Re: my earlier toot.
Honest question - is a "utility room" some sort of Midwestern thing?
Talking about how to avoid running ducts through attics, it occurred to me that it might be.
Here, if you don't have a basement, there's usually a room with your furnace/air handler, water heater, and washer/dryer. Plumbing often routes there, too.
Sometimes it's less of a room and more of a closet, but we can't just stick the washer and water heater in the garage 'cause they'll freeze.
Just thinking about how norms feel normal and stepping outside of them feels weird.
When I hear people say "where else would the furnace go?" or whatever, it's super puzzling to me because... in the furnace room! We literally called it that in the house I grew up in.
But if it's normal to shove it up in the attic where you live, planning a room for that stuff might feel wasteful.
@TechConnectify indiana here and washer and water are both garage items?
@TechConnectify I think so. But we didn’t really have that phrase in Texas, despite also not having basements. Is “mud room” exclusive with utility room, or can speakers and locations use both?
@jason I would not equate a mudroom with a utility room, but I wouldn't call them mutually exclusive.
Generally the utilities are gonna be closer to the core of the structure than the exterior, especially if air handling is involved. But, I have also seen some homes where the back door opens up to the laundry room which also has the other utilities.
@TechConnectify I grew up in upstate NY and if the house didn't have a basement (mostly trailers or various other types of prefab house) there was usually a "laundry room" that had the furnace and water heater in a closet
@anime_reference Yeah, same thing different name.
Thinking through it more, if the washer's in there, I'd probably call it the laundry room even if all the other utilities were there.
But the point is there's a room for that stuff!
@TechConnectify It is quite strange, sometimes I'll see some construction/building videos featuring southern construction and I don't understand some of it.
I also don't get aggressive vapor barriers, but in my region they are somewhat discouraged since everything is just always so wet, they trap moisture and cause mold and decay.
@Denton That's basically what brough this on.
Not really a video, but visiting my brother in San Diego and remembering just how batshit that house seems as a Midwesterner.
It's... fine, mostly, but his energy bills would be quite a lot lower if somebody from the Midwest built that house.
@TechConnectify
I’m in Texas.
Most houses I’ve seen have the air handler in the attic. There’s no special room for it. Some of the older houses have other features. One house I rented that was built in the ‘70s had a huge central exhaust fan designed to run while the windows were open, and air handler in the attic.
My current house has a closet dedicated to the air handler connected to my tiny laundry room. Ducts still in the attic, though.
@bedast And that's what kills me! (the ducts in the attic)
Sure, you can insulate them, but if you just put them /below/ the ceiling it wouldn't matter! At all!
Imagine how much better the Texas grid would be doing if y'all got used to a 10 inch ceiling drop around the exterior and boxed your ducts in that way.
Y'all gotta send some builders up this way to learn from us, I tells ya.
@TechConnectify I think we're approaching much more unified building standards, but they were hardly a thing until recent decades and only recently are builders traveling and talking to one another.
Many people I'd expect still do things the ways they always have.
@Denton Probably.
I say with pride that all they gotta do is venture up this way. We have 95° days in the summer and -20° days in the winter. Our homes are built to handle both, and we cannot afford to cut corners.
It's a big part of what keeps me here, tbh. We have a lot of resiliency already, and our drinking water comes from Lake Michigan.
@TechConnectify the utility room contains a small part of the HVAC system. You still need ductwork outside of the utility room.
Im also used to a utility room in finished basements.
@drscriptt Yes, but you're less inclined to run ducts through the attic when the start/end point of the system isn't up there.
Bottom line, running ducts in the attic is only a step removed from running them outside your home. Hell, it can be hotter in the attic than outside! It might even be worse!
It's not hard at all to avoid that, you just have to care more about efficiency and comfort than you do sightlines (and, perhaps, noise but there's plenty of ways to mitigate that, too).
@TechConnectify uk here. of the last seven places i've lived at, five have had every non-boiler appliance in the kitchen. the other two, the washer /dryer got their own dedicated room.
the boiler is always in an airing cupboard. never been in a place where there's utility stuff in the attic.
a dedicated utility room is always the system i'd prefer, but that might just be because it was like that in the place i grew up
@snailerotica @TechConnectify I'm also in the UK, and also have lived in houses with utility rooms. Smaller houses don't (and I've never seen a house in North America that's anywhere near what counts as a "smaller house" here). In contrast, IME the water heater is often in a cupboard in the kitchen, our modern water heaters are tiny wall-mounted things, unlike North American furnaces.
