Cool story! I didn't notice it in there, maybe I just missed it, I would be worried about animals getting in the house, I wonder if they designed it to be animal proof? Being up in the woods there, the house must be under constant attack from the woodland creatures.
Animals being anything from bees and ants and assorted bugs to squirrels and chipmunks and maybe bears. I have a SMALL woods behind my house and find all of those things have ways to get in without being invited way more often than I like. (Not bears)
I had fears of that when we moved into our house surrounded not only by woods, but wetlands and farm fields. We were pleasantly surprised how little problems we've had from creatures. We do see animals of all kinds wandering on the property - deer, squirrels, rabbits, racoons, opossum, coyotes, owls, hawks, eagles... you name it. The tracks in the winter are even more evidence that we are surrounded by wildlife. But they honestly aren't a problem. They leave the home alone. We have had one mouse in our first year here. A few ants and flies last summer. Honestly, we had bigger problems in the city. My only guess is that there is such a strong natural ecosystem here that they simply don't need anything from our home, so they are just as happy to leave it to us humans.
I live in a suburban city and I've had all of those either in our backyard or just beyond our back yard over the past couple of years (except the eagles). Squirrels, rabbits, an opossum, a skunk, mice, owls, hawks, toads have all been in our backyard before. Deer and coyotes just beyond our back fence. Raccoons I've seen in the neighborhood but not from our backyard. A couple times now I've taken pictures of hawks chilling on our back patio. I have a bird feeder so the birds might attract it.
The dogs freak out whenever I inadvertently let them out with animals in the back yard (happened with the skunk and opossum), so I've had to rush out and put myself in between them and the animals to keep them from possibly getting attacked or attacking they animals (they did get skunked).
We have a tall fence and do our best to repair holes and gaps, but it doesn't seem to matter much except keep deer and coyotes out of our yard (at least so far).
I don't think this matters much at all though. It's a pretty cool house and it's not like their pov needs to match everyone else's. You could find interesting stuff here just like someone describing their perfect vanagon/compact apartment/log cabin.
That's how I feel too but at least I'm disappointed in myself for that which manages to help me feel that I'm better then you which in turns makes me feel just a bit better about me. So, thanks.
I guess we can file yours under "callous indifference". Someone complains about the societal issues that allow a couple to build a SECOND mansion like this in the woods while millions of people are homeless and your response is to paint them as "jealous".
OP isn't complaining about societal issues; OP is trying to drag a couple just because they have demonstrated some modicum of success and happen to be "white".
They literally mentioned nothing about societal issues, except the implicit racism in their assumption that whiteness somehow inherently detracts from people's accomplishments.
You've already changed your argument from "they never said anything about that" to "okay they said it but I think they were making assumptions". Log off. Go touch grass.
By "go touch grass", I assume you're probably a younger person. You certainly have the reading comprehension of one.
I'd re-read this thread carefully and then take a moment to consider: is this really a hill worth dying of embarrassment on? You can always just walk away.
White priviledge is not something that would be on my mind(for all I care, they could be black), but unsustainability, destruction of nature and self-righteousness to do so... I would really wonder why such article has appeared in HN, as it is going against current global social narrative and NH is not really far-right nutwings, but rather on the left-spectrum.
IMO, modern home should leave as less impact on nature as possible - be it materials used to build it or energy demands to run that house.
And the fact that there's a chain of other responders disagreeing with your take suggests that it isn't.
Either way, I don't have a horse in this fight. You may as well be right in your assessment.
The fact of the matter though is this - the original blog post is completely uninteresting. If you have wealth and money - you can pretty much build anything anywhere. There's nothing in that house that is a technological marvel/achievement or anything in its construction method that warrants unique news coverage on HN or elsewhere.
> Person's actions influenced by their circumstances
This is a pretty reductive viewpoint, since literally any article or project could be seen in the same light.
* Of course you released a popular jazz album, you had parents who loved jazz and had an instrument at home.
* Of course you work in journalism, you lived in a city that took great pride in its news institutions.
* Of course you like programming, you had access to a computer and free time in your childhood.
* Of course you run a book review site, you had access to functional library systems growing up.
* Of course you are interested in politics, you were able to volunteer at local election campaigns.
Like, if someone is building an expensive home, you would obviously expect that their life experience has been such that they are able to build an expensive home. Likewise, if someone does anything, then obviously their life experience has been such that they are able to do that thing.
This is a cool writeup of a cool project, and reducing it to the fact that these people have been fortunate can come off as pretty smug.
Doesn't the author actually mean postmodern? "Modern home" architecture is from the early-mid 20th century.
If you're looking to build a home, do yourself a favor and watch Essential Craftsman's Spec House series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...). Your eyeballs will grow wider and wider with all the considerations, but you'll be better informed for it.
Modern is usually referring to mid-20th century in terms of style. Post-modern doesn’t include everything after that — it’s kind of a mess to describe but probably the simplest explanation is that post-modernism is a reaction to modernism. It’s a style full of visual puns, and structural manifestations of literary criticism.
“Contemporary” is the more generic umbrella term for things that are modern with a lowercase “m”.
Of course, nobody agrees on what Postmodernism is so please feel free to tell me why I’m wrong :)
Yeah, I saw those flat roofs, and talk of whistler, and thought what a nightmare. Peaked roofs exist for a reason. I wonder what their snow strategy is? Because one day of rain on top of several feet of snow causes severe structural strain if it can’t just slide down.
Pemberton is quite rainy, so forest fires aren't a huge concern. Once you get to the other side of the Coastal mountains (the interior), fire is a much bigger concern.
here's an article from this summer when there were four out-of-control fires burning in the pemberton region. pemberton is definitely less of a concern than the other side of the mountains, but there is definitely still a risk. and that risk is only growing.
Leaving out the actual financial information makes this post a little useless. Before I can imagine it, I want to know if I can do this or if I need to be a trust fund baby.
These kids may not have a trust fund, but to have already bought and sold a Vancouver townhouse with enough equity to buy raw land and build a fairly baller house on it… they definitely had parental help.
Dude works for slack – a quick search reveals that he was one of the early employees. I know nothing about him otherwise, but he doesn't have to come from money, being lucky with the IPO could explain the windfall to afford the house. In other news, it looks pretty (and over the top), but I doubt most of us here will ever be able to afford something like this.
If a couple in their 30s with 2 children are kids...what do you consider adults?
Also, I'm approximately their same demographic and could afford to build a house like this if the other estimates in this thread are approximate, and have literally not taken a penny from my parents, or used their resources(which are scant - I was paid more my first job out of college than both my parents combined), since I was 16.
The source of the power is important. Are they kids if they care about the environment and pay for 400A service of renewable energy?
Is there anyone in America or Canada who cares about the environment, who is not a kid by your standard? I know a bunch of people who claim to care about the environment, but they still eat meat, drive ICE cars, have children, use ridiculous amounts of power compared to the global average, and do many of the normal things North Americans do. I still believe they care about the environment though.
They have a large propane generator to provide supplemental power when the 400A service isn't enough, such generators typically do not have advanced pollution control / carbon capture devices attached. This, combined with the design of the building, is evidence their care doesn't extend to action in this instance.
Sounds like a stop-gap measure, partially because building codes in the region didn't let them do what they really wanted to do:
> These are two areas where the BC building code, BC Hydro, and the construction industry lag behind more environmentally progressive regions. It’s our hope that as the technology and standards improve we’ll be able to eliminate propane from the mix and use a fully electric power base, much of it captured on site from our 11.6 kW array.
Assuming they hired an architect and had hired labor build it (and put Feist lyrics at the bottom of the post), easily in the multi-million dollar range considering the location.
That said, it doesn't have to be that way. I'm building a house up in the mountains at the moment. Found ~3 acres for 12k and I'm doing the land clearing and build mostly by myself on the weekends to keep costs down.
My current guess is final costs w/ out-of-pocket financing (goal is to do it debt-free so I own house and land outright when I finish) will be somewhere between $250k-$350k, including the land price (maybe a bit higher as material prices fluctuate).
If you're patient and willing to make adjustments elsewhere in your life, you can do it. If you're just building a simple house, too, and not a Dwell photoshoot, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish.
In case anyone else thinks that's crazy, I bought 40 acres in the Ozarks with a (manufactured) home, a shop, a 52x14 storage building, and a few other outbuildings. The land was mostly wooded, with a few acres in use for a garden.
$60,000 in 2015
Details: 1 hour from walmart, 35 minutes from the grocery, 5 miles from pavement, zero stoplights in my county, no zoning at all (build anything you want). But a nicely-kept dirt road, plenty of people living in the area, etc.
I live in this area. Build prices for modern, architectural homes up there is probably in the $300-$400 / sqft range at the moment. Sure, you could do some work yourself, but unless you've got an army of friends and family that can do complicated concrete work in remote areas, your going to have to hire professionals, and professionals are _really_ expensive right now.
My guess is this build was between $900k-$1.2m CA. Hard to guess without knowing the sqft or acreage. This isn't necessarily outrageous given the market up there, and was probably a great investment and has substantial equity, but you need a strong personal balance sheet to handle that and the cost overruns.
Your right, though, that if you live in a low cost of living area, and you keep your expectations and footprint manageable, you can get a lot for very little. Like these cob homes, gorgeous - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlzpfkjjqOw
According to the author, the couple acquired the money within 5 years. So yes, this is a wealthy person building with very few constraints.
I mean it's still somewhat interesting vicariously. Kind of like the New York Times' house-hunting section, wherein they pretend that an $800,000 walk-up is an entry-level home.
It’s at least $1,000/sqft all-in. Construction costs have gone up a lot in recent years, and architecturally designed houses like this are expensive to design and build.
The post says they own a duplex in Vancouver, the most expensive housing market on Earth. This is where your rents are going if you are a family renting a flat in Vancouver for $4500/month: for these people to pave over some remaining BC forests.
Thanks for this - I have what you might call champagne taste on a beer budget. I've always wanted to live in a small, but highly efficient house in the woods. You know, something that looks like it came from an architectural magazine. But I am consistently blown away by what even pre-fab homes cost. I clearly don't have the budget that the author does, but the process felt eerily similar to mine so far.
