How to build a house in Japan part 3.14159265... How much do you need to know?

Disclaimer: you're going to have to wait for the next post if you want some ideas about exactly what you need to know.

If you buy a car, you don't usually start making suggestions about where to put the seats, where the filler for the fuel tank should go, or the timing of the spark plugs. But when you build a house it's possible to make all kinds of request and suggestions. You may also have noticed that almost all cars are built in factories, where standard parts are assembled in quality-assured processes. Although cars were all bespoke in the beginning, to build a car by hand now you would need a lot of expertise, time, money, or perhaps all three.

It's tempting to think that the same economic forces will push all houses to be factory-built, leading to higher quality and lower cost. But that happened to the automobile industry well within a hundred years, while house building is perhaps a hundred times older, and many houses are still built by hand. So some other factors are at play. Of course there are logistical issues with actually building houses in factories: wall and roof structures can be factory-produced and assembled on site, and sometimes are, but it would be very difficult to transport whole buildings over inevitably large distances from these huge factories. Cars, on the other hand, could be literally driven off assembly lines.

Another conclusion is that building a house is much easier than building a car, and it is within the capability of many more people. So one question you may want to ask is: how much do you need to know to build a house yourself? The short answer is that if you can ask that question, you probably know enough, or at least will find out enough in the process, which you should appreciate will take at least a couple of years.

But before you start thinking about doing everything yourself, how much do you need to know before you start commissioning others, and looking at part 4, which is paying for the project.

High-volume, low-cost builders are likely to give fewer options, but as the scale comes down and the price goes up, so do the choices you can make. Building professionals should probably be giving clients simple choices between limited options or within small ranges, with the kind of user friendliness that Steve Jobs brought to Macintosh. But people do have opinions about the way a house should be, and it may not be on the menu. These ideas may be based on things you have in your existing house, things you saw in someone else's house, things you read about somewhere, or something from your fertile imagination. Whatever ideas you have, if you are paying for your own house, it's reasonable to request it to be your ideal house.

Really?

But be careful of what you wish for, as you might just get it. Indeed your imagination may be playing around with what some of those things in other people's houses and in magazines actually are or do. And if you have a great idea for your house, but have never seen another house that uses that idea, then it's possible it's not actually a great idea, and there are very good reasons for not doing it. It's also possible that you have just invented something. 

And it's also possible that it is a great idea and has been used in several other houses, but you just haven't seen them. If the architect or builders tell you it's impossible it may just be beyond their experience. I remember in the early stages of our project suggesting to the architect that we could take heat out of the air leaving the house and use that for generating hot water. The architect laughed at me. Later I was talking about the same thing to the passive house lady, and she said, "Oh yeah, that's what they do in Sweden."

So visit as many houses as possible. You can also look at houses in magazines, but beware that they may be idealised houses that are lived in very differently, and any of the features may have lost their sparkle a couple of years, or even a couple of weeks after the paint dried. Or the features may still be there but are invisible under layers of magazines, homework the kids didn't do, bits of clothing that you're not sure who left behind, and jars filled with pens that mostly don't work.

The internet is a great source of information and you may often be in a position where you know more about a topic than the professionals. Materials and techniques around the world are developing all the time, and what your architect learnt at college twenty years ago may have changed, been superseded or debunked. Watch this you tube video for some brilliant tips for doing it yourself. I particularly liked the idea of putting a rubber band over the head of a worn-out screw to get some purchase on it. But also remember that a lot of professional builders now make a living from correcting projects by people who watched one youtube video and thought they knew what to do.

Stick some foam in, she'll be right! (not)

But beware of the Dunning-Kruger effect. This means that your ability to know how good you are at something depends on how good you are at doing it, because the skills needed to judge an ability are similar to the skills needed to have that ability. This should make you humble about your ability to specify the building you want, choose contractors, or take on a project management role. It may also apply to the architect or builder if you are expecting them to do something new. They may have no relevant experience with insulation, airtightness, installing high performance windows, ventilation systems or any other features essential to low energy buildings.

