Why did we give up on insulation?
Why did we give up on insulation?
I just watched some video about Yakutsk Siberia which is meant to be the coldest city in the world. Thought "Those poor bastards, wonder what they need to wear indoors when it is -40 outside."
Turns out a pissing tank top and PJ bottoms. We really need to start demanding better things in this country don't we?
I'm also reading a book about coal mining. All the unpaid labour, minimising wages and dodgy things the bosses did then still happens now. Now I'm not a tankie so don't get the wrong idea here. But why are we all okay living like this I don't get it? Why is the UK population so forgiving at living it shit conditions.
Also I'm going to jump in before anyone says no insulation keeps you cold in the summer. Insulation works both ways, it can keep heat out or it can keep heat in. It's better in the summer and in the winter.
Siberia video in question:
https://youtu.be/K0z7Avc9ZtY?si=_KTob2YYMn2HLwkv
Also I hope I havent broken any rules. I can't see any. This seems mostly news posts but I guess text posts are allowed? Sorry if not.
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I thought the material used in the US wood, gypsum, etc made insulation more essential compared to stone/brick construction often found in Europe.
Can’t recall where I heard that thing so take with a huge grain of salt
Depends a lot on the construction and age, but there's really no type of construction that doesn't need insulation.
There's a specific UK issue though. For some reason they're falling behind and have been for some time. F.i. The rest of northern Europe are using triple or quadruple pane windows, while many houses in UK still have single pane windows.
The windows alone being 2-3 generations behind code is only part of it. Loft insulation is also far behind:
Also older housing stock. My house is over 120 years old so that does limit done of what you can do to improve things. That said with decent windows and loft insulation there is something to be said for the thermal properties of a bunch of stone.
120 years ago is about the time they started doing double brick walls. Leaving air between the inner and outer brick walls was basically the first kind of insulation.
In the 1970s they figured out to put polystyrene beads in the space between the walls. This idea has recently been improved by better materials, so it's still possible to update the insulation on these old houses. Whether it's financially feasible is a different question.
Another method is to put more insulation on the inside, but this takes up space and early attempts in the 1950-1980s proved to do very little except creating a fire hazard. If a house has those old panels on the walls, it's probably better to remove them.
A neighbour of mine recently put very thick insulation on the outside of the house. Must have cost a fortune and it looks weird, but I guess it works really well. It also requires that all windows are moved, so it's probably easier to just build a new house.
So there a few options, but money is likely better spend on changing the roof, windows or the heat source.
Most houses in the UK have double glazing. Not all (somehow - if there isn't a grant for that there should be!) but by now most have upgraded.
Triple glazing appears to be getting started, I got a free upgrade to triple when I upgraded!
Ideally the best insulation is the least dense as density typically relates to thermal conductivity. Where stone/brick really helps is in raw mass, if you've ever been in a basement you'll kinda know what I mean. It'll flatten the temperature changes and make it more stable but if it's always hot or always cold it's not great.
The US has mostly rock wool or fiberglass insulation and not just wood clad in gypsum. But much of the US can go from -26 in the winter to 35 in the summer. I used to live in a city with a latitude about the same as Madrid that would get to almost -30 and as high as 41. The house was made of brick but past that outer layer it had a wood frame with insulation to maintain heating or cooling.
In my town we're more concerned with intraday temp cycle, so we just add another layer of brick. Store heat during day and release at night. I'm 32 and have never used a central heating system once in my life, shit's awesome
I've lived in Phoenix, Arizona where it gets above 35 degrees every single day for most of the year (last year they hit 46 degrees for about a week straight) and it would commonly be 30 degrees or warmer in the middle of the night. Some months we'd have a power bill of about ~235 pounds a month just trying to keep the house cool (~25 degrees). (I hope it's ok that I gave so many approximates but I wanted to give units Brits would feel most comfortable with instead of using Fahrenheit and dollars)
Do not recommend lol
Bricks used in houses have big air gaps in the middle (which you can also insulate if you want to, both inside and outside.
That said you can do a lot with mass. I lived in a concrete building in a place with similar extremes and it did keep the heat very well, on account of those walls being half a meter thick. The glass windows were so bad at insulation by comparison that you could sometimes feel a breeze coming from the panels even when they were fully sealed just because the inside air was dozens of degrees warmer than the glass.
A lot of that also comes down to how far the tech for windows has improved over the years. I feel like more American homes are much newer and therefore more inclined to have newer windows than many British homes.
I personally don't much care for stick built homes and would prefer ICFs for most situations but mostly for water and fire resistance. Stick framed houses have so much thermal bridging so I can totally see why a layer of insulation between two brick walls would be quite good.
Thanks. And, by wood and gypsum, I meant the construction material besides the insulation
Oh I'm sorry, I just assumed because really old houses were just wood and gypsum with no insulation lol
Some of them are. And no paper for a moisture/wind barrier too I think.
But those, I think, were less about insulation and warmth and more about ease of construction and plain exposure to the elements.
E.g. not great but good enough. But now we have wood, etc and insulation and I was musing that maybe the reason why stone/brick homes didn’t was because they worked well enough.
I wouldn't doubt if it's just good enough and it's expensive to add the insulation to old buildings let alone stone/brick ones. But I'm not going to pretend I understand what life in Britain is like or what homes are generally like when I've never been. I was going to say that buildings might be substantially older but honestly I don't know how old the average home is in Britain, most people could live in something made in the 70's or newer like here in the US.