It's never mentioned how much acreage was purchased, I don't think. My mental block is anything sub 5 acres where I am looking. My current trouble is that I don't live anywhere near where the property I am looking at is. Getting there is… quite a to-do. I'm leery of putting much trust in a realtor as my eyes/ears given that 1.) the property is cheap enough that their commission will be small potatoes and 2.) they have an incentive to sell you _something_. How does one navigate that part? How much of the soil test/survey/etc was done pre-sales, how much was a contingency, or do you just YOLO it?
Usually the county clerk will have some pointers. Always double check lot lines, plat maps, zoning, permit and ownership history yourself. Use the realtor provided information as helpful pointers to get started, not ‘the truth’. They often aren’t trying to mislead, just not questioning things they are told or that are convenient for them to believe, but there but there are also some outright frauds.
Also, pay for your own independent well inspections (it has a well right? If not, uh oh), septic inspections (the soil type is okay for a septic system the county will approve right? If not, uh oh), and walk the property a couple times at different times of the day and night.
Sometimes there is a noisy train line, or airport landing patterns change during certain times, and what was a mellow quiet plot can be noisier than LAX during Christmas.
I had the opportunity to stay very nice place up in BC last summer — at the price of constant fear that we might need to hop in the car and leave everything behind at any second. And this was in a fairly big town (Kelowna).
I can't imagine what the risks are for living in a place like this is...
Pemberton (where this home is located) is much wetter than Kelowna, so I think it's less of an issue. It's similar to the difference in Washington between the west slope of the North Cascades (such as Mt Baker, which holds the worldwide single season snowfall record) and the east slope of the North Cascades, which are dry and have large wildfire seasons.
Even the Olympic peninsula (rain forest) burns periodically. I’ve seen the burn scars from apocalyptic sized fires in central Ontario too. The Amazon burns when someone ‘helps it’ a little.
Everywhere dries out enough it will catch fire at least some of the year. If there is forest, there will be fire.
Ugh, the font doesn't scale when zooming, but the pictures do. The font does scale though when changing the container size. The font is massive on a monitor, terrible UX.
Also: It sucks that bookmarklets have fallen out of fashion. I just spent a few minutes trying to find a working bookmarklet that changes the font size and failed.
They die so that we may truly live! (pounds shields)
Seriously though, every NA forest community I’ve seen is similarly screwed. There is a reason the firefights always get seen as heros - those communities would not exist if it wasn’t for them.
The way to do this if you're not wealthy is to get a cheapo plot of land on the Oregon/Washington coast ($<100k for up to .5 acres) and put a manufactured home on it. It's way simpler, cheaper, and the construction on manufactured homes has improved a lot over the years (they're framed with 2x6s to survive transport, and this makes them sturdier and better insulated than most traditional houses). I did it and it's been great! No complaints. No architectural magazine is going to feature my house though.
Another option is kit homes. I've been looking at First Day Cottage and Shelter-Kit. They are designed to be assembled by homeowners, but some people hire contractors. This FDC on Reddit looks extraordinary.
Wow. Might I ask where? I'm thinking of places like the outskirts of Monroe, North Bend. I've heard of people doing this farther out on the Peninsula in places like Port Angeles.
You're about 15 years too late to find 'deals' in Monroe/North Bend area. It's seeing huge growth and property values are way up. There's not as much land as you think too since a lot of it butts up against state and national forests.
there's a lot of land on the WA/OR coast, but you won't find it cheap in a Seattle suburb, which is where a 30 minute drive along the coastline will take you
You can't, because land within commuting distance of a major city is going to have more people that want it, and be more expensive. You need to go farther out. I'm not super familiar with the Washington coast, but in Oregon places like Lincoln City, Yachats, Coos Bay, Otis, etc.
Still going to be cheaper than a site-built home in a rural, high cost of living area.
The materials price increases that are causing factories to raise their prices are also hitting local contractors who do site-built homes.
In fact, if anything, the factories can insulate you from this price volatility more because they have a lot more bargaining leverage with their suppliers than a local contractor who's doing 10 homes a year.
The manufactured home thing is really interesting. Do you have more information regarding that? I Googled a bit and found much info about "Mobile home", is it the same thing?
In factory built home parlance, generally, a 'mobile' home is built to HUD building codes (which are the same nationwide) and is not considered a permanent residence - often time it stays on wheels even when put in place, and can theoretically be moved at a later date (although they rarely ever are). These are also sometimes referred to as 'trailer houses'. They used to be built very cheaply and were a depreciating asset (think like a car or an RV), but there are higher quality options these days.
A 'modular home' will be built to spec to the local building codes wherever it is being placed (which is usually IRC + whatever peculiarities local government officials have tacked on). They are placed on a permanent foundation, cannot be moved, and are generally treated as equivalent to a site-built home once finished. Again, you can spend a little or a lot on these, some factories will do fully custom designs that would be completely indistinguishable from a high-end site-built home once finished.
Many factories will build either variety, some specialize on one over the other. In rural, higher cost of living areas both varieties are often quite a bit cheaper than a site-built home, both because of the efficiencies and economies of scale a factory can provide, and also because they can be built in an area with lower labor costs and shipped to your land.
In populated, growing urban areas, the cost benefit diminishes a bit because production builders can approximate the benefits a factory has by building 100s of homes in the same neighborhood at the same time.
edit to add: My information pertains to the US, the article references land in Canada. I don't know as much about factory built homes or building codes in Canada.
We used Skyline: https://www.skylinehomes.com/ They're pretty standard American-looking houses, though a little narrower than a traditional house because they put them on a truck.
In my short experience, there is a very practical difference between "manufactured" and "modular" which is explained at the Ideabox site link below.
We have seen/stayed in one of these Ideabox homes and they seem a good balance for a house when you're not a "I want to build my dream castle" kind of person (that's me).
To clarify a little: Where I am interested in building, there are county-wide laws or code regarding mfg vs mod homes, effectively taking one of those options off the table for me.
And, just to be clear, I am not a build my castle person, but I do want something more modern than the usual cabin in the woods. Hence, Ideabox...
Ideabox's cheapest home is a 780 sq ft 1BR for $230K. According to their cost estimate, the total cost would be $420k. This seems over-priced. Pre-fab homes should be cheaper than custom-built homes. A new home of that size will not cost $400k in Wyoming or Kansas.
>Pre-fab homes should be cheaper than custom-built homes.
Yeah that's my main pick with all pre-fab proposals that eventually pop-up here and there, some of them even winning awards for "affordable" housing. Every. single. time. the total cost of the project is on the 6-7 figures range ...
That might depend where you live. 2x6 is standard here in my part of Canada, but that's just for added insulation, not for any structural reason. Older homes were built with 2x4 exteriors
Is there a difference with manufactured vs prefab in the resale process in the eyes of lenders?
That's what has always steered me clear of doing this. If you need to sell, I've learned that manufactured homes are not lendable by many institutions. Maybe this new class of modular will count as "Stick built" for lending purposes. They seem really nice.
Also in BC/PNW you can buy old houses that are going to be demolished. Some friends on Lopez Island had an old home shipped over and plopped on their 40 acres where they then started growing wheat and baking bread.
> Geothermal wasn’t viable on the slope and with the space we had to work with, so we switched to an air source heat pump for exchange. The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A. We eventually settled on supplementing our electrical generation with propane, which we had hoped to avoid. High-efficiency electrically powered water boilers and other mechanical systems are more advanced in Europe, but we found that subcontractors were wary of importing anything unfamiliar (and unrated for North America) and prefered to use gas.
Huh, as someone who wants one day to build a passive house to live in, this is all very interesting. Sounds like they're not getting quite as modern of a home as they wanted.
Most residential electrical service in the US is 200A or well below that. Especially if you have a place with gas heat, hot water, dryer, range you do not need that much. But even with electric appliances and a typical pool heater, 200A is plenty.
400A service in the US is the purview of the very wealthy for their Taj Mahals - which is obviously overrepresented here - but that's a fucking distorted view point if you think it's the norm.
But 200A in EU is roughly 44-50 kW, a common contract for a flat (here in Italy) is 3 kW, if you have a heat pump and/or conditioner it goes to 4.5 or 9 kW.
I have seen (largish) villas with 20 or 25 kW, but everything more than that - like 100 A or so - is definitely beyond common use.
Yep, 3 KW is the "minimum contract" (but still very common for small flats) though there are of course no fuses anymore but a current limiting switch that trips and that can be re-armed, it allows peaks of about 20% more than target, older versions of these switches allowed higher peaks, so when they started replacing it with the new version which is more "strict" many contracts were upgraded to 4.5 KW because the limiter was tripping very often.
Traditionally the oven was (only in the last years electic ones have become prevalent/ubiquitous) gas-powered and that electric kettles are not common, so the typical tripping scenario is now electric oven cooking+ironing or (say) iron+dishwasher+washing machine.
NA uses 120VAC at most loads - but service is 240V split. So 200A service in NA is the same as 200A in the EU. Of course this is confusing since we often talk about 120V loads, e.g. a 15A electric kettle in the US is pretty lame compared to a 15A electric kettle in the UK.
The 120V outlets are approximately equally split between the two legs (which you could view as -120 to 0 and 0 to +120), so one way you could view it is that 200A service in NA allows for about 400A of 120V load. But then larger loads are usually across both legs and you have to account for imbalance so it doesn't work out quite that simply. And then there are "weird load" like dryers, which commonly put the heating element across both legs but the drum and blower motors across only one, resulting in some amps on both legs and some more amps on only one of them.
And while we're at it commercial buildings often run the lighting across both legs for wire gauge economy. So there's a lot of nuance on the load side. But on the supply side it's all 240V either way (well, kind of, could be 208V in case of a wye supply, but that's not common).
One space heater is 12-15 amps. I can't count how many people I've had to explain that to as they scratched their heads why they keep tripping the circuit breaker in the winter.
Also lesser know fact: A circuit breaker doesn't cut off at the rated amperage. It cuts off when it spikes above that amperage. When the current is steady, you can blow past the limit, but one little wobble and it will finally trip. "I wasn't doing anything different" being a common refrain. A little ripple from the city power or the other end of the house can push it over.
I mean, technically they're 100% efficient (as are computers).
Heat pumps are limited by how cold and humid it is outside. The coils freeze up and they have to cycle to melt it off. It's not particularly cold in Vancouver but it is definitely humid. I'm not sure where the triple point is.
100% efficient is extremely inefficient for electric heating. A good modern air source heat pump has far above 100% efficiency in all but the coldest climates and a ground source heat pump has far above 100% efficiency in essentially any climate.