So when talking to professionals, while they probably know more than you know, remember:

• they probably know less than they think they know 
• you probably know more than they think you know
• you may know less than you think you know

People say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but in fact any amount of knowledge can be dangerous.

Note: 

1. For most calculations, pi is a bit over three. The precision in the title would give you the length of a piece of string around the equator to within 40 centimetres, if the earth was perfectly round, which it is not, and you knew the diameter to within a few centimetres.

2. How long is a piece of string?

Are renewables helping gas burn, or is gasoline stopping electricity going to cars?

First they ignore you
Then they say you're stupid
Then they say you're wrong
Then they say you have an interesting idea
Then they say they thought so all along

"You have enough electricity to power all the cars in the country if you stop refining gasoline." According to Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk via green transportation. "You take an average of 5 kilowatt hours to refine one gallon of gasoline, something like the Model S can go 20 miles on 5 kilowatt hours."

We often hear complaints about renewable energy not really being renewable, because it uses some fossil fuels to produce the materials. It's interesting to note that the petrol that goes into cars is actually using electricity.

As usually things are much more complicated than it seems. Advocates of renewable energy see a future with 100% renewable energy. Skeptics see the energy costs of producing renewable infrastructure, and the source of that energy, and claim that the march to renewables will produce more carbon emissions so we are better off burning fossil fuels directly.

Some of the nuclear lobby, meanwhile, attack renewables and claim they are just being used as greenwash for the fossil fuel industry, which wants to be there when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining. In fact there are many common interests of the nuclear industry and renewable industry. One is electrification. Also, they can also both benefit from increased capacitance in the system: renewable energy because the production is unreliable and may not meet or match peaks in consumption; nuclear for exactly the opposite reason that production is constant and energy storage will mean demand can be met with less plant.

It's very unlikely that burning fossil fuels will lead to a fossil-fuel free future, unless you are cynically hoping that the only realistic fossil-free future is one where they have all been burnt. As a technological development, electrification makes renewables possible since the energy is easy to convert and transfer over large distances. The internal combustion engine has a much more limited diet.

Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes  is a 2015 paper by Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Mary A. Cameron, and Bethany A. Frew from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, and the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

They claim that existing technologies can be used to get the US onto 100% renewable power. The paper has some critics, of course.

This podcast from Science Vs asks whether 100% renewable energy is possible, and features Jacobson and Delucchi as well as some of their critics and more neutral observers. The answer is not exactly yes, and they point out a few areas will be very tricky to get onto renewables, such as iron smelting. But they suggest it's a pretty good direction to think about moving in.

In the conclusion, the podcast suggested people may need to change the way they live, using energy depending on how much is being generated. Use the air conditioning when the sun is shining. Do the washing when the wind is blowing. It's easy to see some logic there. It may be more tricky if people are expected to switch off the heating when there has not been much sunshine, since that's known as winter in several places.

It's interesting to note that at no point did the podcast mention efficiency. Increases in efficiency do not rely on people's behaviour. Also they are cumulative and compounding, so a seven-percent annual improvement in efficiency means half the energy use in ten years. This is certainly a high level of improvement, but the predictions of most of the renewable skeptics assume efficiency improvement of zero. This is also true of fossil fuel advocates and the nuclear industry, whose forecasts are consistently based on increased consumption of energy, and whose forecasts are consistently wrong,. Since they are in the business of selling energy, increased consumptions is in their best interests, and it's not at all surprising that it gets into their forecasts. If I was running a bakery I'd be hoping to increase my sales, and if I was planning for fewer customers in the future, I should probably be taking an early retirement, or at least changing my profession. Even in the paper by Jacobson et al., future energy production is based on the predictions of the IEA, International Energy Agency, who have been predicting the end of solar power growth for fifteen years.

Lesson one take three

The low energy building class is now in its third year, and the make up of the students was much more like one of my regular classes. There were over thirty students, up from seventeen last year and nine the previous year. I think there is only one foreign student this year, where half the class or more has been exchange students in the past.

