Because those are the actual reasons.
We still sometimes use things like awnings, just in the form of 'porches' or modern-looking 'slat awnings'
Changes in architectural fashion has made some forms of awning look dated.
Fabric awnings need upkeep to keep them looking smart. When the awnings are above ground level, it's semi-expensive upkeep. Building owners are tempted to keep those tired, sun-bleached awnings in place rather than renewing them - contributing to the dated reputation of awnings.
Awnings also face competition from interior curtains and blinds, which are much simpler to maintain.
And there's shifting building use. A few decades ago an office worker would prize a desk by a big window with lots of natural light to read paperwork by, but in the age of PCs nobody wants direct sunlight on their screen. Internal blinds let workers control the light levels to match their needs.
But not significant competition. If the blinds are very reflective a small amount of sunlight might end up going out again but in general, once the solar radiation converts to heat you can't get it back out through the window. That is particularly true for modern multi-pane windows.
This is especially true if you have an overhang, trees, etc providing even modest shade.
An awning is a net benefit over a curtain alone, but there’s overlap in functionality so having a curtain reduces the net saving from adding an awning.
The alternative to awnings are shutters or, like you said, plants, but not curtains.
Shutters can effectively block sunlight, but they also emit IR radiation 24 hours a day based on their temperature. If it’s hot outside, thick reflective curtains really can save more energy across a given day than shutters though they also work better together at some point you might as wall just seal up the window.
The radiation of the sun has to go somewhere. More of it will be reflected back by shutters, and whatever is absorbed can more readily be dissipated outside than inside.
While I understand this “once the heat is inside” thing I still can’t help but feel closing the curtains (and blackout curtains) makes a non-trivial impact on the overall daytime temperature of a sun facing room.
I get the goal is to reflect the energy back out and of your curtains are pure black that absorbs all the energy it would, in theory, heat the room as much as just leaving the curtain open but it still intuitively feels like you should close that curtain anyway.
I mean insulation is inside the wall of the house and it keeps the heat out. How is that any different than a set of blackout curtains besides the R value? (Hint: it’s probably the lack of insulating properties in a curtain… though there would be dead air between the curtain and window and dead air is a moderately good insulator itself.
TC should do a video on that. I’d love to see some numbers on the effect curtains have on indoor temperature.
A couple decades ago I managed to wrangle a nice east-facing window. Bright sunlight in the AM was a pretty effective way to really get moving, but I couldn't wear white shirts because the reflection made my monitor unusable and there was a period each morning where I just needed to do stuff not at my PC (cubicle farm, my options were to face the window or face the corner with the window to one side).
In that, if your property had awnings the implication was it didn't have AC (I guess people can't read/trust a listing) so you needed to remove the awnings to advertise that you had AC.
The classic one is the single hose. There are dual hose models.
https://www.menards.com/main/heating-cooling/air-conditioner...
With the installation instructions https://cdn.menardc.com/main/items/media/LUMAC001/Install_In... on page 11 you can see two sets of air inlets - one for the air exchange with outside, and one for the air exchange inside.
A dual hose model is still less efficient than a window unit, but it’s an improvement over a single hose design.
Not sure how its in US, but houses here in some parts of Europe have literally become completely plain white cubes to minimize building costs as much as possible. No more roof overhangs (which brings problems), no more awnings, no decorations, practically no balconies or varied designs. Just sets of suburban white cubes.
There's a crop of these hideous things I've seen around Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland and rest of central Europe.
Unfortunately, the truth of both those places, and in fact all the strict Modernist/Brutalist buildings of the postwar period, is that rain absolutely f*ks them over. No amount of tar paper, roofing tile, etc., can help against a flat roof, frequent precipitation, and a temperature climate.
Either way it's not a sufficient solution because AFAIK even the best solar protection glass will let 1/3 of the sun's heat in, which is an enormous amount when you have long summer days.
The other thing the builder did foam insulation of the garage doors and walls. Easily 20F difference from my previous house in the same area. Reflective ridged insulation in the attic too. My old house 110 easily, in the summer. It is basically the same temp as the outside now. Cost for the AC is basically half what my pervious house was. I would go for awnings at this point as it is basically one of the few things left I could realistically do. But HOA...
