Friday 28 April 2017

Efficiency of spending and the thermodynamics of happiness

When it comes to money I've mostly been looking at how to spend more when you build a house so that you will save money while you're living there. How do you balance capital expenditure and running costs?

Another consideration with money is how spending it makes you feel. The Guardian asks, is there a proven link between housing and happiness? People often say that money can't buy happiness, but are they just going to the wrong shops?

It depends what you spend money on. A lot of research seems to show that spending money on other people will make you happier, while spending money on yourself will not. There is also little evidence that more money will make people more happy, once people have got above the poverty line. So if you're in the lucky position of having shelter, warmth, food, fresh water, employment and access to education for your children, the best thing you can do to increase global happiness may be to send any spare cash you have to people who are not as fortunate as you.

People sometimes talk about the pursuit of happiness, which I find deeply problematic. Happiness is a journey and not a destination, so the happiness is in the actual pursuit. People may be happy when they receive something, or be happy thinking about getting it, or choosing exactly what to get, or going through other activities that will lead to getting it. They may be deeply unhappy if they don't have something, especially if everyone around them has one. But once they get it, and are used to having it, their level of happiness will quickly revert to the norm. In this context, there must be a steadily increasing flow of material things for them to make us happy, and they must be new, or faster, stronger, bigger or better in some way. I don't know about you, but for me that is a pretty miserable idea!

Last year we bought a new fridge, and a new washing machine. Within a couple of days the novelty
of the new white goods wore off and they just became doors in the wall.

Last year we also bought some plane tickets at a similar cost. I certainly didn't spend the whole flight enjoying the seat, and in fact long distance flights are not terrible comfortable. I do still remember what happened at the other end of the flight, and it's very easy to think about those memories without thinking about the money we spent on the tickets. Those memories of other times, visiting other places, and meeting other people will remain long after I've forgotten about the airlines and hotel bills.

So what does this have to do with thermodynamics? Not a lot. Happiness is just chemicals in the brain.

What does it have to do with house building? Just two things spring to mind: Think about other people when you are building a house, and think about what the building will let them do.   

Tuesday 25 April 2017

Candid advice for architects

One time when I was hitch hiking I asked the driver what he did, and he said he was a painter. I thought this was interesting, but wasn't sure whether he was an artist, or a workman. So I asked him what he painted. "Houses", he replied. This didn't help me very much. I was still not sure whether he sat with an easel producing two dimensional impressions of houses, or whether he covered their surfaces with paint. I make no value judgement on the two vocations, and whatever the man did I was grateful he was giving me a lift.

I think sometimes there is a similar confusion with architects. The clients usually just want someone who will make a building for them, but the architects often seem interested in creating a work of art. Here is some advice if you are an architect. If an architect is working for you, you may already know this.

1. Save the models for your mum.

You may be really pleased with the one-in-forty model that you've built of your client's house. But your clients are not three centimetres tall and don't want walls, roof and floors in white plastic. If we were your parents, and you had brought it back from elementary school, we would be really proud and impressed. But we're not your mum and you're not at elementary school. 

We can get 3D simulations on computer games, where we can not only walk through virtual realities, but shoot zombies on the way. CD Roms are given out free with interior decoration magazines that let us see what a room, a building or a space will look like. We'd like to see what the spaces are going to look like from inside, ideally walking around them, looking from different angles and even better with different light from different times of day. This is technically possible and clients deserve it. 

2. Leave your opinions at home. 

Clients are interested in your knowledge, your experience, your judgement and your creativity. We are not paying you for your opinions. 

3. Distinguish the process and the product.

Most people working on the house are entirely involved in the process. The clients are predominantly interested in the product. In other words the completed house. As long as they get the house they want, they may really not care who does it, what order it is done in, where they have to come from, what other jobs they are doing at the moment, or what they had for breakfast. 

Although it's not the primary concern, the client may be very interested in the process, and how the building is made. Most people only build a house once and it's a rare opportunity to see concrete being poured, or a wooden frame going up, or a freshly painted room. Some people don't want to miss a thing!

So don't forget that the finished house is the most important thing for your clients, but don't assume they are not interested in how it gets there.

4. Communicate.

Your job is not really to give the clients what they want. They won't get it! You have to make them want what they are going to get. At the beginning of a building project, everything is possible, the human imagination is boundless and sketches on paper are cheap and unlimited by many of the laws of physics. As the project goes on, this level of satisfaction begins to fall. If we imagine there is 100% satisfaction the moment you decide to build your dream house, then the client is lucky to be over 50% satisfied by the end. As dreams turn to reality, there is a steady erosion of satisfaction and things become impossible, scales are reduced, qualities are sacrificed to the bottom line. 