The only utility I've ever had in a roof space was a header tank to pressurise the hot water system.
@davecturner @snailerotica A huge factor in the NA/UK HVAC divide is how common hydronic heating is.
Since that's more-or-less the default for you, combi-boilers are a slam dunk.
Since so much of the US benefits from air conditioning, even way up here where it gets life-threateningly cold every winter, we largely ditched it in favor of forced air heating and cooling, which necessitates a separate water heater.
@TechConnectify see, i still think its weird y'all have a furnace at all. we had gas, but only for hot water. both the gas tanks and hot water system were just. around the side of the house
@irina We're largely not using tanks, though. If you have a tank around here, you're on propane and not gas - which isn't just a pedantic distinction, people generally don't conflate the two.
The gas network reaches pretty much all of the Chicago metro, so until you're very rural, you have a pipe delivering methane. It's way cheaper (for now) than electricity so nearly all of us use it for building heat, too.
@TechConnectify I’m guessing basements aren’t the norm out there? If so, why? Water table weirdly high? Ground freeze too deep?
@98codes The water table thing is the case for Florida, I think, but in other places? No idea.
My gut says something or other about earthquakes for CA. Maybe.
Those are the only two reasons I can think of. But it may be something to do with land value, soil, mindset (maybe Midwesterners are more prone to digging for another "free" floor?), regional norms.
Basements certainly aren't a given where I live but I think the large majority of SFHs have 'em
@TechConnectify huh, it never struck me before that you would need one heater for air and another for water. I guess I imagined some kind of water-to-air heat exchanger.
@davecturner Such a heat exchanger does exist, but you're unlikely to find it in a house. In a larger apartment building with a central heat source, though, hot water may go through radiators but it can also go through a heat exchanger inside of an air handler. My late grandmother's condo was setup like that - the building had central heat, but each unit could control how much heat they got. Then a conventional condenser on the roof fed an evaporator in the same box for cooling in the summer.
@98codes @TechConnectify Ok, I'll chime in from Massachusetts. 1908 house. Steam heat. 3rd floor attic that is all weird angles and you can't stand up straight. Evap unit in the attic, the dreaded condensate pipe/pump, ductwork punched down into the ceilings of the 2nd floor bedrooms.
@98codes @TechConnectify Here's why I don't mind:
1. I'd much rather lose the useless 4’ high attic space than have to build out a utility room in a useful room downstairs.
2. The whole place (incl. attic) (and duct work) is well insulated, so I'm not losing much thermal efficiency.
3. I only care about AC in the 2nd floor bedrooms, ceiling fans are fine for the living/dining/etc. And that attic space the ducts cross was useless anyway.
YMMV but for me it's a good layout.
@andthisismrspeacock @98codes In your case, I'm honestly not bothered because you have an old house which has been retrofitted. I definitely wouldn't suggest /adding/ a utility room.
But when designing a new home, I think you should.
Also, as soon as the HVAC industry realizes how amazing they are, ductless mini-splits will probably render your kind of retrofit obsolete. But right now, it's pulling teeth to get them unless you DIY it.
@TechConnectify @98codes Oh, absolutely, for new construction why would you ever do this?! If you had the option of making a utility closet. And I've considered splits for the downstairs but it's not (yet!) hot enough here that we need them so fans work ok. For now. What a fun time to be alive.
@TechConnectify As a European living in apartments all my life the luxury of having a "utility room" almost perplexes me. Every place I've been to has had municipal heating, central heating from a shared plant for the entire building complex, or a wall-mounted water heater in the bathroom.
@outfrost That's pretty much the norm for apartments here, too.
If it's not a central heating system, there might be a furnace/AC or some kind of air handler in a closet but that's about it. Maybe a water heater as well, but that's often centralized.
@TechConnectify east coast here: utility closet in the basement/ground floor feels like the norm. I see a lot of home improvement videos on YT that have attic stuff and I'm fully baffled. Though some have it as a conditioned space.
@theotherlinh They all need to come to a cold place sometime.
