Differences in building culture

Different countries have different building cultures, and the differences between Japan and the UK are immediately visible. Just like the buildings themselves, some of these differences are superficial and others are structural, some are easily visible and others are buried and hidden deep underground but have profound influences.
 
In Japan people like new houses but in in the UK people like old houses. I think this comes from the fundamental difference that in the UK houses represent capital wealth, while in Japan the value is in the land, and houses are consumables. Before we decided to build, we spent a few years looking at buying a house, and visited many that were unsatisfactory, in one way or another. A few times we noticed houses for sale moving into the list plots of land for sale, as the building was knocked down. In these cases, the price usually went up, suggesting that an old building on a piece of land is a liability and the land becomes more valuable when it is removed. 
 
In the UK, if people want a different house, they will sell up, buy a new one and move. In Japan they will knock the house down and rebuild. Redecoration and renovation are carried out on a regular basis on UK houses, while in Japan they are more of a recent trend. 
 
Here's a barn conversion. Not an uncommon sight in the English countryside, but it would be difficult to find a building in Japan that had been converted from keeping animals and their feed to human use.

 
Perhaps also as a consequence of the low value placed on buildings, building standards seem to be much stricter in substance and enforcement in the UK than in Japan, where the main criterion seems to be that your house won't burn down and fall onto the neighbour's.
 
In the UK, central heating is standard, while in Japan it is is a luxury. The term mudanbo jutaku (literally no-heating house) is sometimes used in Japan to describe buildings meeting the Passive house standard. This comes from the trend in Europe towards higher levels of insulation so that central heating systems can be scaled down or removed altogether. Meanwhile in Japan adding central heating is a sign of a progressive house.

In a UK house, the boiler is inside. Why waste the heat? Traditional Japanese houses don't have a boiler but recently many have an ecocute atmospheric air pump with a large tank of hot water, which is invariably put outside. Why waste space?

Insulation has not been used very much in Japan, although it has been increasing recently. In the UK it is in the building regulations, and there is financial support for adding it to existing building stock. In fact I heard that the authorities will even pay people to clear your loft. One of the barriers to people claiming their free loft insulation was that they couldn't be bothered to clear decades of crap from the loft, which makes installation impossible.

Traditional UK building materials are stone and brick while in Japan the material is wood. Occasionally you see brick houses in Japan, but they are more likely to be a wooden frame with brick-imitation cladding. Meanwhile in the UK people in brick houses sometimes get them stone-clad. 

The design process in the UK starts with the whole building, into which rooms are fitted. In Japan the design seems to start with rooms that are assembled together into a building. 

The market surrounding the building industry in Japan, including DIY home-improvement, seems to focus on products. If you can plug it in, switch it on, fill it with batteries, it'll have a place on a shelf. In the UK, there seem to be more parts and materials.

Of course there are differences in what mother nature offers the two countries. Earthquakes are unusual in the UK, but frequent in Japan and buildings must be built to withstand them. Traditionally summers are humid and winters are dry in Japan. My grandmother used to say that Britain doesn't really have a climate—just weather. But inasmuch as it does, the summers are dry and the winters damp. 
 
In spite of all these differences, there are some significant similarities between the two countries. Both have high self-ownership: Japan 60%, UK 69%. There is variation up and down both countries, but the annual heating demand in Matsumoto and London is similar, between 2 and 3,000 degree days per year. People have an impression of Japanese people living in rabbit hutches, but in fact the average new build in the UK is significantly smaller than in Japan, 76m² compared to 95m², but this may relate more to the number of occupants, and the number and location of houses being built. In surveys, the floor area that people think they need is very close, with people in Japan wanting 35m² per person compared to 33m² in the UK. See shrinkthatfootprint.com for more details. 
 
There are also much bigger differences between the culture of the building industry and normal people, whose desires are very similar.