5. Costs are your problem.

The budget is what we can spend on the house. It's not some vague target that will work as a starting point. That is what we think we can afford to pay. You need to keep under it. We don't really care how much things cost. That's your problem.

6. Study marriage guidance counselling.

If you're dealing with a couple, the easiest thing is to work out who is the more powerful of the two, then to start ignoring the other partner. This makes sense as whoever is more powerful is going to be making the decisions anyway. However, it's cynical, disrespectful and may lead to a divorce. I'm not really sure of the best advice, but you need to know. 

7. Draw the pictures, then go and find another customer.

There are two ways that clients can work with architects. One is to draw the pictures and hand them over. The other is to see the whole project through. I found this out much too late, and it was never really an option given by our architect. I can understand that seeing the whole project through leads to more revenue, and also I imagine there are various opportunities to strengthen relationships with a variety of tradesmen, and maintain fingers in a variety of pies. This is probably especially true in Japan where architects are referred to respectfully as Sensei, and can command undeserved and unrequited respect from a whole industry. Also I can appreciate that holding on to a whole project means not having to worry about finding another client for longer. 

Unless you're really good at project management, you should probably concentrate on drawing and designing. If you are good at project management, then you should probably do that and get someone else to concentrate on drawing and designing.

8. If somebody notices how much time and effort went into your design, then you probably didn't put enough time and effort into it.


And I haven't even started on advice about low energy building, but you can read some here from Proud Green Home. I especially like the idea about not allowing incandescent bulbs onto the building site.

Friday 21 April 2017

Review: The Big Short (2015)

This is the first film review I've done. I briefly dabbled in review writing in a magazine that I used to put together at school, until we got a rather caustic letter from one of the people in the play I had reviewed saying, "the only thing worse than amateur dramatics is amateur criticism." So read on at your peril!

Film reviews have even less connection with low energy building than the nonsense I usually write, but this movie was about mortgages, and they have everything to do with building houses. Without financing, low energy buildings will not get off the paper, and unless you have extensive savings, or you are going to spend ten years building your house with the remains of your pay, you will be going to the bank to borrow money. If you are in Japan it makes financial sense to get a loan from the bank even if you have the money since you get a tax rebate for having a mortgage, but I digress from the content of the film.

The Big Short (2015) is based on actual events leading up to the economic crash of 2007 and 2008. For anyone who missed it, mortgages were considered as safe as houses for the banks lending money, while in the real world brokers were getting paid bonuses for giving as many mortgages out as possible, even so-called Ninja loans to people with no income and no assets.  

As I was getting my loan in Japan I had heard of people going to the bank and being handed actual cash from the bank manager, which they passed across the table to the landowners or the people building the house. In more "developed" economies, this money is just numbers on a computer somewhere. The bank is not lending you money that they have taken out of their safe and can count in front of you, but they are adding numbers onto a balance sheet somewhere. 

This makes sense so far, but the money needs to be balanced with assets. In a deregulated financial market, these debts are bundled and sold as mortgage bonds, then traded and tranched, tranched and traded. The movie has a nice scene with Jenga blocks representing the debts, and does a very good job at explaining financial concept in a clear and engaging way.

The Big Short follows four people who realised that a lot of the mortgages were not being paid back, and the bonds were being given more credit than they deserved. So they started investing money into the loans having too high a credit rating. This is the part I don't really understand. 

Financial institutions have a whole range of jargon that makes things very difficult to understand. There are two reasons something sounds difficult to understand. One is that it is a complicated system that inherently is difficult to understand. The other is that someone is bullshitting, to separate you from your money, or to keep them out of prison, or both.

I understand investing in a house or in land, since that has intrinsic value. I understand investing in stocks and shares because those businesses generate wealth. I understand investing in commodities. I understand that governments sometimes want to generate money and they will issue bonds, and I guess the countries they represent have value. I also understand that these things can be bundled together into funds. But when I hear of "financial instruments" like "structured investment vehicles" alarm bells start ringing. I know those terms are designed to make our eyes glaze over. 

The people who saw the impending collapse of the mortgage world put money into something called a Credit Default Swap, which is a regular payment that may lead to a payout if a loan defaults. I think I pay something like this for my own house loan. 

So I suppose I do understand what is happening here, I just don't understand why it is allowed to happen, especially with people's life savings. Putting money into something being valued too highly is gambling. This should be in Las Vegas, not Wall Street.