"The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A"
Am I the only one who almost spit out his coffee when reading this paragraph? I mean, building a remote home in the middle of a forest is a cool idea, sure. But then end up feeding the whole thing with 400A worth of electricity? And when the current is too high, end up supplementing with a propane generator?
Am I missing something? As a European, I'm used to way more modest figures for family homes - maybe 400V @ 25A plus gas for heating.
I'm from the US and I was shocked they needed 400A plus propane. We draw more current then you guys because our voltage is lower but still, 200A services are pretty standard for large rural homes.
My thought is that power can go out for days at a time after a big storm, so propane is mostly a backup electricity/aux heat source.
Maybe they have a heat pump setup which switches to propane when it gets really cold.
Wood is there, but somebody needs to feed it. And people inevitably get old or lazy about it and depend more and more on the convenient heat sources available.
Seconded. I recently completed an all electric high performance remodel, and with 200A service, I can power a heat pump, heat pump water heater, all electric kitchen and laundry, and an EV charger, with Amps to spare. This is in the mild Bay Area, and my heat pump draws about 6A (15A breaker). The largest loads are EV and cooktop/stove.
A 3000sqft custom house built to high performance standards (airtight and well insulated) can be space heated in a cold climate with a heat pump that draws
no more than 24A (40A breaker) using a heat pump. At that load a modern heat pump will make 40kBTU of heat. There are many examples of this across Canada.
I just now read that they have an outdoor heated pool, though, so crazy as it sounds they are presumably using electricity to heat it.
> plus propane.
Apart from backup water heating when the power goes out, their hot tub will waste huge amounts of energy, so propane might be operationally cheaper than electricity.
I'm running a small hot tub in central New Hampshire. I figure it costs me $15 per month in the winter.
Edit: Service in the US is generally 200A or 400A. I'd say 400A is overbuilt for what they have, but that doesn't mean they actually use much of that capacity.
For example, I average 1000 kWh per month, which is about 1.39 kW 24/7, or 12 amps average on my 200A service. The 200A is to have headroom for peak demands, and we probably never get close to 200A.
If I were to rewire my panel (it's full), I'd go for the 400A - it's just heavier copper in the three lines to the entrance panel. That would not increase my monthly power bill right now, but it would provide lots of excess capacity in case I want to switch to heat pumps and electric vehicles.
Since we heat with wood and propane and don't use electricity for either and have mostly LED lighting and a gas stove, I do wonder where all the power is going, especially at night. Too many computers, I guess. Add analysis to my to-do list!
It's funny how removed we are from reality. Even if $15/month might be cheaper than a propane bill, it would be far far more expensive against the planet to heat it with gas/coal burned at a factory 100 miles away, converted to electricity, then converted back to heat inside the spa water heater.
I think that an air/water heat pump on the tub, with say a COP of 8, would be less expensive to operate than propane or straight electric. But, I couldn't justify the capital expense. (Small hot tubs are electric.)
I like my wood/propane mix for heating, because it's immune to power outages. At some point I'll get too old to cut/split/haul wood, though, and will have to figure something else out.
I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity. Perhaps some people are concerned with methane leaks in the natural gas distribution system.
> I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity. Perhaps some people are concerned with methane leaks in the natural gas distribution system.
It's that, as well as the fact that having a gas stove means you have a gas hookup in the first place, so you're more likely to also use it for heating. That in turn leads to more emissions than other heating methods produce.
> I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity.
It can make a lot of sense in urban areas. In addition to removing the methane leaks (with their high GWP), it reduces the need to install/maintain expensive natural gas distribution infrastructure, and also improves indoor air quality by eliminating NO2 and CO production within the house. If the power goes out, you just use a propane grill in the backyard, or a small butane stove.
I don't think this is true. Could you source this? I've had several small outdoor electric hot tubs, and all of them have had dedicated heaters. The couple times I've had problems with the heater, the symptoms involved the pump running constantly and the tub never reaching temp. I'm sure there is some friction heating, but I don't think it's anywhere near enough to reach standard temperature.
Apparently you're correct, and I was misinformed. You could implement it this way—like how Tesla's newer designs can run the electric motor in a less-efficient mode to provide heat for the battery pack—but the designs I investigated did have separate heaters as part of the circulation system. (For some reason the specs for these were not listed in the product summary, but rather only in the manual.)
So in NH I am paying just over $4.20 a gallon for propane and about $0.18 a kwh for electricity. With those prices a propane heater for my hot tub would cost more to run. Also a heat pump heater for the hot tub would optimistically get around a 3-4 COP in warmer weather and 2-3 in the colder weather but either of those would lower your price to heat it considerably but the capital expenses neglect those savings.
NH electric rates are $.20/kWh [1]. If you are spending $15/month for heating the hot tub, then you are consuming ($15/month)/($.20/kWh)=75kWh/month to heat it.
Assuming you are using are using a resistance heater (100% heating efficiency), to raise 200Gal of water (typical small hot tub size) from 50F to 100F requires about 25kWh of energy.
To only use 75kWh/month (255kBTU), you would need to only raise it to 100F less than 3 times a month, and that assumes that the water temp doesn't naturally drop below 50F (unlikely in NH).
It's likely you are spending significantly more than $15/month to heat it with electricity.
Propane is about $30/MBTU, which would work out to about $9/month for the equivalent amount of heat.
I pay $0.13 per kWh in my town. (That's my marginal cost.)
The tub is well insulated, with an insulated cover, so you need to account for that. My estimate on the hot tub cost is by comparing my kWh usage after the tub was installed to the prior year use.
So assuming $15/month, you are using 115kWh, which is 392kBTU of heating energy. It takes about 83kBTU to heat 200gal of water from 50F to 100F, which would be like 5 full heat ups from 50F. Of course there are the other convolved factors you mentioned (insulation).
> they have an outdoor heated pool, though, so crazy as it sounds they are presumably using electricity to heat it.
That’s an almost ideal case for an air-to-water heat pump though, the heat capacity and efficiency of which go up as the output water temperature goes down. Pool heating (and snow melting) are ideal use cases that can support a very low output water temperature and still get the job done (as compared to baseboard or cast-iron radiator space heating).
reading this as a french, this is wild. AFAIK you can't even get more than 136A as an individual, you need to operate a company (if my calculation is correct - max. for individuals is 15kVa AFAIK). Huge majority is 6kVa / 230V => ~26A
It was probably upgraded from ~30A at some point in the past as a requirement of a lender. Presumably it has circuit breakers? Those weren't even a choice in a 100 year old house when it was built AFAIK. I've been curious how well these jobs are generally done, when I was a kid it was a big selling point to have circuit breakers instead of fuses. I've always been curious how through some of those upgrades were, did they replace all the wiring too, does everything have grounds, etc. Or did they just pull a few 240 lines for AC/range/etc?
True. For comparison, I have a 60s era 1000sqft house in northern Canada that had a 60A service into a 50A breaker panel up until last year. For insurance, safety and maintenance reasons[0] we upgraded to a 200A service, but for a small house and a 3-4 person family 50A is sufficient provided your hot water heater is natural gas.
[0]: The incoming line was aerial and over the legal span length, so it had been attached to an insulator nailed to a tree halfway between the house and mast. Also the mast was deteriorating to the point that it needed to be replaced anyways and insurance was making noise about not allowing a new policy if it wasn't upgraded to at least 120A. We did a customer pole and went underground to the house. Much nicer aesthetics and I can now turn off a breaker on my side of the meter at the pole to do maintenance.
as a heads-up, most electrical mains in the USA are 240v; they are wired two circuits in series for most residential applications. But you'll find a 240v plug in most homes; it's the industrial heavy-duty looking plug.
I had the same reaction (European too). If it's in Canada the supply voltage is 120V, so roughly half what we have in Europe, apples-to-apples it's comparable to 200A in Europe.
Still, it's a very high amount of power (48kW) that would not even be subscriptable in France for a consumer (the max is 36kW).
240v is delivered to homes on two legs - the legs are split to make 120v circuits for lighting and wall plugs. 240v circuits with both legs are common for things with a large draw such as HVAC, electric water heaters, electric stoves/ovens, electric dryers, etc.
Remember, they didn't want fossil fuels - if you are going all electric, especially for heating (in CANDADA!) you are going to pull some wattage.
That big outdoor pool - in CANADA - doesn't help either.
Supply is 240V in North America. You probably have multiple 240V circuits at your home, typically for electric range, oven, and clothes dryer at least. It is split into two for regular outlets and lighting.
It's not a typo because 400A is indeed the highest tier residential service BC Hydro currently offers[0]. 400A is also in the right ballpark for the amount of equipment he describes.
The copper coming from "something" will be at least 1/2 inch thick, probably more so that it doesn't lose voltage. We're probably talking a 7/0 cable where 4/0 would be bare minimum.
Probably larger than that. If they’re 200m from the transformer, 400A service requires (3) 1000kcmil cables per leg. 100m drops it to (3) 350kcmil which is still pretty beefy
The amount of cognitive dissonance required to say "we want to limit impact" on one hand, and to run a 400Amp electrical connection to heat your hot tub and pool in Canada, is staggering.
I doubt most North Americans need a 400A connection. (How much wattage is that? 48kW?) I live in an ordinary single house in a boring suburb in the bay area, and on hottest days, if I have to use the A/C, the oven, and the dryer at the same time, maybe it would push it over ~10kW. Maybe once in a year.
There are places where we waste energy because we're doing dumb stuff: in northern parts of the country, your house should be well insulated and designed for cold temperatures.
Then there are places like Nevada, which are just not suitable for large-scale habitation. "Can we make this monument to our hubris more energy efficient" is kind of missing the point, right?
True, most places would need to run A/C or heater much more often than California, but I doubt they need three times as powerful an A/C at any given moment.
I'll not defend our wasteful habits -- we really are screwing up the world over here -- but still, most North Americans don't have electrical outdoor heated pools. In a rural, fairly chilly area... that's really something.
Their contractor talked them into building it without a fixed budget. That's a pretty good financial incentive to just say "can do!" to every suggestion the owner makes.
If it’s cheap hydro power driven (like much of Canada), it isn’t absurd.
A lot of hydro power is ‘use it or lose it’, since the dams also provide flood control and MUST keep extra capacity free to absorb sudden water surges. They can’t just store everything they get.
