Why don't we use awnings anymore (2022)

I think the builders of the past would be amazed by modern technology like argon filled double paned windows with advanced window films to reflect the heat instead of letting it in.

But yes, let's bring back the awnings too. Sometimes the low tech ways are easiest and best. I will say that I don't think awnings alone can save a stick built modern house from the heat. Part of the key to old houses staying cool was high thermal mass: lots of brick and stone that could stay cool during the day. As great as modern insulation is at keeping hot and cool separate, a modern insulated wall doesn't cool it's surroundings like a high thermal mass wall would.

Moving to a world where we combine passive cooling and high thermal mass construction with the benefits of modern tech will be key in my opinion.

There’s Argon in those? Interesting. I wonder if anyone’s tried adding an electrode for plasma effects.

> As great as modern insulation is at keeping hot and cool separate, a modern insulated wall doesn't cool it's surroundings like a high thermal mass wall would.

Why does modern insulation hold less thermal mass? Is it just that trapped air has less mass than stone?

That's exactly the reason. Technically it's actually the amount of energy needed to heat a volume of material, not the physical mass, that is important. But for many materials the two go hand in hand.

Fiberglass insulation reduces convection but has no mass like rock wool

> argon filled double paned windows with advanced window films to reflect the heat instead of letting it in

We replaced the old double-paned windows with new triple-paned with 60% IR filter. There's hardly any tint, but boy did it make a difference. Especially in the living room which has a very large window which catches the sun from noon to midnight in the summer.

Before the wood floor in the living room would be baking hot where the sun hit, uncomfortably so at times. Now I can't tell the difference.

We added it just cause it didn't cost much extra, figured why not. Very glad we did.

I wonder how long the argon actually lasts in practice. The industry claims 20 years under normal conditions.

What happens when they break?

I've geeked out on thermal mass as much as the next guy, but I don't think it's a good solution at scale. Adding thermal mass is expensive, both due to the materials cost and that it's a niche building technique. Insulation, heat pumps, and solar all benefit from mass production and technology improvements. Combine them with light-colored roofs and solar panels, and that can probably beat thermal mass construction.

You replace them.

I was referring to the cleanup of toxic materials and the safety aspect.

Argon is a largely non-reactive noble gas. What toxins?

Rock wool works by reducing convection. It's mass is not a major factor in its functionality.

Adobe and stone are things with thermal mass, not insulating fiber thickness.

The material costs for adobe are almost certainly close to zero if you live in an area that can benefit from using it.

The labor costs for adobe have become very high, mostly it seems because the descendants of the families that started the amazing adobe brick "factories" no longer want to be dirt farmers.

> can probably beat thermal mass construction.

You have to define what "beat" means. My hundred year old adobe did not rise above 81F as an interior temperature this summer, despite outside highs around 100F. That would be possible (or even lower!) with the technologies you mentioned, but my adobe house did that with no energy utilization at all.

Awnings have a nice property that fancy windows don’t: they can reduce heat gain in the summer while still allowing more heat gain in the winter. A nice south-facing window that lets the low winter sun in can provide a lot of desirable heat in the winter in a cold climate.

(Also, removing a given amount of summer heat via air conditioning is considerably cheaper than adding that same amount of winter heat via gas or heat pump in many climates, because the indoor-outdoor temperature difference is much higher in the winter.)

Even better, depending on climate, grape vines.

Our house (Australia) has trained vines on the sunny side that are thick with leaves and grapes in summer, bare and leafless in winter.

Ideal for seasonally sensible shade and warmth.

For those interested in digging into this passive solar design concerns itself with solar gain optimization. Passive house is a standard that makes use of these concepts as well but goes alot further.

Glass and a noble glass is like the least toxic combo you could have. They're both inert.

And Argon makes up a little less than 1% of the air you breathe.

Could do both though, it’s not an either-or situation.

> Sometimes the low tech ways are easiest and best.

They’re not even easiest and best, but they’re additive and in the grand scheme of things awnings (and shutters) are not that expensive, so it’s a small investment for a permanent benefit.

Don't the vines damage the house?

English ivy (hedera helix) can damage mortar, but grape vines don't have holdfast structures like hedera that can sink into mortar. Plus, hedera helix is so dense that rotting vegetation and sheltered animals can also cause problems. Grapevines have tendrils that grab onto and twine around something like wires or a trellis.

They're on a free standing trellis that doesn't touch the house.

Two actually, a vertical mesh straight up from the garden bed adjacent to the brick paved verandah, and another that's almost horizontal with a slight slope away from the house.

Most of the summer growth is dense on the horizontal (like an awning) with grape bunches developing and hanging down for easy picking when rips.

Most vines, including Ivy don’t damage bricks walls that are build well. I don’t know about grapes but most ivy uses “suction cups” to trap on directly to the bricks. I think the misconception that they damage mortar might come from the moisture the plants can trap which can then damage the masonry. Or maybe it’s because the plants hide damage until it gets serious Mortar doesn’t last forever after all. Anyway, if you build your house or wall properly you can grow stuff on it with basically no downsides outside of having more bugs (and the things that eat them) on your wall that you might want.

It might not work so well on the Lego brick walls that are glued onto the front of concrete these days, but that would just be a guess.

Thermal mass is also known as "dirt" or "rocks", and is not expensive.

