When you think about making your home more sustainable, you may think about this, a light bulb.
With going green, we often turn to these small little changes to reduce our energy consumption and
our impact on the environment. And while it's good to make sure you've got up-to-date light bulbs
and that you turn them off when you don't need them, and it's actually the design of our homes and apartments that
has the biggest impact on energy efficiency. Something that I wish more people knew about
building sustainably is that it's not as expensive or challenging as they may think. There are
ways to make changes that can make your home much more environmentally conscious without
it being this like astronomical price tag. Architects like Siena Shaw are building with these techniques
to bring a household energy demand down by 80% or more. The house standing behind me
is a project that my partner Brian and I did. It was like one of those dreams right like
well, we don't have the money to buy a property and like build own house right now but we can
buy a trailer we can build our dreams basically but at a much smaller footprint right. Before
we get into how Sienna builds environmentally friendly homes, let's first get into how temperature
is actually stored in a house and how it can be lost. If you had a cooler that you were
trying to keep everything inside cold and then but you had a bunch of holes and you're
out in the middle of the desert, like the ice is gonna melt inside, right and it's the
same sort of idea but if it's completely sealed up, and you keep it closed, it's able to maintain
that temperature for much longer. So when the heater's blasting if the house is full
of holes, all that hot air is just escaping outside. This is obviously a waste of energy
and results in those harmful carbon emissions. Every building has what's called a building
envelope. And this is basically that sealed cooler. You ideally want a building envelope
that doesn't leak. Like at all. Think about it. Houses used to be built with temperature
as the top priority. Before we had energy guzzling mechanical systems to change the
temperature to whatever we wanted. builders had to use natural forces and like clever
engineering. So houses were basically thermal batteries storing heat in case it's needed
later. And don't get me wrong. It's great that we now have the technology to heat and
cool rooms at the touch of a button because I'm cold like all the time, but air conditioners
and heaters take so much energy to work. And in fact, more than half of the average household
energy consumption is used just for heating and air conditioning. But what if we built
homes so they didn't need tons of power to be constantly heated, cooled. We didn't have
to rely on these machines. We aren't putting those damaging carbon emissions out into the
atmosphere, which is like really great so the technology has been getting more energy
efficient over time. Think about those light bulbs and double pane windows and better insulation.
We've already improved so much, but homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. And
so when we expand the square footage, it's just wiping out the gains that we've made.
An easy way to tell how sealed and insulated your home or apartment or adventure van or
whatever you live in is, is just by turning off your heat on a cold day and tracking how
long it takes for it to cool. When air leaks out of the house that goes to the little holes
and cracks and those things exist all over the house. This is obviously a waste of energy
and resulting as harmful carbon emissions. In older houses, half of the energy used in
them or more can go to heating and cooling. Newer houses might be a quarter or less, especially if you're
doing something like a passive house which is a program that requires really high levels
of insulation and airtightness and if you were in what's called a passive house, it
would stay warm. For a super long time without any mechanical help. So this mighty house we tested
out building to Passivhaus standards. I think at a small scale, This house is a really good
example of what an attainable energy efficient house can be. It's not super high tech there's
not like a lot of complicated materials or techniques or methods that went into designing
it or building it. So everything about this house was carefully designed to optimize energy
control. The insulation is a particularly great example of this. This house has somewhat
of a standard internal core, right like there's standard wood, two by four wood studs, and
then there's a shielding layer of plywood and then there's a building wrap on it which
stop the wind from infiltrating through the different layers. And that's all taped so every
seam is taped and sealed to prevent air from going through and then the whole building
is wrapped with this mineral wool and then the next step is this rain screen which is reclaimed
redwood fence boards that we milled down and this allows the whole assembly to breathe.
Using all of those carefully selected layers prevents the heat from escaping. We were talking
about earlier. It was like a great way for us to test all those ideas and to do it with
using like the highest quality materials that were available at the time. So if every crack
in the house is sealed shut won't it get stuffy? What about like fresh air? Well, Siena thought
of that too. This is half of the ERV system that I'm looking at up here and basically what
it's doing is it's pulling fresh air from the outside into the building and then the
other half which is located up in the loft is exhausting and these two talk to each other
and they alternate so that the air is changed over in the space continually. So basically
that creates a situation where if we close up all the windows it's we'd still have fresh
air and these solutions sealing a house insulating it, recovering energy, they work for bigger
buildings too. So as far as like taking these details and scaling them up for bigger apartment
complexes or multifamily dwellings, or that sort of thing. It's possible and really exciting
to see these principles being implemented at much larger scales because large buildings,
larger impacts. it's all exciting. I don't know about you, but after all this, I have
some new ideas that I can implement in my house right now and for my future dream home. My
name is Niba of NotesByNiba And this is Seeker's Impact of Everything. We're going to be talking
about how all kinds of everyday things are becoming more sustainable and giving you the
details and to how it all works, so keep an eye out for more episodes. Thanks for watching.