My house has 350A split across two meters because we have a ground source heat pump which has a special electric rate. I don't think we ever actually use that much power.
Where I live we have to pay to the electric grid for the amps on the main breaker. Because the grid has to be able to provide those, needs to be planned accordingly, needs to have the proper diameter cables and transformers, etc. Even if we don't use them. So having 300A "just in case we need it" would be insanely expensive on the monthly bill. This amount of apmeres is more like for a workshop, small industrial or office building
Many utilities will do this based not on the amperage to the house but the peak kw used in a billing cycle - a capacity charge. This helps incentivize reduced peak usage. In your scenario it's strange because you have zero incentive to keep your maximum usage below the breaker amount, other than the per-kwh cost.
I live in the same such country with such rules. They assume rightly that if you request that amperage you will use it and they will plan and bill you to handle it. And yes we then also pay per kWh :)
Why would it be harmful to run at the amperage that I'm buying ? What disincentives do I need?
No, a lot of saunas in Finland are electric heated. But they're still only 3*16A at most (and usually a lot less, but that depends on the size of the sauna). I think mine is ~7kW and still heats the sauna to high temperatures, just takes a bit more time.
I still don't get though, if living in rural area, why not heat the pool with wood. It just has that sensation that electric heater doesn't provide.
Is this for a wood-construction sauna with a heater warming up rocks that you can steam water off of? That's a lot less mass to warm up, mostly air, and a lot less ongoing energy loss than a big heated pool.
There is a common saying when living in areas when using wood for heat -
‘Wood warms you up three times. Once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you burn it’.
The amount of manual labor and time required to keep a pool warm from wood is monumental. It will definitely keep a fit man in the prime of his life busy and tired.
It isn’t something to sign up for lightly, especially for someone who may not have that kind of physical strength (or want it spent on heating their pool).
These are usually pretty small spaces. So heating them isn't that much of an problem. And going from 22 to 80 for a few hours a week or day isn't too wasteful.
But a hot tub? There are very, very few bodies of water that you can submerge comfortably in that doesn't end up being a non trivial amount of energy to warm up, much less keep warm.
A heated pool for a single-family home in the wilderness seems particularly decadent and indulgent.
It looks like they wanted a California house, with flat a roof and giant windows, in the Canadian Wilderness. But there's a reason houses in the mountains look the way they do. This house looks as out-of-place as a ski chalet would on the beach in San Diego. In any case, it looks as if they have enough money not to care.
I can't believe no one at any step of the process gave them a warning about flat roofs, huge glass windows, having a pool, etc. in frigid mountain areas with tons of snow. I feel like there must be a lot more to this story, like cycling through different architects and engineers until one would finally not tell them the idea was bonkers.
A flat green roof. Which is much worse than just a flat roof.
The drainage will clog and they’ll risk having a leaky roof every spring. And you can’t get up there with a snow shovel because it’s a green roof and you’d scrape off all the dirt and plants.
It's also weirdly not mentioned in the article - the lack of any of this type of feedback, especially considering it's about building a home in the Canadian woods.
I wonder if the pool can tolerate freezing solid in the winter, or if it cracks the concrete? Flat roofs might be okay if they're built right. In Oregon, people would look at you funny if you built a house with a flat roof, and yet almost all our commercial buildings have flat roofs, so apparently it works out somehow.
(Oregon has one semi-famous flat-roofed house that I'm aware of, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I suspect FLW hadn't actually ever been to Oregon: it looked like a house that belongs in Arizona or California. Anyways, the eventual owner of the land the house is built on wanted to tear it down and build a mansion, and after much protests they allowed some people to come in and take the house apart and reassemble it near Salem. After putting it back together, they found some of the original contractors who had built the house originally. Supposedly they took a tour of the house and declared that it must have been properly reassembled, because the roof leaks in all the same places.)
> I wonder if the pool can tolerate freezing solid in the winter, or if it cracks the concrete?
A lot of people have inground pools here in Quebec. AFAIK it's just a matter of removing some of the water before it freezes, to minimize the effects of expansion. It does tend to generate small cracks, but nothing that can't be patched over with annual maintenance.
In Pemberton, no less. An outdoor pool, _very_ large windows, open/not-enclosed outdoor patios, etc etc. They've basically planned to heat the outdoors when it is below 0C a few months out of the year; and most of the year it's below 18C. And all that exposed, non-insulated concrete. The thermal mass they have to heat is practically unbounded. Bonkers.
They're going to have a hell of the time with the weathering on that siding and roof in 10y, too.
I knew a person who tried to put in triple-glaze, in New Westminster, BC, and it took a special lien on the property along with special approval from the Province because they weren't allowed by the building codes at the time.
Edit: I saw someone else building a cabin with similar windows recently. They are double pane, they are just some sort of frameless unit, held together by the strip of black material around the edge. Whether they work probably comes down to how well the installer seals around the edge of the window.
And while the sliding glass doors look like they are single paned, look at the quadruple reflection. Isn't that usually caused by multiple sheets of glass in close proximity?
The external framing is also 2x6, so someone was thinking about insulation. I think it's just that after declaring victory on a well insulated house they then decided to heat the outdoors anyway by directly heating things that are out of doors.
Yes, I'm sure those are at least double pane. Modern windows (especially high end) can be both energy efficient and nice looking. Same goes for their concrete walls--its quite likely that they have insulation in wall cavities or embedded directly in the concrete itself. That being said--I'm sure it still costs a pretty penny to heat in the winter. Its just probably not as bad as you might think.
Dang, what makes the west coast so prone to burning? I've lived on the east coast all my life and have never encountered a wild fire. The biggest fires we get are ~1000 acres[1], and easily contained.
The west coast has large tracts of unoccupied, I maintained forest land, and a more Mediterranean climate (wet then much drier).
The two combine into large, periodic forest
Fires.
The east coast has much fewer unbroken tracts of forest, and where it does have them they are more heavily managed and stewarded for a number of reasons.
The east coast was developed and property subdivided/allocated long before the tendency towards large national parks, monuments, etc.
It isn’t that these national parks or forests cause all these problems (though many of them DO feature prominently in these huge fires), they are also a sign of the very different nature of land allocation during the settling of the area.
You can see this pretty clearly if you pull up maps of federal land (national forests, national parks, blm land, etc). Several western states have more land owned by the federal government than anyone else.
Top-to-bottom windows all over and narrow spaces .. it's actually amazing they fit it in 100KVA. This thing in winter would need about twice that just to not freeze. Hence the propane, and forget the tub and the pool.
Since our voltage is 120/240 volt split phase or 120/208 open Y service (less common) we tend to need higher currents for main breakers/fuses. The old standard for a home was 100 amps whereas modern homes are built with 200 amp mains. I suppose the low cost of air conditioning and heat pumps has raised this demand. Otherwise our lighting and appliance loads have become more efficient.
A 230/400V open Y service at 25 amps is just 10kW which to me sounds like an old standard or mains for a small 1-2br apartment. I'd expect at least a 50-60A service. Though I know some (many?) homes in EU are on actual 3 phase so 25A at 400V 3 phase becomes 17.3kW which is not far from the 24kW a 100A 120/240 service provides. Still anemic but quite a bit of power for a 1-4 person household living modestly. Though in the USA it seems utilities make residential 3 phase difficult or impossible to obtain as you might do commercial stuff with that electric without paying commercial rates or your neighborhood is served by a single phase feeder.
My impression is that in many European countries much lower supply ratings are normal (like 25A, I think I've even seen 17A on an apartment with A/C!) and it's just sort of accepted that you will trip the main breaker if you run too many things at once. In the US tripping the main breaker would be a pretty crazy occurrence, we seem to always spec in order to make that very difficult to do. I wonder if one difference is the safety margin applied considering the long trip time for breakers in a light overload condition... if you have say 100A service you could pull 150A for a decently long time before the main trips, perhaps for the runtime of some appliances, and over time that could lead to heat problems.
> if you have say 100A service you could pull 150A for a decently long time before the main trips, perhaps for the runtime of some appliances, and over time that could lead to heat problems.
Depends on the trip curve and the age of the overcurrent device. Looking at the trip curve for a Fuji BW250 (125-250 amp frame size), at 150% the device will trip in what looks like 5-30 minutes. Any load over 10x rated current is an instant trip.
There was a scandal many years ago where an electrical equipment manufacturer, Federal Pacific, was caught rigging its testing machines to pass faulty or poorly performing circuit breakers. It was found that some of those breakers would carry 150%+ rated current without tripping. They were responsible for quite a few electrical fires and were sued into oblivion.
It's entirely reasonable if they have a tankless water heater + electric heat. The amount of powerdraw that can be required during a shower means I would trip a 200A circuit during the winter. Average powerdraw would certainly be much lower, but you have to prepare for the peaks. Adding in an electric pool heater, more square footage to heat, and probably a fancy electric range, means you could hit 400A somewhat easily if you aren't being careful.
Nobody should be running electric heat (resistance heat, COP=1), since we now have heat pump technology that can operate below 0F and do so with COPs of at least 2. Electric tankless WHs are also a terrible idea in almost all cases. A HPWH or standard electric tank would be much better for overall power demand.
Using 400A consistently would be insane. Building the capacity to support 400A but using much, much less on average is... prudent, especially when building a house that is remote.
You aren't missing anything, that's pretty ludicrous. My (midwest USA) house has 100A service, and I weld for fun and run a rack with servers. The welder can make the lights dim which makes me want 200A, but 400A is just insane.
There are highly efficient heat pump powered water heaters, going out anywhere remote, these and other heat pump systems should really be used. This is a really great overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=1840s
Just because you prudently plan for 400A of peak capacity doesn't mean you would actually come anywhere near using it at any given time. Part of building a house in the woods is planning for contingencies.
What gets me is that the space doesn't seem to get you very much - it's a 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath house.
I dunno, maybe my thought is unrealistic - but if I were to splash out a ton of money for a palatial rural manse, I'd shoot for something with a bit more space than a large-ish suburban home.
Especially because one of the most common uses of such a property is entertainment - forget having folks stay over unless you make the kids bunk?
Yeah, that bit made no sense to me. I'm not familiar with the location but clearly it's rural and only accessible by car. They also were living in Vancouver which sounds quite far away, and presumably have friends/family there.