> The metal frame could last for decades without needing changing, and the fabric covering would need to be replaced every 8-10 years depending on exposure and climate.
The problem is that we keep getting 20F-above-normal days in the fall when it lets the sun into the house.
I wonder if global warming will create a business opportunity for retrofitting houses like ours.
In the Netherlands a lot of houses have electrically retractable awnings (or even just mechanically windable by hand), especially above the giant windows facing the back yard.
During winter and bad weather, we retract the awning. When it's too sunny, we deploy it.
typical row house layout with big windows on both sides: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorzonwoning
retractable awning: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonnescherm
Worked great, looked great, and smelled great for the two weeks of bloom in may.
I've heard of grape vines being used in place of wisteria, which might be better in places where the latter is considered an invasive species. There may be other "friendly creepers" with similar deciduous qualities as well.
Paradoxically, this can make a building more fire-resistant than just having a bare wall. Plants contain water, after all.
https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/Fire...
Let me put it this way: it's cheap enough that a lot of social housing and other cheap forms of housing inhabited by the "lower class" feature them.
[0] https://www.bunnings.com.au/windoware-3-x-2m-charcoal-easy-f...
The china brands with no reviews do go down to $4-500 though. The labor to have someone install one of those (if you're not diy) and find out it's crap would cost more.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Your comments currently stand close to trolling and it is annoying.
You may find other useful ones, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Agreed, nor is the inverse implied of course. But what is your point?
> How many decades of fabric replacements could you get from the savings of bolting on a simple metal frame as compared to an elaborate electromechanically actuated arm mechanism?
That's what I'm saying, fabric doesn't really need to get replaced in 15 years and going from personal experience. The mechanism is simple enough to be reliable as well.
Ultimately, it's impossible to analyze the cost benefits of this. It's a matter of personal taste and what the harshness of the local climate allows. I don't doubt that fixed awnings are cheaper - but actuating awnings fix their drawbacks, and the maintenance they introduce is minimal in my experience. And frankly, for the price of giving up a single vacation in 15+ years, it's not that expensive. Again, cheap enough that those in social housing can make the choice to get them installed.
ETA: my point of mentioning social housing is to say that people with lower income can still get them. The government doesn't pay for it. I just wanted to paint a picture of the relative cost.
No clue why this turned into a huge debate. I don’t have a dog in this fight, all I’m saying is that america has retractable awnings, they have some downsides, and a government (or a “low class” individual) buying something doesn’t convince me it’s a good investment.
Who said anything about the government buying them? The renters in public housing usually buy and install them by themselves. That's why usually every balcony has a different type of awning, in a different state of disrepair.
While I'm nowadays in IT, when I was a child our family lived in this type of public housing, and we had a retractable awning of exactly that kind that my parents had installed themselves.
Even a working family, if they're earning very little, may be living in subsidized public housing.
Renters have lots of rights over here, allowing them to customize a lot about the apartment. Awnings are usually owned and installed by the renters themselves.
So a family that has so little income that they need to live in subsidized public housing may still have enough income to buy a retractable awning.
Dutch (northern european?) windows also open to the inside, making blinds impractical unless they’re built into the window frame.
On top of that, historically blinds are uncommon for cultural reasons, they impair looks and the amount of light coming through, even when fully open. It’s already dark enough in here most of the time :)
They have a similar function as awnings, because you can have them part of the way down, so they block the sun at whatever altitude it is, while allowing you to keep the window open for airflow or light. They are also less obstructive on the facade than awnings.
Random example: https://as.com/actualidad/sociedad/por-que-hay-tantas-persia...
I've lived both in Spain and the Netherlands.
In Spain you have the wooden blinds that are vertically retractable, they can fully black-out and insulate the room, but you also always have very light translucent curtains next to them, that let light in but can block visibility for privacy.
In the Netherlands you usually only have very thick curtains that are not translucent, they fulfil both purposes in one, light/temperature insulation and privacy, but they are an inferior solution for both.
My parents and grandparents from Spain are surprised and often note how many windows in the Netherlands are wide open, particularly on ground floors, you can see everything in the house from the street. In Spain we would simply use the translucent curtains that block very little light but provide privacy. And in the north of Spain it's just as grey as in the Netherlands, the light level is similar most of the year.