Yeah, the gas leaks out after a while, then your double pane glass fogs up on the inside and costs $$$ to replace.

Touch a cold blanket and cold stone countertop and tell me which feels cooler, then do the same thing for a hot blanket and a hot countertop.

Sure, the stone is more conducive meaning you feel the temperature sooner. But it also has a lot of thermal mass, meaning it can give off or absorb more heat.

Older technology is often neat in a lot of ways and has certain benefits, but there's a reason why we moved on.

> Part of the key to old houses staying cool was high thermal mass: lots of brick and stone that could stay cool during the day.

That only works if you don't have long hot spells. I live in a house with high thermal mass - reinforced concrete filled cinderblock. It was built by a commercial builder as his own house in 1950. There's enough thermal mass to keep the interior temp stable for three days. No need for air conditioning.

This worked fine until Northern California started having week-long stretches of 100F+ temperatures. That didn't happen until about ten years ago. Once all that thermal mass heats up to ambient, it won't come down for days.

While modern building materials are very good at keeping the heat out, they aren't perfect. My house was built without awnings or AC and with modern window tech, but we opted to have awnings and screens installed nevertheless and they made a huge difference in how much heat from sun is coming into the house (not to mention the bright light itself).

For my case, I think it's irresponsible to be installing AC without first making sure the house is optimized for keeping the heat out.

I live in about a 200 year old New England farmhouse that’s a mixture of post and beam and stick. I definitely observe that for one or two hot days, especially with passably temperate nights, inside will definitely be cooler than out. But once the house heats up, it takes days to get it cool even if temperatures have gone down outside.

Those require very low pressure (partial vacuum) rather than argon.

To fog up, it has to pass water molecules, which are way larger than gas molecules. I've seen only a few IGUs fog up, all of them had clearly visible damage, and they are ubiquitous here, with many 20+ years old. And the IGUs themselves aren't very expensive either (unless they're over 1sqm individually), frames indeed are.

My parents redid their home with a dud batch from a company that offered 30 years guarantees. Company was out of business within 10 years and 20 years later ~60% of them are fogged. Still very energy efficient.

Low-e coatings are metals (silver, tin, zinc), I believe. But not very much, and not very toxic.

The old-tech can also be less compatible with new tech. If you live in an adobe house the high thermal mass can also block WiFi.

If you go this route, design for the climate twenty years from now, not for twenty years ago.

(Speaking from experience—our house is an oven in the spring and fall because those seasons are 20F hotter than we assumed when designing the house.)

Sometimes I wonder how many people who espouse old building technology have actually spent a lot of time living in an old house. Everything has advantages and disadvantages, and living in an old house growing up ... well, lets just say I prefer my modern house of today.

> are 20F hotter than we assumed when designing the house

Then you designed a house for a climate that never existed. There is nowhere on earth that is 20F warmer than it was 200 years ago, let alone 20.

I've seen a video about fixing that yourself. Seems like a missing market opportunity, since replacing windows costs many thousands, so you could probably charge hundreds to provide this as a service.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXyQWqK9lg0

Peak temperatures have gone up that much for the microclimate our house is in.

Put another way, air conditioning used to be unnecessary in Silicon Valley. Now we have > 100F days pretty much every year.

Do you want to be comfortable for reasonable AC cost or watch cat videos in HD instead of SD. Decisions, decisions.

The seals on them degrade and leak.

I've had a lot of them fog up with no damage.

I'm dubious. If you pick the right threshold, you will surely find that the frequency of days above that threshold is massively increased. But that doesn't imply that the temperature is up 20F.

I certainly remember plenty of days in the mid-to-high-nineties in Silicon Valley 20 years ago.

And heaven forbid you try to use WiFi-enabled doorbells or AC controllers.

There's even "passive cooling" (called thermal mass activation) where you circulate groundwater through the floors/ceiling or concrete walls to cool them down. Ideally combined with a geothermal source heat pump to recover the waste heat dumped to the ground in the cold season

Vitis vinifera has a deep vertical root that can fit in even narrow places and don't causes a lot of trouble. Climbing roses can vary, some are huge and they trow a lot of garbage, but short climbers normally are manageable. If they grow too much, you can just prune it to a desired size

Ivy or Wisteria are a different question. The first will damage walls and the second can crush anything like a vegetable python

Heaven forbid I know how to extend WiFi ranges or otherwise accommodate outliers. If only such technology existed. But sure, getting off my ass to change the temp or see who is at the door is basically an unthinkable inconvenience in these modern times.

I thought this exchange was in good nature but the tone seems to point to something else. Have you ever lived in an adobe home? They can create a unique set of issues more modern methods don’t need to deal with.

Yes, most problems have engineering solutions. It all comes down to whether the juice is worth the squeeze. FWIW I’m generally in favor of the increased reliability of low tech, but also acknowledge I’m in the minority.

Sorry if you took that personally.

Living in a mud hut where it rains 120 days a year doesn't sound like the solution. Bricks work better.

Concrete is often used for thermal mass, too, and that is expensive.

That’s not an apology if that’s what you intended. Bricks are also inordinately more expensive. But you generally see adobe in dry climates. Again, engineering tradeoffs.

Rocks and dirt have been used forever - adobe!

Another option is water. Water is cheap, and you can pile up gallon jugs of it. Or use your pond/swimming pool.

Geothermal HVAC makes use of the thermal mass of rocks and dirt, too.