I swear, I don't know how this happened, but it seems everyone in warm climates doesn't understand that the same measures we take to keep our houses warm in the winter ALSO KEEP THEM COOL IN THE SUMMER
@TechConnectify I'm familiar with the concept from larger buildings, but I'm used to those just being stuck in the basement.
@Canageek @TechConnectify is there a difference between a mudroom and a utility room?
My house (Central Illinois) had neither, but I knew people with slightly bigger houses that did.
@WizardOfDocs @Canageek If the utilities are in your mudroom, then no. But personally, I would probably call that a laundry room first (if it has laundry appliances). Mudroom to me means a little vestibule and nothing more, but that's just how I think of it.
@TechConnectify Western Canada here, that's definitely how we do it (utility/furnace room, usually on the ground floor or basement). In my experience, washer and dryer are 50/50 chance of being in there or a dedicated laundry room closer to living areas. Nothing in the attic but cobwebs and squirrels (and often not easily accessible, just an access door hidden in a closet or something. BYO ladder).
@TechConnectify Excuse a "stupid" question from an European, but what for do you need air ducts anyway?
@smokku Because nearly all of us have air conditioning, and for those that choose not to have it, forced-air heat is so common at this point that it's cheaper to install a furnace than a boiler and radiators (plus it allows easy retrofit of an air conditioner down the line)
A fun little bonus is that, since heat pumps are just air conditioners that can also run backwards, most of our housing stock is ready to accept them with minimal modifications.
@TechConnectify My Orlando home, built in 1989 has the air handler in the garage, which is common. Utility rooms are not. At least not for this vintage. More common in apartments, from my experience.
All ductwork routed in this single story home is in the attic space, and is insulated. The cold air does not stay put in the attic long enough to be largely effected by the attic heat.
@RGPphotog Yeah but I bet there are some leaks. No ducting is perfect, and this is why I'm staunchly opposed to it being in the attic at all.
Even if you're only losing 10% of your cooling to the attic through leakage and thermal transfer, that's 10% extra on your power bill all because running ducts through attics became normalized somehow. It's also 10% more grid capacity needed for homes.
So I remain firmly opposed to it as normal practice, yet it continues to be...
@TechConnectify My heat pump unit was installed when i moved in. 2009. We have no furnace. I still have the original water heater 40Gal tank. electric. Washer/dryer also in my garage.
(I can't wait to get a heat pump water heater.)
@immibis @smokku Fun fact! Assuming this is some sort of quip about air conditioning, y'know that heat pumps are the same technology, right? We're all in agreement that we need to swap gas-burning with heat pumping because it's much less carbon-intensive. And air conditioning is just heat pumping, but pumping heat /out/
I've been struggling to convince people that air conditioning is actually not that energy-intensive and demonizing it is just silly. Especially because (con't)
@immibis @smokku the need for cooling happens to coincide with the months where solar energy production is highest.
The reason the power grid struggles more in the summer here than the winter is that huge swaths of buildings *burn gas* in the winter. That is much more climate-intensive, but it relieves the power grid. So when we stop burning gas and switch on the heat pumps, the grid is strained.
Long story short, this "cooling is a slippery slope!" mantra is silly and y'all better get over it
@TechConnectify Got it.
The thing with air is that it has low energy capacity.
Replacing hot air with cold works for a moment - until it heats from the walls.
It's even worse with replacing cold air with worm. You will still feel cold, of the skin not receiving IR radiation.
That's why I prefer water both for heating and cooling.
@smokku Um... sorry to be contrarian, but even a hydronic system is ultimately just transferring its heat energy to the air. That's literally what radiators do. If you're near one, you might get a nice amount of IR and I'm not knocking you for liking that, but directly heating or cooling the air is just as effective.
@hipno Ductless mini-splits are going to become your friends I have no doubt.
You might use an air-to-water heat pump to provide heating to your existing hydronic system, and you can install a small mini-split in one room to provide relief in heatwaves.
Humorously, this is more-or-less exactly how we got started with air conditioning. People would install a window unit in the living room first, then maybe a bedroom, and eventually we adapted our central heating systems to provide cooling.
@TechConnectify in Texas: detached homes will typically have a “mud room” in the back of the home for washer/dryer. Then water heater in a standalone closet somewhere else in the home.
