How to Design a Cold and Moldy Home
It’s not hard to design a suitably cold and moldy home for the family you hate. First, orient your mansion East/West. Make it narrow. This minimizes any chance that sunshine might pierce your Southern flank.
Then pick the stingiest windows you can find and instruct your architect to use them sparingly. Avoid any use of windows on the Southern elevation. One, at the most.
That will keep the sun out.
Sunshine warms homes for free. That’s socialism. Real men use fossil fuel for the daunting task of warming up a frigid family. There’s no free lunch. Tough sh*t.
And when the fossil fuels run out? It will never happen. Real men will dig more up from under somebody.
You could have just as easily made your point without the vitriol.
Yeah, what is so weird about McMansion design is that implicit assumption that we will never run out of fossil fuels.
Subdivisions-full of these monsters are often way out in the middle of nowhere.
Sorry, anon. You are right.
It’s just so sad.
There happens to be about a century’s worth of great passive solar design examples on this road overlooking a lake - and now suddenly all these McMansions (that seem to wilfully ignore these design lessons) has sprung up there.
If only the builder throwing these McMansions up had just looked at (or walked into) some of the older houses around - there’s a long tradition of houses with South facing enclosed sun porches with deep overhangs to keep out the South sun in summer, and let it all in in winter.
They are comfortable houses for that climate of hot summers/cold winters.
[...] saw this little article a few days ago on how to make sure you built a cold and moldy home and it really made me laugh. I live in a city where many of the older homes were built with the [...]
Haha, nice one Susan, and I love the comments.
Good post, keep it up!
Nicely done. I’m writing a Mcmansion post at SuperEco and linking to you!
This was HILARIOUS! Made your point!
Why apologize for a perfectly suitable comment? Anon is not right. He or she is as archaic as the definition of his/her username.
Vitriol is defined as “bitter criticism” and I see nothing wrong with calling a horse a horse.
What is with all of this negative, pointless sarcasm/tirade about fossil fuels. To the second point, researchers are now studying the theory that fossil fuels are in fact a waste product of the Earth, and are therefore renewable (Oh, and BTW, CO2 is plant food, get over it).
Now, to the first point. My home was built in 1865. It used coal fire places, then coal forced air, and now natural gas to heat it. It is also oriented East-West. We have a ton of solar gain (in a long, narrow house, no less), to the point where, if it’s sunny in the winter, we don’t have to turn on the heat, and it’ll hit 78* (I’ve measured). Stop with all of this sarcasm BS on McMansions. People buy them, and are fine with them. Shut up.