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?
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The hot cup touches the air and makes it hot. Most insulation works by keeping the hot stuff from touching anything else.
More goes into a house or building than insulating it. There is structural. The building needs to stand. You can’t really make it like a cup and expect it to be sturdy.
But honestly. If your building a home to code, it’s most likely better than that cup. Some homes will only loose a few degrees in 8 hours. A yetti,while keeping the liquid warm, will keep it warm for 4 hours. That’s pretty good for a cup of coffee, but it’s got nothing on a well insulated home. Even in an older home that looses 1 degree per hour, in 10 hours you only lost 10 degrees.
It’s not necessarily about the material. The cutting edge production on home building can make super energy efficient houses. I follow a YouTuber that does just that.
The stuff that yeti uses isn’t a secret, it also isn’t a new concept, they are just really good at it. They are also very proud of it as reflected in their pricing.
The cost of building a really tight, really energy efficient home? Yeah….. That’s why you don’t see them everywhere.
Wai i thought the Yeti is unreal?
Why would you want to fill your house with ice?
We don’t make them with the same material but we make houses with really good insulation. Engineers build houses you could heat with a hair dryer on the attic. Trouble is these houses are very expensive so people prefer to just make modestly insulated houses and pay a lot to heat them.
Expense and practicality. A yet cup costs $15. A block of wood the same size costs like $1.50. Also, all of your doors and windows would have to be sealed hatches, it might be hard to scale, susceptible to leaks etc.
This is a common theme. Consumer goods frequently contain features/materials that are affordable at a small scale but could never be paid for at the scale of a construction project.
Read up on Passive House. It’s not necessarily constructed like a yeti, but the principles of being airtight and super insulated are the same.
A YETI cooler’s walls are a vacuum which prevents heat transfer when the lid is closed. But open the lid a bunch on a cooler and it won’t work very well.
This is the major reason that a house does not perform as well as a YETI cooler. Most houses are not carefully built to limit the amount of air that leaks through small cracks and penetrations on its walls, floors, and ceilings. Essentially, houses often perform like a cooler with the lid open.
If a home’s walls were built like a YETI cooler’s and vacuum sealers there would likely still be places for air to sneak through the walls. This could occur, for example where the plumbing or electricity or exhaust fans pass through the walls, floors, and ceilings.
Cost for one thing.
A styrofoam coffee cup costs less than a quarter and will keep your coffee warm for about an hour, a yeti coffee mug (I have one) costs over $30 and keeps coffee hot for about 4 hours.
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