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 high efficiency home industry actually uses the Yeti cooler as an analogy and a framework to build super efficient homes. Check out Matt Risinger on YouTube. He builds high efficiency homes, some passive house rated. Passive house rating is essentially yeti cooler level.
Side note: it’s super expensive to build this way, and the payoff over just standard “good” insulation is essentially never
Heat can transfer in three ways: radiation, convection, and conduction. You can’t really stop radiation, although you can slow it down. You also can’t really stop convection, but that isn’t relevant to keeping heat inside a thermos.
Well… You Can!
But there are a few issues that would make the cost insane.
A little background. These cups are actually two cups smashed together, with empty space in between them. And I dont mean air. I mean *empty* space. A vacuum. Literally nothing (or as close as we can get) is in between these two cups, except where they are joined at the lip of the cup. Vacuums cannot transfer thermal energy (gain or lose heat) so they insulate super well.
So why don’t we make houses this way?
Well, if you’re gonna use a more “traditional” frame and wall set up, you’re gonna need to erect a building around the building to suck a vacuum in there. And then your construction workers are gonna need to wear space suits to do their work. To say nothing of the dangerous work conditions this would cause. Not to mention things like windows and doors would ~~ruin~~ severely diminish the effect you’re going for anyway.
Okay, so maybe make it out of bricks made this way? So that’s acutally starting to happen! Its great in theory and works better than traditional insulation (well, when done in tandem) but you still have the issue of losing the effect every point where a brick touches another brick. So ultimately while it is better, the amount you’re gonna spend on it wildly offsets any cost savings and makes it not great.
If a yeti cup costs $40 and a yeti cooler costs $400 I would hate to see the cost of a yeti house lol
Yeti’s cups and coolers can do that because the walls are vacuum sealed, so there’s no air in there to transmit heat in or out. The process to build those works fine in a factory, but it would be INSANELY expensive to build a house out of that. And then, one tiny crack and you’ve lost all the insulation in whatever chamber cracked.
Double wall vacuum seals would be pretty hard to do on an entire house. Yeti basically uses two metal walls and has nothing in between so that the heat can’t transfer through the walls
We do, they are called [Earthships](https://youtu.be/wVp5koAOu9M). 6 foot walls surrounded by 4 to 8 inches of insulation. Roofs sometimes 14 inches thick of insulation. Double walls before the interior living space. Big learning curve, but they feel more grounded, embraced and balanced living in.
We do, they are called [Earthships](https://youtu.be/wVp5koAOu9M). 6 foot walls surrounded by 4 to 8 inches of insulation. Roofs sometimes 14 inches thick of insulation. Double walls before the interior living space. Big learning curve, but they feel more grounded, embraced and balanced living in.
We do, they are called [Earthships](https://youtu.be/wVp5koAOu9M). 6 foot walls surrounded by 4 to 8 inches of insulation. Roofs sometimes 14 inches thick of insulation. Double walls before the interior living space. Big learning curve, but they feel more grounded, embraced and balanced living in.
Not the same tech as Yeti, but check out the stuff that Earthship is doing. Is a bit hippy dippy, but a cool concept nonetheless.
https://earthshipbiotecture.com/design-principles/heating-cooling-buildings/
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