We also have fewer ground-floor households, they are generally unpopular, there's often shops there at street-level, and apartments are far more common than detached houses.
I know them from Spain, but I'm not surprised that they came to Brazil from Portugal, and I assume they are popular in many places around the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
I cannot tell you if that is justified, but I can say from personal experience that in some cases the praised Dutch directness turned to racism. Things like, people not believing that you have a phd, or refusing to take your credit card because the color of skin does not match the ethnicity of the name.
> population is dissatisfied with immigration.
I don't see the contradiction.
It always was a thin line. What has changed is that victims are now speaking up, and a silent majority realizing that brutish-directness always was a subgenre that somehow kept being taken as representative of directness.
One can be direct and courteous (and not racist), but the Netherlands (as in Holland) isn't the best place to find that.
I think GP confuses the Netherlands and Norway.
There's more than one way to invest money. Though I agree they could've put at least some of it in the stock market like Norway.
I've never seen an HOA that bad; that's horrific. I've seen ones that ban window AC units, but never any that had anything to say about central HVAC.
That's the kind of thing that ought to get legislatively challenged, perhaps as an accessibility issue.
But yes, let's bring back the awnings too. Sometimes the low tech ways are easiest and best. I will say that I don't think awnings alone can save a stick built modern house from the heat. Part of the key to old houses staying cool was high thermal mass: lots of brick and stone that could stay cool during the day. As great as modern insulation is at keeping hot and cool separate, a modern insulated wall doesn't cool it's surroundings like a high thermal mass wall would.
Moving to a world where we combine passive cooling and high thermal mass construction with the benefits of modern tech will be key in my opinion.
(Also, removing a given amount of summer heat via air conditioning is considerably cheaper than adding that same amount of winter heat via gas or heat pump in many climates, because the indoor-outdoor temperature difference is much higher in the winter.)
Our house (Australia) has trained vines on the sunny side that are thick with leaves and grapes in summer, bare and leafless in winter.
Ideal for seasonally sensible shade and warmth.
Two actually, a vertical mesh straight up from the garden bed adjacent to the brick paved verandah, and another that's almost horizontal with a slight slope away from the house.
Most of the summer growth is dense on the horizontal (like an awning) with grape bunches developing and hanging down for easy picking when rips.
Ivy or Wisteria are a different question. The first will damage walls and the second can crush anything like a vegetable python
It might not work so well on the Lego brick walls that are glued onto the front of concrete these days, but that would just be a guess.
(Speaking from experience—our house is an oven in the spring and fall because those seasons are 20F hotter than we assumed when designing the house.)
Then you designed a house for a climate that never existed. There is nowhere on earth that is 20F warmer than it was 200 years ago, let alone 20.
Put another way, air conditioning used to be unnecessary in Silicon Valley. Now we have > 100F days pretty much every year.
I certainly remember plenty of days in the mid-to-high-nineties in Silicon Valley 20 years ago.
We replaced the old double-paned windows with new triple-paned with 60% IR filter. There's hardly any tint, but boy did it make a difference. Especially in the living room which has a very large window which catches the sun from noon to midnight in the summer.
Before the wood floor in the living room would be baking hot where the sun hit, uncomfortably so at times. Now I can't tell the difference.
We added it just cause it didn't cost much extra, figured why not. Very glad we did.
That only works if you don't have long hot spells. I live in a house with high thermal mass - reinforced concrete filled cinderblock. It was built by a commercial builder as his own house in 1950. There's enough thermal mass to keep the interior temp stable for three days. No need for air conditioning.
This worked fine until Northern California started having week-long stretches of 100F+ temperatures. That didn't happen until about ten years ago. Once all that thermal mass heats up to ambient, it won't come down for days.
The labor costs for adobe have become very high, mostly it seems because the descendants of the families that started the amazing adobe brick "factories" no longer want to be dirt farmers.
> can probably beat thermal mass construction.
You have to define what "beat" means. My hundred year old adobe did not rise above 81F as an interior temperature this summer, despite outside highs around 100F. That would be possible (or even lower!) with the technologies you mentioned, but my adobe house did that with no energy utilization at all.