• Everyone wants a lower budget. Given a choice we would all rather pay less.
• Everyone wants a larger house. Obviously there are limits to the size of plot, and many people would rather not live in the Palace of Versaille on account of the cleaning and maintenance and all those tourists traipsing through your bedroom. Some even advocate smaller living spaces. But given a choice of a 10m² or 15m² living room most people would probably choose the bigger one, other things being equal.
• Everyone wants a house that is warm in winter and cool in summer.
• Nobody wants condensation, whether it's rising damp, weeping mist on the inside of windows, or damp causing mold on clothes.
• Everyone wants low running costs.
• Everyone wants a long building life. Nobody wants to see a house they have built knocked down. We'd rather die first.
• Everyone needs lots of storage space. People may not think of this, and any time you visit a model house or look through glossy magazines of ideal homes, be aware of the lack of the kind of stuff that we share our living spaces with.
• Everyone wants a house that is easy to keep clean. People often forget this one too. Especially the architects who tend to be male and probably don't keep clean their own houses! 

A green house as a greenhouse

I don't usually call this a green house. For a start it's white. I certainly don't want to call it the White House. I think the "green" adjective has been used so variously, vaguely and virulently that it has lost a lot of the power it needs. Also, I'm not so keen on greenhouse gases, which are very clearly defined.

But it is certainly working as a greenhouse. In one sense it is trapping the heat of the sun with it's very own greenhouse effect. Luckily this is not due to a build up of atmospheric carbon dioxide, as we have our own ventilation system. We also have a few house plants.

And the plants are all doing really well, what with the bathing in sunlight and the temperatures kept above freezing. It's amazing how many plants just die when water freezes. Perhaps not all that surprising though. It's even more amazing how many plants survive frost.

We had a Christmas cactus in our old house that had survived for several years, but it flowered for the first time after we moved into this house.

Also since moving, for the first time we have kept a cyclamen alive until the following year. 

We got an avocado going this year too, and it's now about twenty centimetres tall. When growing plants from seed, there is usually a danger of getting over-excited when you see a green shoot coming out, only to be disappointed that it was one of the weeds in the garden that had left its seed in the soil you are using. Since avocado seeds are centimetres across, and you can get them to germinate by placing them in a cup of water, held pointing upright by three cocktail sticks stuck into the sides, there is no danger of getting the wrong plant. It did spend a couple of months in the cup before sprouting roots, then a few weeks in a pot of soil before the growing head broke through, but now it is racing away. 

In the spring we should be able to get a little nursery going to get some seedlings for the garden. 

How much water is in the air? A worked example

Here's a practical physics problem. I have a leaking ventilation system with a bowl catching the drips.  How often do I have to empty the bowl?

Assume it's 20 degrees inside, with 40% relative humidity, and a little below freezing outside. Assumptions are approximate. All the best ones are. Save the precision for what you know.

A cubic metre of saturated air hold a little under 20 ml of water at 20 degrees C. A little under 5 ml at freezing. The ventilation system is set to shift 150 cubic metres per hour, so that's something like 450 ml of water per hour. The bowl holds 2.9 litres. It's going to fill up in about 6 hours.

Oh no, better go and empty it!

Dry air and dripping pipes

It is the dry season once again, and we have two problems. The first is keeping the house humid, and the second is avoiding pools of water on the floor. 

A few days ago I was in the bath and heard a dripping noise. The drips were going in and out of sync, playing the kind of rhythm that will maintain the attention of someone relaxing in a nice warm tub. It sounded like there were two drips at different frequencies. Absorbing as this harmonic analysis was, my main concern was where the drips were coming from, and whether they were building up somewhere, planning a journey through wall and floor cavities to appear where they would do as much damage as possible. 

Opposite to the UK, Japan has high humidity in the summer and low humidity in the winter. Rather than those damp winter days of drizzle and sleet, we often get clear days when the sun is out and the sky is blue, but the temperature struggles to go above freezing. When air is cold it holds less moisture, and since the relative humidity halves with every 10 degree temperature rise, by the time this air gets into our house the relative humidity is probably in the teens. 