There is a precedent in insurance. Shipping was a dangerous business, and people could pay premiums to insurance brokers in return for large payouts if the ships sank and the cargo was lost.The idea goes back to the ancient world, and for example the Code of Hammurabi made provision for an extra payment on a loan so it would be cancelled if a cargo was lost. The first insurance policy independent of the loan goes back Genoa in 1347. The modern insurance industry grew out of London and you may have heard of a Mr Lloyd, who had a coffee shop there in the late 1680s frequented by ship owners. For a while anyone could take out an insurance policy on a ship being lost, but during the 19th century, there were problems with people gaming the system, leading to the Marine Insurance Act of 1906 and the concept of "insurable interest". This means that you can only insure against losing something if you have an interest in keeping it. The Life Assurances act of 1774 is an earlier example of this concept.

Nothing about insurance is in the movie, but it seems a hundred years later this idea had been forgotten, and so a group of investors were able to walk into Wall Street banks and effectively place these bets, which were later turned into financial instruments and sold to other investors.

The movie tells this story well, focusing mostly on four investors who saw the crisis coming. I like the way this film is billed as a comedy. Perhaps they wanted Jim Carrey for the Christian Bale character, Jack Black for Brad Pitt, and Ben Stiller for Ryan Gosling. 

I rolled off the couch laughing when the Brad told us that 40,000 people die every time unemployment goes up 1%. 

The few people who made millions out of banks failing may be quite amused. The people involved at every level with the irresponsible lending habits leading up to this crisis, who still have their salaries and bonuses, must be laughing all the way to the bank. Where they still work. 

One counterfactual idea strikes me though. What if, instead of trying to make money out of it, those clairvoyants had pushed the credit raters to look a bit more closely at the assets and start downgrading them? In fact, could their investment into the mortgage failures have helped the collapse? 

A house of cards will only fall down if you knock it, and to be honest since we came off the gold standard in the 1930s our whole economy has just been based on bits of paper. More recently it has been bits in a computer somewhere. 

The real story here is not about mortgages, but about shadow banking: financial institutions beyond the regulations of traditional banking. This steadily increased through the 1980s, speeding up in the middle of the 1990s, and by 2000 there was more money in shadow banking than in traditional banking. To take a extremely pessimistic view, this is like betting that you have a dozen broken eggs when you only have a box of ten eggs. And you are betting with the eggs. 

So is that the joke at the heart of this "comedy"? I'm still not really laughing yet. 

It's tempting to look at the four heroes of the story as important players in a financial system that is trying to buffer against risk, who helped expose problems in ratings of the mortgage industry. But it's more likely that they were out to make money from insurance payouts that in a moral system would have gone to people who had lost their savings or their homes, and that they were very much a part of the shadow banking system that still seems way too big. Rather than addressing the problem, they gave banks the opportunity to sell trillions of dollars worth of bets that the mortgage bonds would not fail.  

So what does this have to do with building a house then? Well, perhaps not very much, but when you are borrowing money, you might want to know where it comes from. Remember the Adam Smith line: if you owe the bank a hundred pounds then you have a problem. If you owe the bank a million pounds, then the bank has a problem.

Anyway, on a scale of one to three, this movie definitely gets a three.

Let me leave you with some words Woody Guthrie sang in the 1930s: 
"The gambling man is rich and the working man is poor
And I ain't got no home in this world any more"



Notes and References

The relationship between unemployment and death was not a joke, and data can be found on page 300 of Thomas, W. L. and Carson, R. B. (2014) The American Economy: How it Works and How it Doesn't, Routledge. 
See also: TUC (2010) The Costs of Unemployment, a TUC Briefing to Mark the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion.

Monday 17 April 2017

A washing line stretching between cultures

I don't imagine houses built in the UK come with fitted washing lines, even though creels may have been standard issue in the past.

A washing line came fitted onto our house, and I'm sure this was one of the things we spent a few hours talking over with the architect. Like many of the decisions it was wrapped up in invisible cultural assumptions.

For a start, washing lines in Japan are actually washing poles, traditionally bamboo hanging down from the eaves of a house. Ours is held up by two brackets bolted onto the pillars holding up our balcony. In our original plan, a terrace ran the whole width of our house along the south. At some point, partially to increase the amount of garden and partially to reduce the cost of construction, this was shortened to two thirds of the width. The terrace remained in front of the kitchen at the East, but was removed at the West. The washing pole remained at the west, so that area remained dedicated to washing, making it difficult to plant much there.

The reason the washing pole stayed there is probably that the pillars on the terrace don't line up. In three places along its width, there are two pillars holding the balcony up, but in the middle of the terrace there is only one. This means that the brackets would stick out at different lengths. Actually this is not such a problem. Whoever designed the washing pole brackets had obviously thought about this possibility, and made oval holes for the poles so they are perfectly equipped to protrude adjacently from bits of building that are not parallel. More recently I moved the washing pole so it is above the terrace, which turned out to be very straightforward, although it interfered with an awning we were using before.

