[patcheudor]

"(why the standard ceiling height in this country is 8 feet is a concept I will never understand)"

One word: efficiency

Tall ceilings create a heating and cooling nightmare. In my area a number of builders over the last two decades came into the valley from warmer climates like Arizona and built a bunch of homes with very tall ceilings. People loved them and they kept building, then a cold winter comes along and people complain about their $800/month+ heating bills in what was claimed to be an energy efficient home.

[nostromo]

Two words: ceiling fans. :)

My house has a tall main room that spans two floors. People ask me why I have the fans on in the winter... and I tell them that it keeps our heating costs down. It's counterintuitive, but true.

[frik]

Wow, eye opening, and actually quite logic given that warm air travels to the top.

[saalweachter]

Ceiling fans actually have a little toggle on the side to switch from 'blow' to 'suck'. Doing so circulates the air without the direct 'breeze' across your skin which may chill you.

[alricb]

I don't really think it's the case. You're adding surface area, yes, but not that much, and you can easily compensate by being more careful with windows and avoiding wasteful features like bumpouts &c.

On a 35*50 (1750 sq. ft) single level house, you're adding 170 ft of exterior wall to an envelope that had 1360 sq. ft of walls and 1750 sq. ft of ceiling giving directly on outdoors, or 5.4%. Given a "code" insulation level of R-20, it would mean adding less than an inch of insulation to compensate.

I suspect the builders from warmer climates simply didn't build correctly for the climate: not enough insulation, problematic details. You get issues whenever builders move from one climate to another, because many of them just don't care enough to learn about how to adapt houses to their new climate. Details that are fine in one climate (if you're living in a dry enough place, you can install your windows almost without thinking) won't work in another (install a window "Vegas-style" in Seattle and see how long it takes before it leaks).

[auxym]

It's not a question of surface area, but that the air you're paying to warm up will all go right to the ceiling. You can easily get temperature gradients of at least 5 C on a cold day with a two-story high open set up. That is where ceiling fans come in, though.

[lsaferite]

Or a passive house design.

[tw04]

That's why you put in radiant floor heating. It doesn't matter how high the ceiling is.

[thenomad]

Yup. Here in Edinburgh we have quite a lot of Victorian flats with 14' ceilings. They're noticably more expensive to heat in winter than flats like my current one, which is modern and has 8' ceilings.

They do also feel a lot bigger, though. Maybe it's worth the tradeoff?

[cturner]

I have wondered whether you could go crazy vertical and try to get rising heat to create a cooling system, as with termite mounds. In winter, pull cloth mezzanines across to create buffer layers.