Most of the moisture in the air inside is then either residual moisture released from the walls and wooden floor, or moisture that we have added, either deliberately with our humidifier, or as a consequence of hanging up washing, cooking food, or breathing. I'm sure our house plants contribute something to the humidity too, if we remember to water them. 

When this air leaves the house, it goes through the heat exchanger in the ventilation system, and with the drop in temperature of around 20 degrees, the relative humidity quadruples. If we've succeeded in getting the humidity over 30%, into the comfort zone for people and wooden buildings, that quadrupling will put the relative humidity over 100% and water will precipitate inside the heat exchanger, hopefully getting into the drain and finding its way out of the house. 

This is where I thought the drip was coming from, but it sounded like it was coming from outside. I opened the window in the bathroom and it didn't sound like it was coming from outside after all. Next I went up to the room with the ventilation system, which is directly above the bathroom, and heard nothing and saw nothing there. At this point I gave up, hoping that it was something happening within the pipes. 

A couple of days later I listened a bit more carefully and traced the drips to the ceiling of the bathroom. I got a step ladder, and opened the inspection door in the ceiling, which was quite exciting as I'd never done that before. Then I could see the drips coming from the pipe draining the ventilation system above. When I went upstairs there was a small pool of water under the drain where it comes out of the machine, and it looks like the fitting is leaking. There is a bowl under it now, and at the end of the long weekend, we'll call the builders and see if they can come and fix it, again.  

Five laws of domestic science

1. All horizontal surfaces will accumulate crap

This is just the law of gravity really. This includes tables, chairs, shelves, kitchen counters, and floors. Tatami rooms are especially susceptible. If you're building a house and want a tatami room, and think it's going to look like the kind you walk into in a ryokan, then be aware that it's probably going to look more like a store room. 

2. The tupperware never fits into the tupperware cupboard

In our case it's a drawer. Tupperware is an amazing invention, but relatively recent in the psyche of the kitchen designer. It's cheap and light, which makes it ideal to buy and use, but makes it seem less voluminous than it is. When kitchens are planned, we think of cutlery drawers, places for plates and pans, cupboards for cups, and stockers for food. We are preoccupied with ergonomic locations for the fridge, cooker and sink, or at least we should be. Tupperware is the last thing on our minds. It will find itself in a left-over cupboard. Luckily tupperware is light, so it's not a big problem if it finds itself in a high cupboard.

There are two more more facts about tupperware. First, some of it is always being used, so whenever you try to neatly arrange it in its cupboard or drawer, which is already too small to start with, you're always missing something. Second, inspite of the trademark, and with apologies to other brands that are not getting free advertising, it is made by different companies and does come in different shapes and sizes. Some pieces and sets stack neatly together, smaller sizes fitting elegantly into larger sizes. Some do not. Tupperware collections grow organically and are not planned. It is always the large, bastard sizes that are hiding when the cupboard is organised, and it is those pieces that shatter the order into chaos.

3. It's easier to put things in front of drawers and cupboards than inside them

Sooner or later something is going to appear in front of each drawer and cupboard, unless the drawer or cupboard is in a well trodden, narrow corridor where people would trip over it. In fact, even then things get left in front of cupboards or drawers, and people do trip over them. Then usually the person who left the thing in front of the drawer or cupboard complains about the person who kicked their stuff. One solution to this is sliding cupboard doors. These can still be opened with stuff in front of them, so there is much less need for people to put stuff there. Also, people may be scared of leaving things in front as they know the door could still be opened and their stuff could fall perilously into the void beyond.

4. There's always a pile of stuff that doesn't live anywhere

A plastic part that definitely belongs to something. A semi-precious stone. A ticket for an event in two-and-a-half weeks. A glove that somebody left in the house. It's been there for ages, and the person has been surviving with one glove. Who knows, they may even have taken up golf.

Coming soon: a list of objects with no obvious place to put them away.

5. The only way to avoid clutter is to have no stuff.