If YETI can make a cup that keeps water cold or hot for hours and a cooler that holds ice for hours, then why aren’t we building houses with that same material?
In: 824
First, you have to understand that yeti coolers and yeti cups are totally different. Coolers are just really thick thick foam, whereas the cups are vacuum flasks basically. The magic of a yeti ISNT the materials they’re made of, it’s the way those materials are arranged. Mostly it’s just that the walls are SUPER THICK. Thicker than other coolers.
You can’t really build a house like a vacuum flask, but you absolutely can build one with super thick walls. Google Passive House.
But this is rare for the same reason why most people don’t own a Yeti cooler: it costs more. Look up Passive House, it’s relatively simple to build a super insulated house that requires basically no heating or cooling. However the up-front cost is like 30% more. And homes are built by developers who sell the home not live in it. Buyers are more sensitive to up front cost, rather than ongoing expenses, so that’s what builders build.
People are talking about the metal and blah blah blah…. what you’re actually talking about is whether you could create a vacuum barrier around the outside of your house to nullify heat transfer. And the answer is, sort of. There are already vacuum sealed insulated panels but obviously there’s space in between, and they don’t really do much more than regular insulation. If you could create entire walls with perfect vacuum seal, you’d still need to have door and windows, and this is where most of your climate control is lost anyway.
If you could create a perfect vacuum enclosed room, you’d nullify heat transfer, but also air transfer and moisture. So you’d have a new set of problems.
I just built a 100 square foot cooler that will hold it’s temp *almost* as well as a thermos. It costs $30k with no plumbing, electrical (aside from cooling unit), foundation (it’s on blocks), or finishing of any kind- just a bare metal box.
There are many requirements that houses need to fulfill other than thermal efficiency. E.g. structural, fire safety, building services, acoustics, ventilation etc. Additionally whatever materials & design used needs to be cost effective.
Its not the material of the cups and coolers that keep things hot or cold for so long, its the design.
That design revolves around creating a barrier inside of its walls that is a complete vacuum. No air or material of any kind that could transfer heat from the outside of the cup/cooler to the inside and vise versa.
This creates many problems when trying to design such an insulation for a house. Breathable air for example.
Yeti doesn’t use any special material for their cups, it’s just metal. What’s special is the shape of the metal. A yeti cup (and indeed most thermoses) have an inner cup and outer cup that don’t touch other than the thin section that makes up the brim. Between the two layers is a vacuum. This means that, for heat to flow out of the liquid in the cup, it must conduct through the inner cup, up through the thin brim section, and out the outer cup in order to escape. It’s all about giving the heat as small of an escape path as possible.
A house is, clearly, a lot more complicated than a cup. Windows, doors, vents, eaves, ducting, all can act as passages through the “outer barrier” of a house. The cost to construct some double layer vacuum insulation system for an entire house would be insane, never mind the cost of maintaining it. Much more cost effective to simply throw some fiberglass in the walls and be done with it. The extra you pay in heating / cooling is a drop in the bucket compared to such a complex insulation system.
Not to mention, most heat lost through windows and doors anyway. The walls aren’t really the parts of the house that need improving, when it comes to insulation.
*[“I read a story](https://youtu.be/uCKU1NVEBYM); a 17 year old kid stole a plane, crashed it, and survived. Why don’t they just make the whole plane out of that kid?”*
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In the arctic. It would be overkill to do it in more average weather as we already have the cheaper materials for insulation.
Insulated cups like that use vacuum as an insulator between layers.
Manufacturing insulated solutions like that on a house scale would be hideously expensive, complicated to maintain.
Insulation works on the principle of the three things: Conduction, convection and radiation.
Once you lose the vacuum, free convection takes over and actually transfers heat relatively well compared to materials with low thermal conductivity
In all, its much simpler, more cost effective to just use a material that is suitable for the scale of what you are doing
It is difficult to sufficiently scale the vacuum insulation to building sizes, the structures would need to be radically redesigned and it would simply be too cost prohibitive to build and maintain at scale. The buildings would also still need climate control, which is also hindered by the insulation increase, to combat internally generated heat from computers, people, machines, etc. That heat would be trapped inside the structure with less pathways to dissipate than before.
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