There was a more simple solution: A washing line.

Specifically a retractable washing line, that can be pulled from one end of the terrace to the other, and possibly back again. It could even be pulled to a post elsewhere in the garden. If I could find one. UK online sites have several models to offer, but most of the retractable washing lines in Japan are less than two metres long and designed for hotel bathrooms.
We did find one though, and it seems to work.

Friday 14 April 2017

Sweeping generalisations about cultural differences in lighting


A lot of western developments in light fitting design have been going on in Halogens. Compact, low voltage LEDs can now slip neatly into some Halogen fittings. Halogen bulbs are smaller and of lower voltage, but not much more efficient than incandescents. They have never really taken off in Japan, and especially not in domestic application, where more efficient fluorescents have been standard since the 1970s. Many foreigners have been taken aback when they first visit a Japanese house and see the kind of lights that would only appear in shops and offices in the west.

There is an interesting article here on i news about new lighting technology.

I've been keenly watching the development of LEDs for domestic lighting over the last few years, but most of what I have seen is the production of LEDs in conventional light bulb packages. 

Early in the development of incandescent lighting, a conscious decision was made to limit the lifetime of the light bulbs, in order that new bulbs could be sold. Hence the invention of lightbulb fittings, and replaceable lightbulbs. In many cases for LED lights, the life expectancy is as long as the building, or at least as long as the furnishings, so there is no need for a replaceable LED. 

To have a replaceable LED light bulb would be like using a typewriter keyboard for a computer. This would be ridiculous because the QWERTY typewriter keyboard layout was designed to slow down the typist and stop mechanical keys jamming. Wait a minute, we do use typewriter keyboards for computers!

Moral of the story: packaging is of much higher priority than performance. 

Monday 10 April 2017

I want a heat camera!

More technically it's called a thermograph, but I thought the Greek may put half the readers off. It probably has done now! I borrowed one before, and here are some examples of the photos.

Some sushi. Getting warm, Eat up!
There are two problems with these cameras. First they are really expensive. Thousands of dollars in fact. This has been somewhat remedied now that we're all walking around with cameras built into the phones in our pockets, but even the FLIR for android costs over 300 dollars. There has been a kickstarter project for a while to deliver cheaper thermographs, but I'm not sure if anything came of it. 

The other problem is working out exactly what they are showing you. Unlike a regular camera, which seeks to show different colours at brightnesses in rough proportion to how your eye would see them in the real world, thermographs seek to show the temperature of objects. The camera doesn't actually know the temperature of the objects, it just knows how much heat they are radiating in the infrared spectrum, and will show this value using a different colour. Bodies radiate heat depending partly on their temperature, but also on their emissivity. I find it very difficult to fully understand the idea of emissivity and will need to write more about it later.

A neighbour's house: hotter downstairs
Heat radiates in proportion to the fourth power of the absolute temperature of an object, and something called the Stephan-Boltzmann constant. It also depends on the emissivity, which is 0 for a shiny mirror and 1 for a black body. Mirrors confuse me, because when you look at them it seems like they are radiating your image back to you. I have trouble making the mental leap that this means they are not radiating anything themselves. But that is the situation. I also wonder, when a thermograph looks at a window how much it is seeing the temperature of the glass rather than the temperature of what is beyond, or a reflection of the temperature around you. I guess on a very cold clear night, the amount of radiation reflected from the outside sky will be negligible.

 I also have trouble remembering how many m's and s's there are in emissivity.

Black body?
Everything else has an emissivity between 0 and 1, and most organic, oxidised or painted surfaces have an emissivity of around 0.95. A further complication is that the emissivity is different depending on the wavelength of the radiation, so some materials may reflect more radiation at lower frequencies. Thermographs must work this out, ideally allowing you to choose what frequency radiation you are looking at.

Thermographs don't know the emissivity of an object, so they must be told. Here is a thermograph of our cat. She has a black body, but in the picture it comes out yellow, and her face is white hot. If she had been male we could have called him Stephan Blotzmann. 

In fact I don't really want a heat camera, I want a temperature camera, but a thermograph would be a nice toy.  

Raytekjapan has more data on emissivity of several materials.

Friday 7 April 2017

A German composter, and other useful ideas

I wanted to write about a German Composter. If you didn't read carefully, you might be expecting Brahms or Beethoven, but they are composers. Actually they were composers. Now they are de-composers. You probably wouldn't want them in your compost anyway.