So how are they going to be entertaining people all the time (they specifically mention entertaining large groups being important to them)? Come over for an evening, except one of you can't drink and has to drive 2 hours back at the end of the night??
Yep. My partner and I have had the same thoughts about having a property outside of the city that's large enough to entertain in. We jokingly call it The Compound - but there is something to the name I think in terms of how it needs to be designed to fulfill that need.
At a bare minimum it needs to be large enough to have a guest suite - the central socializing spaces like the kitchen and living room also need to be scaled for that use.
Ideally (assuming a grand budget) you can have separate structures for guests entirely.
But certainly one has to assume that guests are bunking over, given how remote the location is. It seems eminently unreasonable to assume guests are driving several hours at the end of the evening.
The whole thing is pretend environmentalism. It starts out with some superficially "green" elements like solar power but eventually throws it all out the window when that conflicts with luxury or desire. In the end they've built a huge, inefficient house with enough embodied energy to power Ghana for a year, only accessible with the family's giant gas-guzzling truck, as depicted.
> A goal for the build was to limit impact to the site during construction, and then to limit the footprint of the home after completion. In pursuit of this we planned an efficient mechanical design that would feature solar panels for electricity generation tied to the grid, geothermal for heat exchange, and no fossil fuels.
Oh, great, sound like you have some good environmental principles!
> However, we quickly ran into several problems with this approach.
Yeah, it can be a bummer to sacrifice your own comfort. But it is worth it for the environment!
> The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A.
Wow, that's a lot of electricity. Like, a loooooot. Maybe we can pare it down a little bit -- limiting our impact is important, right?
> We eventually settled on supplementing our electrical generation with propane, which we had hoped to avoid
Right?
O-oh. Oh so you're using propane to heat the pool.
The current tesla wall charger will charge 48A and requires a dedicated 60A circuit. The previous model wall charger would charge 80A and required a 100A circuit.
You can limit the charging current but at some point you will have to make compromises on driving.
It's 400A peak usage, not average. Different decisions could have been made to lower that peak load considerably. As another commenter mentioned, swapping out the tankless water heater which can trip a standard house's electrical connection all on its own.
I have 3*25A in a relatively old, three-story house in Sweden. Heated with a heat pump. I assumed 400A was a typo but apparently not? I guess it makes sense considering the heating of the pool, the large surface area and maybe an EV.
400A is an absurd number. I live in the northeast have a heated pool, electric water heater, and am putting in heat pumps and it all runs off a 200A. 100A is the standard hookup in my area. I have no idea what this person is doing (are they heating the pool in winter??) but those numbers are absurd. Also a propane pool heater is far cheaper then electric, converting propane to electricity is really crazy when you could just have propane heat, hot water, and pool heater.
My rural home never uses more than 4kW (and even that's rare), so under 20 amps. I can't imagine needing 400A supply without building a machine shop or something.
The house is obscene, but just because one has 400A service doesn't necessarily mean they're being inefficient in doing so.
It could just be to handle momentary bursts, and the equipment drawing that power might actually be doing the job more efficiently than something that does it slower, drawing more power cumulatively over a longer period of time.
I also did. Another ridiculous thing was that the article initially claimed no fossil fuels, but the one thing they couldn't live without was wood-burning fireplaces. I mean don't they both generate large amounts of carbon dioxide?
I understand wood is not a fossil fuel. But doesn't burning wood have the same environmental effect as burning fossil fuel? They both produce large amounts of CO2 and generate heat. If you didn't burn that wood, those would still be trees capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. So they didn't really achieve anything, did they?
(This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)
If there is a tree, it is composed of carbon it extracted from the atmosphere using sunlight. For that tree to exist, -1 tree worth of carbon (roughly) was removed.
If you chop it down and burn it, or it dies and rots, +1 tree of carbon goes back. But the total carbon in the system hasn’t changed, and on average (if this happens a lot everywhere), the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much the same.
nothing lives forever, and most things stop growing quickly pretty fast. Unless there is a huge disaster, forests turn over in a stable way generally - new trees always growing, old trees always dying and rotting.
So unless you had chopped down massive forests and stopped new trees from growing, or stockpiled half a continents worth of wood for a century and then decided to burn it all at once, it’s hard to meaningfully change the average amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because it never really stops ‘moving’ or gets out of the cycle.
Fossil fuel is carbon that got pulled out of the system a long time ago - those trees or ferns or peat or whatever got stuck underground, where they couldn’t rot or burn, and on a scale that IS continents worth of trees, for millions of years. We don’t know what it is like having that amount of carbon in the system, because the last time it was in the system was millions of years before we existed.
Once those fossil fuels get burned, even if you plant trees, it doesn’t really reduce the amount of carbon back to where it was, because those trees will die and rot or burn or whatever, and on average, the total amount of carbon in circulation is now higher.
It strikes me as high too, but it's possible that he needed more than a 200A 240V main panel to meet code for his very large solar panel system. In the US (I don't know about Canada where the house is) there is a 120% rule, which limits the amount of electricity that the solar panel is allowed to feed into the panel: https://unboundsolar.com/blog/electrical-panel-requirements-....
The idea is that you don't want more energy in the panel than the panel is designed to handle. Practically (if I understand it right) this means that the breaker for the solar panels is limited to 20% of the panel rating.
A 200A 240V panel would limit you to a 40A 240V breaker, which (according to the link above) means a maximum of 7.6kW of backfeed solar.
In the article, he says he has a 11.6kW solar array, which would require (if I'm calculating right) at least a 60A 240V breaker (maybe plus some required overcapacity?). Since this isn't allowed on a 200A panel, he may have needed to bump up to the next largest size of 400A unless he wanted to go smaller on the solar array. So while it sounds like overkill, it's possible there is more reason for it than just a desire to heat his wife's outdoor pool in the winter.
I investigated solar and generation requires appropriately sized circuits and capacity, even if the direction is the opposite.
so 100A panel + 100A of solar requires a 200A panel
A few other things that require high-amp service - on demand electric water heating, and electric car charging (and we're moving towards multiple vehicles).
It's also worth mentioning that by far the largest cost of an electrical circuit is the labor, so sizing for 100A, 200A and 400A is not 1x, 2x, 4x. upgrading later is a huge cost.
I had 400A installed at my house (all electric, solar, batteries, the works). It's still overkill. What's shocking to me isn't that they went with a 400a panel, that I can (and obviously did) justify. It's that it WASN'T ENOUGH and they had to add propane as well. I can't imagine what kind of pool heater they have that needs more than that.
Totally agree. I can't warp my head around the effect of this house in environmental impact including using cars all the time, disrupting local fauna and the energy costs.
Can someone please retitle this to "Building a multi-million dollar mansion in the woods"? "Modern home" makes it sound quaint and interesting. Instead this is just someone throwing a lot of money at a giant dwelling.
Yes, I was hoping for something more insightful around DIY, costs and sustainability. Instead it's an article with some nice pictures that mostly boils down to "pay someone else to do it" and I almost laughed when I got to the bit where they were using too much electricity and their solution is just to burn more gas :/
If this sort of thing interests you but you can't afford a multi-million dollar build I'd recommend checking out Theron Humphrey's work building a modern lakeside home in Montana (https://www.thiswildidea.com/casa). He built a simple, modern and affordable (think low 6 figure) home and did a good amount of the work himself while sharing info on the process. Apparently he's embarking on a new build this year in Arizona and sharing more in-depth info on his youtube.
I haven't used them myself (I live in Europe) but in the US there are companies that will build passive houses and ship them to you in parts. https://www.phoenixhaus.com/ comes to mind.
I took a similar approach to building a new house on a field in Ireland - my house was built in Latvia and assembled in a week or so by a local crew.
Interesting read, who hasn't dreamt of doing something like this (perhaps at different scales). I've started saving for a parcel of land in the Kootenays to build a.. ahem... much less grandiose dwelling for weekend getaways.
It's different from traditional square houses. Most houses are a big box with a sloping roof, so anything that deviates from that expectation is interesting (for some).
My 2¢ from observation. I could be completely wrong, too.
And frankly, they are much better designed than most modern neighborhoods built today in my country. A school, healthcare, some local shops, library, park, playground, sport infrastructure in 10 minute walking distance and public transport making it possible not to have a car.
Also - for the CO2 emissions that canadian house causes you could comfortably support about 100 families living in the commieblocks. With no fancy solar panels nor heatpumps.
Have you lived in these? I have and they are terrible places to live in. Parking spaces are ridiculously under planned, because workers used took a bus, but today most families own at least one car. These buildings are near their end of life since they weren't designed to last.
They are rather depressing to look at, but that's just me.
Soundproofing doesn't exists, moving walls is limited, inner height is claustrophobic.
I don't recommend to look up to these as any good. Maybe something to learn from.
Yes, in several different ones (when I was studying in Lublin I lived in 3 different places and later I rented a flat in Warsaw). I also lived in a detached house in countryside for most of my life and now I live in a reasonably modern neighborhood. I have a comparison.
> Parking spaces are ridiculously under planned, because workers used took a bus
That's the best feature of them. You can walk everywhere and cars are optional. Your kids can play with other kids without constant supervision. There's no vandalized underground passes stinking of piss where you get mugged. Old and disabled people can actually live there on their own. My wife's grandmother moved from a detached house to an old commieblock in a nearby city because of that - she doesn't drive anymore and living within walking distance of basically everything is a huge positive.
> These buildings are near their end of life since they weren't designed to last.
The ones in Poland are good to go for the next 30-50 years. It mostly depends on the rust protection for the concrete reinforcement. The cheapest ones with no protection are soon going to fall apart but we had very little of them. We built them with some galvanic protection. The ones with stainless steel are basically forever, but we had almost none of those.
> inner height is claustrophobic
250 cm. The same as in modern blocks in Poland (my current flat has 255 cm and that mostly depends on what kind of floor you have). It's the building code still. In fact the building code is much worse now - for example distances between blocks are several times smaller and there's no requirement to plan utilities in new neighborhoods. The end result is this:
Notice that it's all houses and parking, no utilities whatsoever. No public transport. Schools, shops, parks, health clinic - you need to drive through these tiny roads with your car to get to all of these. The end result is traffic jams and people sitting in their houses all day cause there's nowhere to go.
I will grant you soundproofing is worse, but even in modern blocks you can still hear your neighbors.