Apartments will typically put the air handler and water heater in the same closet. If there’s enough space then you’ll also have W/D in there too.
@TechConnectify @immibis @smokku I think one of the issues in the US isn’t cooling itself (though we do tend to run it too much) but the fact that our heat envelopes are too large and too leaky.
You shouldn’t be cooling 5000sqft for two adults. And yet…
@SamTheGeek Even then, there is some degree of nuance.
Like, I agree broadly that McMansions are some of the worst parts of American culture. However, a large modern house can be much more energy-efficient than a small old one. This isn't to say that as a rule a McMansion uses less energy than a Chicago bungalow, but I'll bet many of them do.
@hipno We are struggling with HVAC contractors who just want to do the same old same old, and I have little doubt this is a worldwide phenomenon.
Finding contractors who like to deal with mini-splits is annoyingly hard right now, but they're so goshdarn flexible as a solution to *so* many problems that people will see the light before too long.
You just have to connect the two ends together with two pipes and a wire. Drill a few holes, route the pipe, and you're done!
@TechConnectify What makes no sense to me is that gas is cheaper than electricity. Not just per unit of energy, which still doesn't make sense, but, per unit of heat produced. Surely citywide pressurized flammable gas infrastructure costs more to maintain than electrical infrastructure.
@StarkRG @TechConnectify something about gas being able to carry all that energy vs wires being able to handle all that electricity without getting too hot I think. Worst case scenario is the gas pressure runs out and no gas is supplied. Not that I'm pro-gas or anything, perhaps homes need to be much better insulated regardless of gas or electricity heated.
@arfman @TechConnectify
Wires heating up isn't an issue due to many, many circuit breakers and other such safety devices. If, somehow, you managed to pull enough current through a electrical main that the wires heating up would be remotely an issue (it's an enormous amount), the current would simply be shut off.
On the other hand, the worst case scenario for gas is that houses and streets explode.
@StarkRG @arfman Wires in your home aren't the problem, it's wires on the grid.
We need a lot more transmission capacity than we have right now. Lines sag when they get too hot, sometimes to the point of touching a tree or the ground which will cut power at best and start a wildfire at worst. The huge Northeast blackout in 2003 was a result of this.
Rooftop solar may be part of the solution here, but I still have some issues with how we implement it today.
@TechConnectify @immibis @smokku Here in California, I feel the big problem with air conditioning is how poorly insulated a lot of houses are.
@TechConnectify @arfman I'm certainly not claiming that electricity is danger-free. I also wasn't taking about wires in your home. There are circuit breakers at substations that will cut off if wires get anywhere near to melting. Sagging is certainly a potential issue in places where you have overhead wires rather than buried ones, but making sure there's sufficient clearance is part of maintaining the system.
@StarkRG @arfman OK, but the system is barely functional as it is. It needs a lot of work to grow.
And as far as why the gas grid is cheaper, well for one it is all already mostly buried and many of the logistical challenges of electricity production don't apply. For instance, there is actual storage on the gas grid in the form of buffer tanks.
Plus, you can get nearly all the energy out of gas when you burn it at home. Power plants are lucky to get half, so I don't find it surprising myself
@StarkRG @arfman However, we're in the middle of grid operators suddenly waking up to the magic of free energy production from solar and wind.
If somebody cracks the storage code, then electricity will probably become cheaper than gas, and once we hit the tipping point, the gas grid will start a death spiral.
The next couple of decades are going to be fascinating...
@TechConnectify @immibis @smokku
I think people are just comparing their bills from winter to summer, and not seeing much difference if they are running the AC all the time.
@TechConnectify My spidey senses tell me you’re arguing with a German. They hate air conditioning so much that some have wanted to ban heat pumps from acting in reverse to be air conditioners so nobody could “waste” electricity on air conditioning.
Interestingly, these are the same people that open all the windows in their homes multiple times per day due to fear of mold. I can’t imagine that’s ideal for energy consumption…
@TechConnectify I've thought about this a lot in my house and I'm not sure there's many other places the ducts can go.
The closet where the AC shares walls with a portion of the rooms, but not all of them.
There's no basement because the frost line is negligible, and the soil type precludes a basement anyway. (Inch-wide cracks and separation when the clay soil dries)
The roof crawl space has the sort of access to the upstairs necessary for ducting, and allows future access unlike walls.
