Fantasy home design

[plantae]

As many of you (e.g. anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes with me in the last couple years) know, I really want a house. With a yard. Unfortunately, I live in a place where the housing market laughs at people who want house, yard, and short commute for under $750,000

Comments

[randomdreams]

A lot of places don't allow graywater reuse these days, although nothing's stopping you making a system that can later easily be reconfigured for graywater. But you probably won't get a permit with anything obviously intended for diversion.

Solar water heating is much more cost-effective than photovoltaics, unfortunately, and also unfortunately neither is particularly great unless your area has tax breaks/credits. (Many many places do.)

Whole-house fans only work as well as you can get the heat out of the attic. I put in a whole-house fan and it did very little because the attic space was 30-50F higher than the temp inside the house (no I'm not joking: I saw temps in excess of 130F up there on a regular basis.) It was fairly easy to put in a thermostat-controlled attic vent. That, coupled with the house fan, lowered the midsummer house temp by about 10F. The attic *should* be well-vented. But along with that goes serious heat loss out the whole-house fan during the winter. The one I have contains insulated doors on the top, that open when I turn the fan on.

I have double-pane throughout. The amount of heat that comes through (both winter and summer) is amazing. Definitely need shades in the summer: better yet, sunshades, like sails, that hook beneath the gutters and go down to the ground.

On-demand water heaters are problematic. They're *very* expensive to purchase, and use up a stunning amount of power while they're running. Granted, that's not often, but if you have to get new service and replace your main breaker panel to get them the 120 amps they often need, that gets pretty complicated and expensive. (The permit dudes won't let you skate with standard 200-amp house service and just promise to not use your clothes dryer or oven while the water heater's running.)

I'm still thinking about heated floors. The scary thing is when something springs a leak. They might go very well with solar-heated water, but when you want the heat, is the time of year where there's not so much sunlight. We need thermal batteries that last for six months.

Double-pane windows were the biggest and best improvement I made to the house, but also by far the most expensive. Really stunningly huge amounts of attic insulation were about 1/100 the price and also made a huge difference. I'm more worried about heat rejection than cold, so I put multilayer high-IR-reflective coating across my entire attic, and that helped immensely. What I'd like to do is put up IR-reflective material on movable frames, so in the summer they'd be perpendicular to the sun and in winter, parallel. Ditto fans tuned to indoor/outdoor temp differentials so they'd automatically act to do what I wanted -- cool the house in summer, warm in winter.

Lots, lots more thoughts on this. I'd love to talk to you about this more at some point.