What is the difference between insulating a house and double wall insulation in thermos bottles? Couldn’t using that technology conserve energy?
In: Engineering
Ok 2 things need to be addressed. 1 what is a thermos? 2 what makes a house different from a thermos? TLDR it’s mainly about cost and appeal to buyers for homes.
An original thermos (really old style, like 1970s) was a glass vessel wrapped in soft insulation then given a metal skin. An old style (like 1990s) was 2 plastic jackets, sealed together at the top,with insulation between. And a modern (like a yeti) is a skin of stainless steel shaped into an inner and an outer wall, sealed with a chemical tablet inside that then absorbs any moisture and air making a (relative) vacuum. So each of those designs works differently with the last only allowing heat to transfer out where the metal skin lets conduction happen, and please take my word that stainless actually kind of sucks at it compared to copper and other metals.
A house can’t be constructed like a really old thermos (because we won’t make houses out of just glass because cost, material strength, and efficiency) or a modern one (because cost of stainless steel is prohibitively expensive at that scale, isn’t pleasing to buyers, and would cost a lot to make it hold a vacuum while hammering and screwing all the protective siding and drywall pieces on) so construction companies and local and national housing authorities have decided that making a house more like a 1990s plastic thermos is the way to go, because having a cheap material for the walls and structure means building and selling the house are affordable, and we just fill it with insulation and call it good enough, and don’t complain about stapling, nailing or screwing into it because it generally doesn’t affect the efficiency of the insulation.
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