Yes, most problems have engineering solutions. It all comes down to whether the juice is worth the squeeze. FWIW I’m generally in favor of the increased reliability of low tech, but also acknowledge I’m in the minority.
Living in a mud hut where it rains 120 days a year doesn't sound like the solution. Bricks work better.
Another option is water. Water is cheap, and you can pile up gallon jugs of it. Or use your pond/swimming pool.
Geothermal HVAC makes use of the thermal mass of rocks and dirt, too.
They’re not even easiest and best, but they’re additive and in the grand scheme of things awnings (and shutters) are not that expensive, so it’s a small investment for a permanent benefit.
Why does modern insulation hold less thermal mass? Is it just that trapped air has less mass than stone?
Sure, the stone is more conducive meaning you feel the temperature sooner. But it also has a lot of thermal mass, meaning it can give off or absorb more heat.
Adobe and stone are things with thermal mass, not insulating fiber thickness.
For my case, I think it's irresponsible to be installing AC without first making sure the house is optimized for keeping the heat out.
I've had a lot of them fog up with no damage.
Ask the same question to a realtor and they'll know exactly why you're asking.
I know lots of people who don't mind living in darkness or seem to have a personal vendetta against the sun, and maybe those people would be genuinely better off with awnings, but I don't think they're for me.
Back in the day, windows were small and there were awnings and interiors were dark. Often made even darker with dark wood, dark colors, etc. It could be downright gloomy.
Then a kind of aesthetic revolution happened where windows got bigger, walls got white, awnings went away -- and it's all so much brighter and joyous.
And if your windows let in too much heat in the summer so you have to run your AC more, it can be counterbalanced in the winter when you can run the heat a lot less during sunny days.
In my experience that’s true anyway.
Yes, this is what makes it so hard to replace with artificial lighting! I enjoy that absurdly bright sunlight. My house has extra windows over most of my windows and these specifically allow that sunlight in to add ambient lighting. During daytime most of my house is fully illuminated even with the lights off and blinds drawn because of these upper windows. You might describe what I have as the exact opposite of an awning and it’s one of my favorite features.
Plus, if it bothers you that much, there are awnings that retract or fold away.
This seems puzzling to me.
Large windows are a staple of every luxury new build. Floor to ceiling windows are a status symbol.
And it makes sense when you consider the pattern of American life: go to work in the morning at the crack of dawn, come back home when the sun is setting. Now its nighttime and you are inside with the lights on, you need blinds over that window unless you want to give your neighbors a show.
1. https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0610614,-118.2858175,3a,87.2...
These behaviors don't describe how I live with my floor to ceiling windows at all.
My shades close in the morning to block the low sun, and they open during the day and night unless I have some other reason to close them.
It would be difficult or a distant view for someone from the street or a neighbor to see in, and even if people look in, my street-facing windows aren't in any bedrooms or private areas.
Unfortunately with most US build tract housing, there's not enough room between most houses to provide dedicated shade by most any method. I wonder if shade between the roof gaps between houses would be useful.
They can also destroy pavement, and foundations, and underground utilities.
They can be messy. Leaves fall and generally need dealt with somehow, and many kinds fruiting trees produce fruit that is big enough for a person to twist an ankle on just by walking through their own yard.
They can be expensive to maintain properly, and even when maintained properly they can drop heavy things that damage expensive things.
It isn't necessarily a straight forward comparison.
While I'm sure that well-placed trees can be a great benefit to the overall cost of owning and living in a dwelling, I'm also sure that they can be a great detriment.
If I had a choice, I think I'd rather have big solar panel arrays than big shade trees.
Which is a great pity because I’d welcome planting more trees around suburbs.
So what happened? Naturally, the customer fired the architect. They only wanted to look green, but they didn't care if it was actually green. :-/
The biggest one is dealing with all the leaves in the fall. If your yard is big enough, you can easily lose a whole weekend to cleaning up the dropped leaves so that they don't kill your grass over the winter and spring. You also have to clean them out of the gutters multiple times a year, around the foundation, etc.
That house also had an absurd amount of spiders in it, which I attribute to both being close to the woods and shaded by trees. Not to mention vermin such as mice, chipmunks, squirrels can extremely destructive to the house, vehicles, and machinery when their own homes and food sources are right nearby.
