Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Stewart Hicks" channel.

  1. People want the cheapest house possible and contractors have enough to worry about, just keeping up with all the new recommendations. Some of the best designs and green designs are actually frowned on by local, state and federal governments. It costs extra, if you're only thinking modular, mobile or stick-built, to do things like build into the Earth. Most new housing outside the big cities is modular home on a concrete slab. All my older homes had full basements, because they were built before air-conditioning was a thing. Things like building a home with long axis north-to-south, to minimize the surface area of direct sun. Cool on the west side of the house until after noon (longer if you have shade trees, which my older homes all had). Cool on the east side after noon, with shadows starting and growing longer in the late morning. The 1951 house I'm in, now, has eaves the perfect length, just like you're describing. Permaculture crowd want the long axis east-west, with strategies for shade in the summer, but soaking up as much sun as possible in the winter. I think you need more than just eaves, when you're building this way. I think you need natural shade. I always plant trees wherever I put down roots. LOL! But I also love setting up trellises. If you're in a hurry, the trees are spendier, but the extra expense is more than worth it, because you get that lived-in look a lot quicker, and not look like somebody out in the sagebrush country with your trailer and a bunch of scraggly seedlings.
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  2. Our school smelled like Hell because they spent most of a year re-tarring the blasted thing.
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  3. I always want a gabled roof over all entrances to my home, so there's not a major snow hazard when you step outside. I've lived in places where the roof slopes towards the front door, and you get a huge mess, that freezes into a solid chunk if there's any freeze-thaw going on. Clean it up, and the next day or a few days later, you have a sheet of ice just outside your door. I also don't understand why all homes don't have even a storm door, let alone an "air lock" anteroom, where people can get out of the weather without letting all the cold/hot air in. Just stupid designs. We also don't build buildings/homes to take advantage of the temperature buffering you get from a full basement or other earth-sheltered ideas. With proper construction, you shouldn't have to heat or cool a home/building very much. And if you know about Russ Finch of "Oranges in the Snow" fame, you can heat/cool a big space by burying "air tubes" and using small fans to move the air from the tubes into the house. The buried (4-inch) pipe brings the air to ground temperature, which at 8 feet down is the average annual temperature. In temperate regions (North of the tropics and South of the permafrost), the ambient temp of the ground is in the 50-60-degree range (Fahrenheit). We should start using simple principles, so that almost ALL homes use very little Heat or AC.
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