Around half of the students are architects, again. There are a few from the Faculty of Textile Technology, a biologist, an economist, and others studying education, humanities and American Cinema.

There are also a couple of members of the public taking the class. In the first year I also had two of these students, although they stopped coming after a few weeks. I'm not sure how much this was an indictment of my class or wether they just got too busy in their lives, and could write off the very low fees that the university charges. Anyway, I hope they will stay this year. One of them works for a large supplier of building parts, so I hope to have some time to discuss business with him.


In the first week's online quiz, I asked them what language they wanted to speak, and what language they wanted me to speak. The majority want me to mostly speak in English, and they want to speak some English and some Japanese. Nobody wants to only speak English, and only one person wants me to only speak Japanese. This gives me a mandate to speak some Japanese in class, and also an incentive to add some Japanese to my slides.

The first lesson followed the same plan as before. I gave them a few simple mathematics problems to make sure they will not be too overwhelmed in the rest of the class. They were just designed to check they can manipulate formulae.

I also threw in a different kind of question: How many pencils are in this room?

They were working in groups, but not allowed to talk to other groups. Answers ranged from 12 to 60. The middle answer—30—was remarkably close to the actual number—31. This was an opportunity to introduce guesstimation, and emphasise that usually we need to find answers based on limited information.

Graphs of words show Climate Change is still increasing, while Global Warming has stabilised

According to this graph from Google Ngram, Climate change is still increasing. Ngram measures how often words are used in our language by counting occurrences in a huge swath of publications that have been digitised. This is a form of corpus linguistics, a field of study that goes back to Vedic scholars counting the occurrences of different sounds in Sansrkit holy texts. Arabic scholars also studied the Koran, and back in 1230 Hugo de Saint Cher made a concordance of the Bible, noting where and how often each word appeared in the holy book. Computers have made this a lot easier, and Corpus Linguistics has really taken off since the 1960s.
Ngram opens that door to anyone interested in what people have been writing, and we can see here that climate change, global warming and greenhouse effect all steadily increased until the mid 1980s, where they received a bit of boost. Global warming used to be more commonly used than climate change, but slowed and then plateaued in the early 1990s, slighly increasing since. At about the same time use of the phrase "greenhouse effect" peaked.

A climate denier may be tempted to interpret this as the greenhouse effect peaking in 1992 and decreasing since, and evidence that the data for climate change and global warming have been tampered with by NASA.

My interpretation is that discussion of this topic became increasingly important from the 1970s, initially led by discussion of the greenhouse effect. This is the method by which global warming was
happening, and reliable historical temperature data began to become available from this time.

By the end of the 1980s the discussion of how global warming happened was more or less decided, and we didn't need to talk about the greenhouse effect so much. I suspect discussion of "round earth" peaked shortly into the age of discovery when returning ships removed any serious doubt about the shape of the planet.

Global warming and climate change were discussed equally, and largely synonymously until 1992. It's not clear why this happened, but in 2002 a Republican party memo by Frank Lunz recommended that the term "climate change" was used rather than "global warming", which people found frightening. It seems that George W Bush did respond to the calls to "stop global warming" by not using the phrase any more. This is not exactly what people wanted! (See also Guardian, 4th March 2003).

A more detailed linguistic investigation by Dr. Martin Döring of the Institute for Geography at the University of Hamburg into perceptions of regional climate change in North Frisia found: "six prevailing conceptual metaphors: Climate change is an enemy, preventing climate change is fight/war, climate change is punishment for human sins, climate change is overheating/heat, climate change is hot air/hoax and climate change is eco-dictatorship."

Those of us who want to "fight" climate change need to take account of the last idea: climate change as eco-dictatorship. For some people this may be overwhelming, for examples libertarians who make up the right wing of the US Republican Party, for whom denial of climate change is perhaps primarily a rejection of government intervention.