These kinds of comments are hilarious to me. Having a mulching mower makes leaf maintenance a breeze. Owning a house comes with responsibilities. If you're not going to keep up with things, then hire it out. If you're not even going to bother with that, then boy, I don't know. Some people just come across as the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I thought you were at least going to come out with limbs falling on the house, but you just went with sheer lack of wanting to do yard work. I appreciate the laugh
Trees cost a non-zero amount of time and money by just existing and doing their normal tree stuff when they're near a dwelling.
Since the only upside of PV is energy, it seems like you should at least show it's energy positive (vs wasting 1,400% as much energy on net). That huge energy waste is a big hole to dig out of using only secondary incidental benefits.
If a tree is unhealthy or too close or too big, then of course you do something about that. But to do it because of solar (thinking it'll be more "green") is often misguided.
It is impossible to make an informed (instead of faith-based) decision without looking at all of the things in an unbiased way.
Trees near dwellings are seldom hands-off, and solar can have benefits beyond supplemental energy production. It isn't a straight-forward comparison.
> solar can have benefits beyond supplemental energy production.
I'd be curious what you mean by that.
---
Meanwhile, some nonexhaustive notes on solar:
Solar panels are obviously often used to support existing electrical services, since grid-tied solar is easy(ish).
Similar to the shade from a tree, rooftop solar does help prevent sunlight from heating a dwelling. The panels themselves obviously cast a shadow, and they're mounted with an air gap between the panels and the roof (providing both airflow and thermal isolation). Furthermore, because nothing can ever operate over-unity, 100% of the electrical energy they produce is energy that is removed from the situation of the sun directly heating the roof. (Are they better at this than a shadetree? IDK, but they're better than zero for sure.)
With energy storage, solar can be used off-grid day after day when that is a necessary or useful thing to have -- allowing one to maintain many aspects of modern Western life even in the absence of a grid connection. After a bad summer storm, a person can use solar to help stay cool and to avoid tossing the contents of their fridge, and can do so without needing to maintain a generator or manage a fuel supply. (It's expensive to get there, but there's also lots of things relating to the qualities of modern life that are expensive.)
Solar panels can improve the longevity of the roof they're mounted on, by reducing exposure to heat, UV, wind, and precipitation.
Solar panels won't crash through my roof and into my living room, but good shade trees do that sometimes.
---
I can go on, but must I?
Again, even accounting for PV roof shading, the energy audit showed a 15x improvement in keeping trees vs. cutting down trees and adding PV. That roof shading was already 'baked in.' Accounting for PV roof shading is basic stuff in sustainable architecture.
If we're being fair, we should acknowledge that solar panels can also reduce the longevity of the roof they're on, due to poor installation, the addition of new roof penetrations, and wind funneling. It's easy to say "well don't get a poor installer then," but of course the problem is you don't always know that going in! The presence of PV also greatly increases the cost of replacing/repairing a roof, since the PV has to be essentially uninstalled and reinstalled to access the roof beneath.
Well-positioned trees will shade a structure in the hottest parts of the day (normally south and west), which is precisely the "evening peak" when the grid is most stressed. PV instead produces most of its energy in the "afternoon lull," when electricity demand dips. So trees are effectively producing 'negawatts,' (credit to Amory Lovins) reducing demand on the end-of-line distribution grid at exactly the right time of day.`
At the risk of stating the obvious, if trees are crashing through your living room they're not "good" shade trees! Any competent arborist will be able to give you advice on setbacks, trimming, and (yes) removal if necessary. Remember that the trees are most likely giving you a much greater "energy payback" than PV[1], so you should use an appropriately levelized playing field when comparing the expense of paying an arborist every ~decade vs. the expense of paying PV installers every ~2-3 decades.
If I seem one-sided in my presentation, it's only because I'm needing to counter-balance your initial extremely one-sided presentation. My point is precisely that you need to look at both the cumulative upsides and the cumulative downsides of both technologies, and not simply look for evidence supporting a preconceived bias, in either direction. I think we're in agreement on that!
Anyway the exchange has been fun, and hopefully enlightening to at least one other reader, so I'm voting up all. cheers
[1] To quantify this, I would encourage hiring a sustainable design professional to do an in-person energy modeling of the home or business in question.
