Modern insulation is really, really good, and modern heatpumps are very energy efficient and don't pollute your house with CO, CO2, and particulate matter like woodsmoke. Also, modern double- or triple-pane windows insulate much better than drafty Elizabethan windows. We live in a time of marvels.
You're talking about the best of what's available but that is rarely what builders use and retrofitting your already constructed house to use these could end up costing you 1/3 or more of your home's original value.
All that is to say that builders cheap out on new home construction so most people don't get to enjoy the benefits if these innovations.
I live in Edinburgh, and 100 year old buildings are the newest ones in the city. A good chunk of the city is what we call a “conservation area” - so you can’t modify the aesthetic of the building (windows included), but the vast vast vast majority of people outside that space have double glazed windows I’d wager.
Windows have a lifetime of only 15-30 years, though. If you have to replace them anyway, you might as well get double-pane (even if the rest of the house isn't well insulated).
I think this is the stated lifetime of insulated windows. But obviously single glazed windows were never insulated in the first place so there is no practical lifetime on them...
In my house and on my road a lot of the glass is 150+ years old.
Also in australia, the BCC/NCA is an absolute joke compared to basically every other industrialized country. There’s a reason for the annual “Austrlian houses dont meet WHO minimum standards” articles.
As an example single pane windows havent been effective or widely used since the 70-80s in north america and europe. And both places energy standards effectively preclude them since 2000ish. Or insulation in australia is effectively absent in pre 2000s, and maybe R-4ish on a new build now. Conversely NA was R-4 in the 70-80s and it would be about R-6 (or more) these days.
Our residential solar and heat pump uptake is great. But for building standards and quality were a joke.
You're missing out if you don't have such thick mass of warm brick/stone. If you only knew how great it is to sleep on top of it (my grandmother had similar to that in her house :)
Modern fire codes require large space between a stove and walls which is usually goes unused where it could have been really filled with such a thick brick structure with the smoke passage snaking through it like in Russian and German stoves. Or like this:
the modern way of doing that is ICF - insulated concrete forms.
I remember talking to a builder once who was building a house this way. He said the mass wasn't allowed to be advertised with an R-value since it wasn't actually insulation, but he said it was comparable to an R-50 house.
Most high quality modern homes are built to be air tight and bring air in with exchangers. Monopoly framing is how they are approaching this with stick frame houses. They essentially create what looks like a building from the game Monopoly (no overhangs) with air tight materials and tape every hole they can find. They will install a blower door and measure how much air leaks from the building envelope. The overhanging features are installed outside of the air tight monopoly frame.
All of the Zip boards are air and water tight and they use the tape on all of the seams to seal those. The roof will sit on top of the already water & air tight frame. Same with the siding.
I had trouble with my heating system and got a good long talk with the HVAC pro.
I think variable output heating/cooling has one interesting capability - it can adjust to things you've adjusted. For example, a one or two-stage heating system has trouble if you close heating vents in some rooms. It might overheat if too many are closed for example. With a variable-output system, it can support this. further with variable dampers it can support zoned heating and cooling. You can give the places that need it less or more airflow and have a more comfortable house without waste.
after seeing things like heatermeter (pid controlled smoker controller based on the raspberry pi), I wonder why this kind of convenient and efficient control isn't more common.