I'm glad that those neighborhoods in Poland are nice, in Hungary the panel blocks are mostly ghetto style places. Most people live there not because they like the lifestyle, but that's what they can afford.
Weird, I'd trade a chance to live in a commie block for the modern blocks you linked to.
But of course, I'd like to have my own land with my glass-concrete utopia home if money weren't an issue.
I recently started talking to architects about getting started on the design process of a similar but smaller and simpler home and I was blown away by how much more expensive it was to build a home of this quality than what I'd been reading online.
It looks like as of 2022, you are looking at about probably $600-800/sqft to build something like this for my smaller simpler version. Potentially over $1000 / sqft to match the quality in the post
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[ 33.5 ms ] story [ 495 ms ] threadAnimals being anything from bees and ants and assorted bugs to squirrels and chipmunks and maybe bears. I have a SMALL woods behind my house and find all of those things have ways to get in without being invited way more often than I like. (Not bears)
The dogs freak out whenever I inadvertently let them out with animals in the back yard (happened with the skunk and opossum), so I've had to rush out and put myself in between them and the animals to keep them from possibly getting attacked or attacking they animals (they did get skunked).
We have a tall fence and do our best to repair holes and gaps, but it doesn't seem to matter much except keep deer and coyotes out of our yard (at least so far).
Film at nine.
They literally mentioned nothing about societal issues, except the implicit racism in their assumption that whiteness somehow inherently detracts from people's accomplishments.
I guess you missed the phrase "extensive societal advantages" in OP's comment.
I'd re-read this thread carefully and then take a moment to consider: is this really a hill worth dying of embarrassment on? You can always just walk away.
IMO, modern home should leave as less impact on nature as possible - be it materials used to build it or energy demands to run that house.
Where you see bitterness and jealousy, I just see indifference and light irony.
Maybe you're the one projecting?
Either way, I don't have a horse in this fight. You may as well be right in your assessment.
The fact of the matter though is this - the original blog post is completely uninteresting. If you have wealth and money - you can pretty much build anything anywhere. There's nothing in that house that is a technological marvel/achievement or anything in its construction method that warrants unique news coverage on HN or elsewhere.
This is a pretty reductive viewpoint, since literally any article or project could be seen in the same light.
* Of course you released a popular jazz album, you had parents who loved jazz and had an instrument at home.
* Of course you work in journalism, you lived in a city that took great pride in its news institutions.
* Of course you like programming, you had access to a computer and free time in your childhood.
* Of course you run a book review site, you had access to functional library systems growing up.
* Of course you are interested in politics, you were able to volunteer at local election campaigns.
Like, if someone is building an expensive home, you would obviously expect that their life experience has been such that they are able to build an expensive home. Likewise, if someone does anything, then obviously their life experience has been such that they are able to do that thing.
This is a cool writeup of a cool project, and reducing it to the fact that these people have been fortunate can come off as pretty smug.
If you're looking to build a home, do yourself a favor and watch Essential Craftsman's Spec House series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...). Your eyeballs will grow wider and wider with all the considerations, but you'll be better informed for it.
“Contemporary” is the more generic umbrella term for things that are modern with a lowercase “m”.
Of course, nobody agrees on what Postmodernism is so please feel free to tell me why I’m wrong :)
Their insurance is going to be fierce.
I wonder if they actively melt snow on the roof?!
https://www.squamishchief.com/local-news/pemberton-area-fire...
Many, many people dream of living in the woods. The costs are usually unknown or prohibitive!
Also, I'm approximately their same demographic and could afford to build a house like this if the other estimates in this thread are approximate, and have literally not taken a penny from my parents, or used their resources(which are scant - I was paid more my first job out of college than both my parents combined), since I was 16.
Is there anyone in America or Canada who cares about the environment, who is not a kid by your standard? I know a bunch of people who claim to care about the environment, but they still eat meat, drive ICE cars, have children, use ridiculous amounts of power compared to the global average, and do many of the normal things North Americans do. I still believe they care about the environment though.
> These are two areas where the BC building code, BC Hydro, and the construction industry lag behind more environmentally progressive regions. It’s our hope that as the technology and standards improve we’ll be able to eliminate propane from the mix and use a fully electric power base, much of it captured on site from our 11.6 kW array.
> enough equity to buy raw land and build a fairly baller house on it
Sounds about right for Vancouver property market.
That said, it doesn't have to be that way. I'm building a house up in the mountains at the moment. Found ~3 acres for 12k and I'm doing the land clearing and build mostly by myself on the weekends to keep costs down.
My current guess is final costs w/ out-of-pocket financing (goal is to do it debt-free so I own house and land outright when I finish) will be somewhere between $250k-$350k, including the land price (maybe a bit higher as material prices fluctuate).
If you're patient and willing to make adjustments elsewhere in your life, you can do it. If you're just building a simple house, too, and not a Dwell photoshoot, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish.
I don't think you could buy a temporary ice fishing hut for 12k in Canada.
What’s that worth to you?
$60,000 in 2015
Details: 1 hour from walmart, 35 minutes from the grocery, 5 miles from pavement, zero stoplights in my county, no zoning at all (build anything you want). But a nicely-kept dirt road, plenty of people living in the area, etc.
My guess is this build was between $900k-$1.2m CA. Hard to guess without knowing the sqft or acreage. This isn't necessarily outrageous given the market up there, and was probably a great investment and has substantial equity, but you need a strong personal balance sheet to handle that and the cost overruns.
Your right, though, that if you live in a low cost of living area, and you keep your expectations and footprint manageable, you can get a lot for very little. Like these cob homes, gorgeous - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlzpfkjjqOw
Source: am finishing up a home at a similar finish-level at a similar size, although not quite as fancy as this I don't think.
source: We're currently working with an architect on a similar project.
I mean it's still somewhat interesting vicariously. Kind of like the New York Times' house-hunting section, wherein they pretend that an $800,000 walk-up is an entry-level home.
It's never mentioned how much acreage was purchased, I don't think. My mental block is anything sub 5 acres where I am looking. My current trouble is that I don't live anywhere near where the property I am looking at is. Getting there is… quite a to-do. I'm leery of putting much trust in a realtor as my eyes/ears given that 1.) the property is cheap enough that their commission will be small potatoes and 2.) they have an incentive to sell you _something_. How does one navigate that part? How much of the soil test/survey/etc was done pre-sales, how much was a contingency, or do you just YOLO it?
Also, pay for your own independent well inspections (it has a well right? If not, uh oh), septic inspections (the soil type is okay for a septic system the county will approve right? If not, uh oh), and walk the property a couple times at different times of the day and night.
Sometimes there is a noisy train line, or airport landing patterns change during certain times, and what was a mellow quiet plot can be noisier than LAX during Christmas.
I had the opportunity to stay very nice place up in BC last summer — at the price of constant fear that we might need to hop in the car and leave everything behind at any second. And this was in a fairly big town (Kelowna).
I can't imagine what the risks are for living in a place like this is...
Everywhere dries out enough it will catch fire at least some of the year. If there is forest, there will be fire.
Also: It sucks that bookmarklets have fallen out of fashion. I just spent a few minutes trying to find a working bookmarklet that changes the font size and failed.
The author used viewport-relative units for body text and (guessing) only tested on a laptop screen.
This fixes it:
[data-predefined-style="true"] main { font-size: 20px; }
Seriously though, every NA forest community I’ve seen is similarly screwed. There is a reason the firefights always get seen as heros - those communities would not exist if it wasn’t for them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/sibihx/first_d...
https://www.shelter-kit.com/patrick-kit.html
The materials price increases that are causing factories to raise their prices are also hitting local contractors who do site-built homes.
In fact, if anything, the factories can insulate you from this price volatility more because they have a lot more bargaining leverage with their suppliers than a local contractor who's doing 10 homes a year.
In factory built home parlance, generally, a 'mobile' home is built to HUD building codes (which are the same nationwide) and is not considered a permanent residence - often time it stays on wheels even when put in place, and can theoretically be moved at a later date (although they rarely ever are). These are also sometimes referred to as 'trailer houses'. They used to be built very cheaply and were a depreciating asset (think like a car or an RV), but there are higher quality options these days.
A 'modular home' will be built to spec to the local building codes wherever it is being placed (which is usually IRC + whatever peculiarities local government officials have tacked on). They are placed on a permanent foundation, cannot be moved, and are generally treated as equivalent to a site-built home once finished. Again, you can spend a little or a lot on these, some factories will do fully custom designs that would be completely indistinguishable from a high-end site-built home once finished.
Many factories will build either variety, some specialize on one over the other. In rural, higher cost of living areas both varieties are often quite a bit cheaper than a site-built home, both because of the efficiencies and economies of scale a factory can provide, and also because they can be built in an area with lower labor costs and shipped to your land.
In populated, growing urban areas, the cost benefit diminishes a bit because production builders can approximate the benefits a factory has by building 100s of homes in the same neighborhood at the same time.
edit to add: My information pertains to the US, the article references land in Canada. I don't know as much about factory built homes or building codes in Canada.
irishvernacular.com/ also has a guide to building a lovely, modest, warm home yourself (with friends, admittedly) for <50k .
We have seen/stayed in one of these Ideabox homes and they seem a good balance for a house when you're not a "I want to build my dream castle" kind of person (that's me).
https://www.ideabox.us/
And, just to be clear, I am not a build my castle person, but I do want something more modern than the usual cabin in the woods. Hence, Ideabox...
Yeah that's my main pick with all pre-fab proposals that eventually pop-up here and there, some of them even winning awards for "affordable" housing. Every. single. time. the total cost of the project is on the 6-7 figures range ...
That's what has always steered me clear of doing this. If you need to sell, I've learned that manufactured homes are not lendable by many institutions. Maybe this new class of modular will count as "Stick built" for lending purposes. They seem really nice.
https://www.nickelbros.com/residential/homes-for-sale/
Huh, as someone who wants one day to build a passive house to live in, this is all very interesting. Sounds like they're not getting quite as modern of a home as they wanted.
My house can make do with 60A, and my previous one with 40A
Do they use 350A to heat a swimming pool? Talk about a waste of energy.
400A service in the US is the purview of the very wealthy for their Taj Mahals - which is obviously overrepresented here - but that's a fucking distorted view point if you think it's the norm.
I have seen (largish) villas with 20 or 25 kW, but everything more than that - like 100 A or so - is definitely beyond common use.
So kettle + oven and you blow your fuses?