And a 1950's house built with none of those advertised "I'm cutting-edge trendy, and rich enough to just run my new A/C all the time" to everyone who saw it.
Upstairs is hot. But… the house was built with a finished downstairs and diy upstairs. The diy job wasn’t as good from a ventilation perspective.
Meanwhile, my new build, West facing single aspect flat in London regularly heats to 30+ degrees celsius because no one thought about heat management.
I invested in automatic roller shades. It was expensive but worth it.
It's amazing and way better than traditional windows. Winter isn't anywhere near as depressing anymore. I can control the amount of light that comes in far more than someone with normal size windows.
Since the windows are new glass with multiple panes I notice very little difference in insulation performance.
Likewise, I work for an energy company, in summer the aging AC (which they keep low because an energy company's policy and marketing is actually the opposite of what they provide) cannot keep up because there's nothing keeping the sunlight out but flimsy shades on the inside.
I don't have a cupola on my house, but did design in the stack effect. You can definitely feel the breeze coming up through the house. It makes the house several degrees cooler without A/C.
The house also has unusually large eaves, which serve the same purpose as awnings.
The house costs half as much to keep comfortable as my previous home.
Bees and wasps: they settle and build nests in nooks and crannies of roofs. I don't have a problem with bees per se, although they can probably keep disturbing eating in the garden. Otoh they may pollinate flowers in the garden. Wasps on the other hand are truly a pest. I've lived in a house with wasps in the roof, constant wasps in the attic, leading to an unusable attic for about a year.
Bats: no idea, never had them so far. But I've lived in a neighborhood where they were nestled inside the outer layers of roofs. Just like other animals I imagine they "shit and piss all over the place" so to speak. But they're also protected where I live, so once they are there, you can't even get rid of them.
Replacing the roof with asphalt shingles solved that problem.
I've had awnings on my old house destroyed twice by squirrels ripping them apart for nesting.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-20/the-forgo...
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/12/12/philly-first-city-...
We have them on our house. In Australia it's very much worth getting awnings and ceiling fans as well as having a heat pump.
In summer afternoons they can make a really remarkable difference.
Lots of countries even where electricity is cheap use awnings as it's just better to not need to cool something down if it can be avoided.
My childhood home in WA (Western Australia) had awnings, along with shade trees and a patio and it made a huge difference. noticed especially where the west facing Window got setting sun in summer and had no awnings
However, based on what I can see from my train window right now, it looks like most new apartments/townhouses and even office buildings have some sort of awning or window covering.
Absolutely not.
I recently drove past my childhood home. The canvas awnings that were there 30 years ago are still there, and look fine. Almost everything else about the house has changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotchgard
more info in this PDF
https://pfas-1.itrcweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/histor...
I think the reason is simply that awnings take maintenance and are more costly. They eventually rot out from the sun and fall apart, needing replacement. Replacing an awning is not necessary to rent an apartment or sell a home, so it isn't done. If you had a ratty old one you'd probably just remove it vs replace. And even if you did want to replace that awning today, where do you even get one? They don't sell them at the hardware store like they might have 100 years ago. You'd probably have to order custom sized pieces from some company. Probably a couple grand in the materials and installation right there to do up all the windows. Plastic blinds on the other hand are like $50 at the hardware store and you can install them with a drill in 2 mins.
I must admit, although I’ve of course sat next to an uninsulated west Denver wall baking in the sun in early August and an insulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early July, I’ve never actually sat next to an uninsulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early August.
I’m sure this comes as quite a shock, given our people’s pastime. Hopefully you can forgive my great transgression.
However we also have a little feature we lovingly call "Valley Fever" which is a fungus, spread mostly by dust storms. As more Midwestern folks immigrated here, and the Snowbirds set up shop, they all wanted traditional lawns, trees, and golf courses, just like "back home". So by the 1980s-1990s, Phoenix was barely differentiated from Chicago or Kansas in terms of front yards.
Now, those gardens definitely kept things cool in a local area. They needed things like flood-irrigation, so deep water often covers lawns. Deciduous or even evergreen trees can afford a lot of shade where you really, really need it. Unfortunately, monsoon microbursts often topple those kinds of trees, which have shallow roots in impoverished, sandy soils.