Here are the results from some more weeding of my email drafts box.

Materials for making raised beds...
http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16676705/list/8-Materials-for-Raised-Garden-Beds

...how to make them...
http://www.wikihow.com/Construct-a-Raised-Planting-Bed

...and please avoid treated wood
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to-plans/lawn-garden/4308264#slide-1

But you need to make a lawn first
http://uktv.co.uk/home/stepbystep/aid/65

Then you'll need to mow the lawn
http://item.rakuten.co.jp/tuzukiya/ryobi-pab-1610?scid=rm_198680

This ain't gardening, this is herbicide
http://www.permacultureorchard.com/the-farm/

Here is the German Composter. Available on Amazon. We ended up getting a Japanese one that is black. 

And by the way, the picture at the top was James Watt, a Scottish inventor.

Harvesting Rainwater

Here is a list of municipalities in Nagano prefecture that offer financial incentives to have rainwater tanks (in Japanese; no guarantee that it's up to date and I can't remember where I found it):



市町村
指定タンク
助成金額
担当部署連絡先
長野市
100リットル以上500リットル未満
費用の半額 25000円
長野市河川課 026-224-5046

500リットル以上
費用の半額 50000円
安曇野市
100リットル以上500リットル未満
費用の半額 25000円
市民環境部環境課 0263-82-3131

500リットル以上
費用の半額 50000円
飯田市
100リットル以上500リットル未満
費用の半額 25000円
地球温暖化対策課 地球温暖化対策係 0265-22-4511

500リットル以上
費用の半額 50000円
上田市
100リットル以上500リットル未満
費用の半額 30000円
市民生活部生活環境課 0268-23-5120

500リットル以上
費用の半額 50000円





Monday 3 April 2017

Odds and ends

In 1962 Bob Dylan was worried that the world would be engulfed in nuclear holocaust and he would not have time to write all the songs he had ideas for. So he put them together into one song: A hard rain's gonna fall. Fifty four years later he won the Nobel prize for literature, and Patti Smith sang that song in Stockholm. 

I'm not too worried about nuclear holocaust, and would be even more speechless than Dylan to receive a Nobel Prize, but I do have over 700 emails in my drafts box, of which over 100 are nascent blog posts. So here are some of the bits, all thrown into one mass of mildly interesting information.

Design

Interesting piece here from January 2008 by Dr Andrew J Marsh saying the biggest energy savings can be made in the first couple of weeks of the design process. If you read nothing else about low energy building, read this!
http://naturalfrequency.com/articles/efficientbuildings

Should cups be made out of plastic or paper, or neither? That old chestnut!
http://carbon-clear.com/files/Reuseable_vs_Disposable_Cups_2012.pdf

Buildings

A Passive House building in Sweden using thermal mass

A passive house retrofit of a block of flats in the UK
http://europhit.eu/cs14-wilmcote-multifamily-house-portsmouth

A passive house in Ireland
http://passivebuild.blogspot.jp/2012/05/getting-passive-house-passivhaus.html

A Japanese company providing dome houses
https://www.bess.jp/products/

A guy who built a house in about six weeks.
http://themetapicture.com/this-guy-started-with-nothing-after-6-weeks-he-built-something-awesome/

A very cool-looking shed
http://www.mnn.com/your-home/remodeling-design/blogs/tetra-shed-for-all-of-your-home-office-and-adult-time-out-needs

Increasingly random but not necessarily any more interesting

Solar powered airships
http://www.solarship.com/

How to market green building features to home buyers
A nice design for a desk light
http://www.earthtechling.com/2011/05/led-desk-lamp-made-from-recycled-e-waste/
A recipe for white concrete
http://www.concreteconstruction.net/concrete-articles/some-notes-on-white-concrete-mix-design.aspx 
Primary energy factors - how much energy was used to get the energy to your house
http://www.slideshare.net/sustenergy/webinar-primary-energy-factors-for-electricity-in-buildings

Pros and cons of induction heating
http://theinductionsite.com/proandcon.shtml

A paper on Phase Change materials for thermal energy storage by Alvaro de Graciaa, Luisa F. Cabezab (Energy and Buildings, 103, 15 September, 2015)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778815004338

And if you're still thinking about building an igloo, but wondering what the U value will be, here is a forumla for the thermal conductivity of snow depending on its density ρ (in g/cm3):

keff = 0.138 - 1.01ρ + 3.233ρ2 {0.156 ≤ ρ ≤ 0.6}

This puts compressed snow at around 0.2 W/mK, which is slightly worse than wood. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252860601_The_thermal_conductivity_of_snow