Traditionally the oven was (only in the last years electic ones have become prevalent/ubiquitous) gas-powered and that electric kettles are not common, so the typical tripping scenario is now electric oven cooking+ironing or (say) iron+dishwasher+washing machine.
The 120V outlets are approximately equally split between the two legs (which you could view as -120 to 0 and 0 to +120), so one way you could view it is that 200A service in NA allows for about 400A of 120V load. But then larger loads are usually across both legs and you have to account for imbalance so it doesn't work out quite that simply. And then there are "weird load" like dryers, which commonly put the heating element across both legs but the drum and blower motors across only one, resulting in some amps on both legs and some more amps on only one of them.
And while we're at it commercial buildings often run the lighting across both legs for wire gauge economy. So there's a lot of nuance on the load side. But on the supply side it's all 240V either way (well, kind of, could be 208V in case of a wye supply, but that's not common).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
The split is almost bi-modal, not pointing fingers but this bundling seems a little bit of an unfair generalization, not all nations pollute alike.
Also lesser know fact: A circuit breaker doesn't cut off at the rated amperage. It cuts off when it spikes above that amperage. When the current is steady, you can blow past the limit, but one little wobble and it will finally trip. "I wasn't doing anything different" being a common refrain. A little ripple from the city power or the other end of the house can push it over.
Heat pumps are limited by how cold and humid it is outside. The coils freeze up and they have to cycle to melt it off. It's not particularly cold in Vancouver but it is definitely humid. I'm not sure where the triple point is.
Am I the only one who almost spit out his coffee when reading this paragraph? I mean, building a remote home in the middle of a forest is a cool idea, sure. But then end up feeding the whole thing with 400A worth of electricity? And when the current is too high, end up supplementing with a propane generator?
Am I missing something? As a European, I'm used to way more modest figures for family homes - maybe 400V @ 25A plus gas for heating.
Maybe they have a heat pump setup which switches to propane when it gets really cold.
Wood is there, but somebody needs to feed it. And people inevitably get old or lazy about it and depend more and more on the convenient heat sources available.
Seconded. I recently completed an all electric high performance remodel, and with 200A service, I can power a heat pump, heat pump water heater, all electric kitchen and laundry, and an EV charger, with Amps to spare. This is in the mild Bay Area, and my heat pump draws about 6A (15A breaker). The largest loads are EV and cooktop/stove.
A 3000sqft custom house built to high performance standards (airtight and well insulated) can be space heated in a cold climate with a heat pump that draws no more than 24A (40A breaker) using a heat pump. At that load a modern heat pump will make 40kBTU of heat. There are many examples of this across Canada.
I just now read that they have an outdoor heated pool, though, so crazy as it sounds they are presumably using electricity to heat it.
> plus propane.
Apart from backup water heating when the power goes out, their hot tub will waste huge amounts of energy, so propane might be operationally cheaper than electricity.
Edit: Service in the US is generally 200A or 400A. I'd say 400A is overbuilt for what they have, but that doesn't mean they actually use much of that capacity.
For example, I average 1000 kWh per month, which is about 1.39 kW 24/7, or 12 amps average on my 200A service. The 200A is to have headroom for peak demands, and we probably never get close to 200A.
If I were to rewire my panel (it's full), I'd go for the 400A - it's just heavier copper in the three lines to the entrance panel. That would not increase my monthly power bill right now, but it would provide lots of excess capacity in case I want to switch to heat pumps and electric vehicles.
Since we heat with wood and propane and don't use electricity for either and have mostly LED lighting and a gas stove, I do wonder where all the power is going, especially at night. Too many computers, I guess. Add analysis to my to-do list!
I like my wood/propane mix for heating, because it's immune to power outages. At some point I'll get too old to cut/split/haul wood, though, and will have to figure something else out.
I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity. Perhaps some people are concerned with methane leaks in the natural gas distribution system.
It's that, as well as the fact that having a gas stove means you have a gas hookup in the first place, so you're more likely to also use it for heating. That in turn leads to more emissions than other heating methods produce.
It can make a lot of sense in urban areas. In addition to removing the methane leaks (with their high GWP), it reduces the need to install/maintain expensive natural gas distribution infrastructure, and also improves indoor air quality by eliminating NO2 and CO production within the house. If the power goes out, you just use a propane grill in the backyard, or a small butane stove.
S̶p̶e̶c̶i̶f̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶,̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ ̶w̶e̶r̶e̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶a̶w̶a̶r̶e̶,̶ ̶s̶m̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶h̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶u̶b̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶y̶p̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶t̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶i̶r̶c̶u̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶p̶u̶m̶p̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶d̶i̶c̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶r̶s̶.̶ ̶Y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶p̶a̶r̶a̶t̶e̶,̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶e̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶,̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶r̶u̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶u̶m̶p̶s̶ ̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶t̶e̶n̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶i̶m̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶l̶a̶c̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶k̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶a̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶.̶
Never mind. Apparently I was misinformed. The circulation pump moves the water through the heater, but isn't the primary heat source.
Source: https://www.amsenergy.com/fuel-cost-calculator/
Assuming you are using are using a resistance heater (100% heating efficiency), to raise 200Gal of water (typical small hot tub size) from 50F to 100F requires about 25kWh of energy.
To only use 75kWh/month (255kBTU), you would need to only raise it to 100F less than 3 times a month, and that assumes that the water temp doesn't naturally drop below 50F (unlikely in NH).
It's likely you are spending significantly more than $15/month to heat it with electricity.
Propane is about $30/MBTU, which would work out to about $9/month for the equivalent amount of heat.
1. https://www.electricrate.com/residential-rates/new-hampshire...
2. https://bloglocation.com/art/water-heating-calculator-for-ti...
The tub is well insulated, with an insulated cover, so you need to account for that. My estimate on the hot tub cost is by comparing my kWh usage after the tub was installed to the prior year use.
Most small tubs are electric, like mine.
So assuming $15/month, you are using 115kWh, which is 392kBTU of heating energy. It takes about 83kBTU to heat 200gal of water from 50F to 100F, which would be like 5 full heat ups from 50F. Of course there are the other convolved factors you mentioned (insulation).
That’s an almost ideal case for an air-to-water heat pump though, the heat capacity and efficiency of which go up as the output water temperature goes down. Pool heating (and snow melting) are ideal use cases that can support a very low output water temperature and still get the job done (as compared to baseboard or cast-iron radiator space heating).
https://www.thespruce.com/service-panels-changed-in-the-1900...
Which says 100A didn't become common until the 1960's.
[0]: The incoming line was aerial and over the legal span length, so it had been attached to an insulator nailed to a tree halfway between the house and mast. Also the mast was deteriorating to the point that it needed to be replaced anyways and insurance was making noise about not allowing a new policy if it wasn't upgraded to at least 120A. We did a customer pole and went underground to the house. Much nicer aesthetics and I can now turn off a breaker on my side of the meter at the pole to do maintenance.
Still, it's a very high amount of power (48kW) that would not even be subscriptable in France for a consumer (the max is 36kW).
Remember, they didn't want fossil fuels - if you are going all electric, especially for heating (in CANDADA!) you are going to pull some wattage.
That big outdoor pool - in CANADA - doesn't help either.
No, I thought that was a typo and should be 40A (so 120V * 40 A or 400V * 12A).
[0] https://app.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/electrical-connecti...
Most places in the US experience much harsher seasons than the Bay Area.
Then there are places like Nevada, which are just not suitable for large-scale habitation. "Can we make this monument to our hubris more energy efficient" is kind of missing the point, right?
A lot of hydro power is ‘use it or lose it’, since the dams also provide flood control and MUST keep extra capacity free to absorb sudden water surges. They can’t just store everything they get.
I also think it's ridiculous, for what it's worth. 400A is a wild amount of electricity for a supposedly high efficiency, modern home.
Why would it be harmful to run at the amperage that I'm buying ? What disincentives do I need?
I still don't get though, if living in rural area, why not heat the pool with wood. It just has that sensation that electric heater doesn't provide.
‘Wood warms you up three times. Once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you burn it’.
The amount of manual labor and time required to keep a pool warm from wood is monumental. It will definitely keep a fit man in the prime of his life busy and tired.
It isn’t something to sign up for lightly, especially for someone who may not have that kind of physical strength (or want it spent on heating their pool).
Is this some kind of new homeopathy? Wood memory gets into the water making two types of heat have a different sensation?
Hot tubs are also rather small.
But a hot tub? There are very, very few bodies of water that you can submerge comfortably in that doesn't end up being a non trivial amount of energy to warm up, much less keep warm.
To each his own I guess.
A proper Sauna would have satisfied them both!
It looks like they wanted a California house, with flat a roof and giant windows, in the Canadian Wilderness. But there's a reason houses in the mountains look the way they do. This house looks as out-of-place as a ski chalet would on the beach in San Diego. In any case, it looks as if they have enough money not to care.
The drainage will clog and they’ll risk having a leaky roof every spring. And you can’t get up there with a snow shovel because it’s a green roof and you’d scrape off all the dirt and plants.
[0] https://www.davos.ch/en/information/portrait-image/storybook...
I wish they had detailed how flat roofs guards against an avalanche? What is the logic/physics at work there?
https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/2021/04/04/spring-melt-me...
(Love your username, btw)
(Oregon has one semi-famous flat-roofed house that I'm aware of, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I suspect FLW hadn't actually ever been to Oregon: it looked like a house that belongs in Arizona or California. Anyways, the eventual owner of the land the house is built on wanted to tear it down and build a mansion, and after much protests they allowed some people to come in and take the house apart and reassemble it near Salem. After putting it back together, they found some of the original contractors who had built the house originally. Supposedly they took a tour of the house and declared that it must have been properly reassembled, because the roof leaks in all the same places.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_House_(Silverton,_Orego...
A lot of people have inground pools here in Quebec. AFAIK it's just a matter of removing some of the water before it freezes, to minimize the effects of expansion. It does tend to generate small cracks, but nothing that can't be patched over with annual maintenance.
They're going to have a hell of the time with the weathering on that siding and roof in 10y, too.
I knew a person who tried to put in triple-glaze, in New Westminster, BC, and it took a special lien on the property along with special approval from the Province because they weren't allowed by the building codes at the time.
That was ~10y ago, so maybe it's changed now.