Ironically, due to lack of water, and Greta Thunberg, we're reverting to desert landscapes (called xeriscape) and so the new urban domestic hotness here is to install little "drip irrigation" tubes, palo verde, cactus, succulents, yucca, etc. Needless to say, they don't provide enough shade, and the humidity stays quite low.
Phoenicians today are clamoring for more artificial shelter and shade. Bus stops here are works of art with elaborate means of warding off the daytime heat. The city centers are still "heat islands" with murderous temperature increases during summertime ("summertime" in Phoenix lasts from March through October...)
Palo Verdes can get pretty damn big with significant shade factor, but they tend to blow a coat of a billion tiny yellow flowers in season and make a huge mess that the HOA kvetches about.
Read up on the Colorado River Compact. Where the Water Goes by David Owens is a very accessible primer. The tl;dr is that the water was portioned out to the Western states (including Arizona) during an unusually wet period, and we're now in a period of drought. They simply didn't understand this in 1922. With the advent of dendrochronology, we now understand that this river system is prone to droughts that can last hundreds of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_North_American_me...
The scientists (various disciplines did). They were explicitly ignored by the compact negotiators. John Fleck has written about this quite a bit at https://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
I haven't read Science be Damned, I'll add it to my TBR, but I'm guessing that's what it's about?
I haven't read any of Fleck's books, but I read his blog regularly. He's commented quite often on the way the science gets ignored in favor of political/social and sometimes business goals.
Inside window blinds help a lot. I recently discovered the kind of blinds that are built between the double panes of window glass. I got a sliding glass door with them. They're so nice and protected from daily household trauma that I expect them to last far longer than my regular blinds. It'd be great to retrofit the whole house with them. I'd love to have motorized versions that could react to the sun throughout the day.
It's truly shocking how much motorized insulating shades (i.e. pull-down double cellular shades) cost. To the point of making me consider attempting to form a low cost competitor in the market. Also, cellular shades with side tracks are no longer even available to order, which reduces the insulating effectiveness.
I can't help but think this is too bad.
and also shade trees.
I see housing developments where the trees are all cut down, the houses go up, and... they plant trees.
I think of that saying: "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit."
and I would take it one step further...
Don't cut down the trees, build the houses around them! For shade, and beauty.
Depends on the region of the US. In more northern, colder regions, many don't. In hotter regions, I think most either have it or have temporary/window/etc units.
Though locally (PNW) they aren't really an ideal choice because it does not routinely get hot enough in the summer to really benefit but it gets cool and wet all winter long so they mildew. I just planted medium-tall deciduous trees in our west yard instead.
As a result during summer mornings both of them are blasting me with tight beams of sunlight which increases the temperature in my place while forcing me to keep my curtains closed until later in the morning when they stop blinding me.
They make a huge difference in how hot the room gets. I can always tell when it's time to deploy them for the season when the room starts to bake.
Also they look nice!
Conversely, buildings nowadays are covered in fixed awnings that are fully integrated with the building envelope, they work great and are engineered to last the life of the buildings.
Am I missing anything?
Our A/C bill over the summer was pretty competitive with our previous home which was half the size.
The whole point of insulation is to make it easier to manage temperatures without wasting energy, AC or awnings.
Depending on the home's orientation you may not be able to pull that off at all even if you tried.
It was built in the XX, but according to local vernacular, which likely (we have a few examples surviving from the XIII) predates both the modern profession of "architect" and metal-framed awnings.
(my friend the architect has plenty of local work, but maybe that's because we live in different countries?)
Chronological snobbery is a whiggish habit.
If anything, architecture today is lazy and mediocre, especially given our technological advantages. People even used to factor in the path of the sun and the direction of the wind to position a house. Some architects and contractors might still do that, but I don't think this is common, because, hey, we have HVAC, and hey, we just want to slap together and flip a shitty development as quickly as possible.
The lack of care, the lack of concern for urban planning, the misuse of material in a given environment, the use of inferior materials and building methods, the lack of concern for posterity who will inherit our mess, the waste, the ugliness -- it's all shameful. If anything comes out of this "green revolution", I hope it is at least a course correction in this space.
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