And while the sliding glass doors look like they are single paned, look at the quadruple reflection. Isn't that usually caused by multiple sheets of glass in close proximity?
The external framing is also 2x6, so someone was thinking about insulation. I think it's just that after declaring victory on a well insulated house they then decided to heat the outdoors anyway by directly heating things that are out of doors.
Yes, compared to other windows. Compared to a well-insulated wall with external insulation and 6" of interior insulation, they're not great.
Good windows are an R5. A well-insulated wall cavity can easily be an R30.
Millions of hectares burn down every year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_British_Columbia_wildfire...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_British_Columbia_wildfire...
Last year an entire town disappeared:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-sept-7-2...
[1] https://www.providencejournal.com/story/news/2021/05/17/larg...
The two combine into large, periodic forest Fires.
The east coast has much fewer unbroken tracts of forest, and where it does have them they are more heavily managed and stewarded for a number of reasons.
The east coast was developed and property subdivided/allocated long before the tendency towards large national parks, monuments, etc.
It isn’t that these national parks or forests cause all these problems (though many of them DO feature prominently in these huge fires), they are also a sign of the very different nature of land allocation during the settling of the area.
You can see this pretty clearly if you pull up maps of federal land (national forests, national parks, blm land, etc). Several western states have more land owned by the federal government than anyone else.
They are all out west.
[0]https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-an...
[1]https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee...
And the pine beetles are doing a number on BC. It's only a matter of time before those catch on fire.
To which end, I wonder how long such a home would last, given the upkeep. The bling times come and go. Just look at history.
3-5 years at most I think. I've seen futile attempts to sell such experiments.
After that time it's just easier to bulldoze or burn it, and then build something more sensible.
A 230/400V open Y service at 25 amps is just 10kW which to me sounds like an old standard or mains for a small 1-2br apartment. I'd expect at least a 50-60A service. Though I know some (many?) homes in EU are on actual 3 phase so 25A at 400V 3 phase becomes 17.3kW which is not far from the 24kW a 100A 120/240 service provides. Still anemic but quite a bit of power for a 1-4 person household living modestly. Though in the USA it seems utilities make residential 3 phase difficult or impossible to obtain as you might do commercial stuff with that electric without paying commercial rates or your neighborhood is served by a single phase feeder.
Depends on the trip curve and the age of the overcurrent device. Looking at the trip curve for a Fuji BW250 (125-250 amp frame size), at 150% the device will trip in what looks like 5-30 minutes. Any load over 10x rated current is an instant trip.
There was a scandal many years ago where an electrical equipment manufacturer, Federal Pacific, was caught rigging its testing machines to pass faulty or poorly performing circuit breakers. It was found that some of those breakers would carry 150%+ rated current without tripping. They were responsible for quite a few electrical fires and were sued into oblivion.
That, and tankless water heater are stupid, frankly.
I dunno, maybe my thought is unrealistic - but if I were to splash out a ton of money for a palatial rural manse, I'd shoot for something with a bit more space than a large-ish suburban home.
Especially because one of the most common uses of such a property is entertainment - forget having folks stay over unless you make the kids bunk?
So how are they going to be entertaining people all the time (they specifically mention entertaining large groups being important to them)? Come over for an evening, except one of you can't drink and has to drive 2 hours back at the end of the night??
At a bare minimum it needs to be large enough to have a guest suite - the central socializing spaces like the kitchen and living room also need to be scaled for that use.
Ideally (assuming a grand budget) you can have separate structures for guests entirely.
But certainly one has to assume that guests are bunking over, given how remote the location is. It seems eminently unreasonable to assume guests are driving several hours at the end of the evening.
> A goal for the build was to limit impact to the site during construction, and then to limit the footprint of the home after completion. In pursuit of this we planned an efficient mechanical design that would feature solar panels for electricity generation tied to the grid, geothermal for heat exchange, and no fossil fuels.
Oh, great, sound like you have some good environmental principles!
> However, we quickly ran into several problems with this approach.
Yeah, it can be a bummer to sacrifice your own comfort. But it is worth it for the environment!
> The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A.
Wow, that's a lot of electricity. Like, a loooooot. Maybe we can pare it down a little bit -- limiting our impact is important, right?
> We eventually settled on supplementing our electrical generation with propane, which we had hoped to avoid
Right?
O-oh. Oh so you're using propane to heat the pool.
Yeah.
You can limit the charging current but at some point you will have to make compromises on driving.
this is all for one car.
For multiple cars, the compromises get trickier.
It could just be to handle momentary bursts, and the equipment drawing that power might actually be doing the job more efficiently than something that does it slower, drawing more power cumulatively over a longer period of time.
Fossil fuels are from carbon sources taken out of the normal carbon cycle (aka buried generally)
(This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)
If you chop it down and burn it, or it dies and rots, +1 tree of carbon goes back. But the total carbon in the system hasn’t changed, and on average (if this happens a lot everywhere), the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much the same.
nothing lives forever, and most things stop growing quickly pretty fast. Unless there is a huge disaster, forests turn over in a stable way generally - new trees always growing, old trees always dying and rotting.
So unless you had chopped down massive forests and stopped new trees from growing, or stockpiled half a continents worth of wood for a century and then decided to burn it all at once, it’s hard to meaningfully change the average amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because it never really stops ‘moving’ or gets out of the cycle.
Fossil fuel is carbon that got pulled out of the system a long time ago - those trees or ferns or peat or whatever got stuck underground, where they couldn’t rot or burn, and on a scale that IS continents worth of trees, for millions of years. We don’t know what it is like having that amount of carbon in the system, because the last time it was in the system was millions of years before we existed.
Once those fossil fuels get burned, even if you plant trees, it doesn’t really reduce the amount of carbon back to where it was, because those trees will die and rot or burn or whatever, and on average, the total amount of carbon in circulation is now higher.
Does that help?
The idea is that you don't want more energy in the panel than the panel is designed to handle. Practically (if I understand it right) this means that the breaker for the solar panels is limited to 20% of the panel rating. A 200A 240V panel would limit you to a 40A 240V breaker, which (according to the link above) means a maximum of 7.6kW of backfeed solar.
In the article, he says he has a 11.6kW solar array, which would require (if I'm calculating right) at least a 60A 240V breaker (maybe plus some required overcapacity?). Since this isn't allowed on a 200A panel, he may have needed to bump up to the next largest size of 400A unless he wanted to go smaller on the solar array. So while it sounds like overkill, it's possible there is more reason for it than just a desire to heat his wife's outdoor pool in the winter.
so 100A panel + 100A of solar requires a 200A panel
A few other things that require high-amp service - on demand electric water heating, and electric car charging (and we're moving towards multiple vehicles).
It's also worth mentioning that by far the largest cost of an electrical circuit is the labor, so sizing for 100A, 200A and 400A is not 1x, 2x, 4x. upgrading later is a huge cost.
Cool house though.
I took a similar approach to building a new house on a field in Ireland - my house was built in Latvia and assembled in a week or so by a local crew.
I would invest in a couple of these [0]
[0] http://www.onestopfire.com/sprinklers.htm
My 2¢ from observation. I could be completely wrong, too.
At the same time, I find these boxes horrible: https://nlc.p3k.hu/uploads/2019/07/ferencvarosi-helytortenet...
In reality that's how they look like (3 photos from 3 different districts in my city):
https://spoldzielnialsm.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Obecni...
https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/1/7e/04/5ed7c0329f818_o_...
https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/1/79/a3/52da7c5466e91_o_...
And frankly, they are much better designed than most modern neighborhoods built today in my country. A school, healthcare, some local shops, library, park, playground, sport infrastructure in 10 minute walking distance and public transport making it possible not to have a car.
Also - for the CO2 emissions that canadian house causes you could comfortably support about 100 families living in the commieblocks. With no fancy solar panels nor heatpumps.
Have you lived in these? I have and they are terrible places to live in. Parking spaces are ridiculously under planned, because workers used took a bus, but today most families own at least one car. These buildings are near their end of life since they weren't designed to last.
They are rather depressing to look at, but that's just me.
Soundproofing doesn't exists, moving walls is limited, inner height is claustrophobic.
I don't recommend to look up to these as any good. Maybe something to learn from.
Yes, in several different ones (when I was studying in Lublin I lived in 3 different places and later I rented a flat in Warsaw). I also lived in a detached house in countryside for most of my life and now I live in a reasonably modern neighborhood. I have a comparison.
> Parking spaces are ridiculously under planned, because workers used took a bus
That's the best feature of them. You can walk everywhere and cars are optional. Your kids can play with other kids without constant supervision. There's no vandalized underground passes stinking of piss where you get mugged. Old and disabled people can actually live there on their own. My wife's grandmother moved from a detached house to an old commieblock in a nearby city because of that - she doesn't drive anymore and living within walking distance of basically everything is a huge positive.
> These buildings are near their end of life since they weren't designed to last.
The ones in Poland are good to go for the next 30-50 years. It mostly depends on the rust protection for the concrete reinforcement. The cheapest ones with no protection are soon going to fall apart but we had very little of them. We built them with some galvanic protection. The ones with stainless steel are basically forever, but we had almost none of those.
> inner height is claustrophobic
250 cm. The same as in modern blocks in Poland (my current flat has 255 cm and that mostly depends on what kind of floor you have). It's the building code still. In fact the building code is much worse now - for example distances between blocks are several times smaller and there's no requirement to plan utilities in new neighborhoods. The end result is this:
https://static.polityka.pl/_resource/res/path/17/a1/17a1a73c...
Notice that it's all houses and parking, no utilities whatsoever. No public transport. Schools, shops, parks, health clinic - you need to drive through these tiny roads with your car to get to all of these. The end result is traffic jams and people sitting in their houses all day cause there's nowhere to go.
I will grant you soundproofing is worse, but even in modern blocks you can still hear your neighbors.
Weird, I'd trade a chance to live in a commie block for the modern blocks you linked to.
But of course, I'd like to have my own land with my glass-concrete utopia home if money weren't an issue.
That's because you don't understand how big of a deal is 1 hour spent in traffic every day for the rest of your life.
I recently started talking to architects about getting started on the design process of a similar but smaller and simpler home and I was blown away by how much more expensive it was to build a home of this quality than what I'd been reading online.
It looks like as of 2022, you are looking at about probably $600-800/sqft to build something like this for my smaller simpler version. Potentially over $1000 / sqft to match the quality in the post