@tevruden If you didn't see my earlier toot, just imagine all the ducts were hanging from the ceiling. Not above it, but hanging down below.
You can easily make that less ugly by boxing them in with a decorative soffit.
Now, I'm not suggesting you do this to your home, but that's what I'm suggesting should be normalized.
@tevruden I'm thinking of, like, a typical California ranch.
If there's a utility room or closet central to the structure, you can run a trunk duct around the perimeter of the home and add registers for each room near the window. For returns, add a through-the-wall vent above the doors (or, alternatively, just have a minimum door clearance to the floor) and draw air in from the hall.
That setup is already pretty common, except the ducts are *above* the ceiling for, most likely, cost reasons.
@TechConnectify
I guess the problem is that ac is rarely done in a centralised fashion in buildings wherear heatind often is?
@morpheo Oh, in the US, central cooling is /very/ common.
But, in places where it's not, I see a future where you repeat our history. People add a ductless mini-split to the living room to provide relief in heat waves (much like we added window units in the mid-century). Then they'll look into adding it to the bedrooms. And, eventually, central A/C becomes normalized.
The extent of that last part will likely be quite variable, though. We still build some new housing without central aircon
@TechConnectify @davecturner @snailerotica Amusingly, with some newer refrigerants, hydronic heating would make sense again... with heat pumps.
Some companies in the UK are selling in-place conversions for boilers to using heat pumps for the heat.
@lispi314 @davecturner @snailerotica Yep! Those are really intriguing and I think they'll be great for relatively easy retrofits.
But I'd wager as heatwaves get worse, people are gonna want cooling at least in one room. Luckily a basic mini-split can add that quite easily - but once you get it in the living room, you might want it in the bedrooms, too, and perhaps American HVAC history repeats itself across the pond...
@TechConnectify @immibis @smokku
Marques Brownlee recently did a video where he discusses the balance of energy in his house since he installed solar roof and batteries.
TLDR: Even the full roof is not sufficient to keep with AC needs in Midwest and he ran a slight deficit in the summer.
AC power spikes are a problem for Texas grid during the summer in the same way as cold snaps are in the winter; and are also an issue for EU grids.
@andrei_chiffa I haven't watched that video, but to be honest I'm pretty skeptical of that conclusion. My worst daily average is about 25 kWh per day - and that includes charging my car. So either Marques's home is very wasteful or there's more to this.
Regardless, I am not of the mind that rooftop solar is all that great. At least, not how it functions right now. We need a lot of reforms to incentives and who pays for what before I'll push anyone in that direction.
@andrei_chiffa You have me looking at my power bill history and as a point of comparison, my December power usage last year spiked up to about what it was in July because I had /two/ strands of C9 incandescent Christmas lights running 8 hours a night.
My home is new, and it's not that big (and is helped even further by being a townhome), but I wouldn't need a very large array to take care of my needs.
I'd bet cost via complexity. One hole in the ceiling is cheaper than entry and possibly exit holes in several rooms and whatever needs to be done to make it look visually appealing.
Thinking about it, a similar thing could be done in my house by keeping the ducting for two of the bedrooms in the conditioned space by going through the connected closets behind the AC, but that would have added complexity at building.
Might be worth it now tho.
@tevruden Well, at time of construction, I'm not even sure it would be that big of a deal. Done in the right order, you would install the ceiling first, then run the trunk duct before you enclose any walls.
A little extra framing around it for drywall isn't gonna add much in the context of building a new home, at least I wouldn't think so. Roll it into a mortgage payment and it might cost an extra $10/month which I'll bet you'd save in energy bills.
@tevruden But retrofitting is a lot more complex, for sure.
More than anything, I just want some California builders to come up here to the land of 95 degree summers with 70% humidity and -20 winters.
Somehow we manage to build homes for that - and they can, too!
@TechConnectify @StarkRG @arfman not only the energy sector is going to be disrupted if the following argument is sound:
@mainec Just finished watching this - there's a lot of exciting stuff in there, for sure, but I'm nowhere near as convinced that autonomous vehicles are happening that fast (and frankly the Tesla stats cited are all sorts of murky and it was disappointing to see them taken at face value).
I think in general the point that car ownership will fall is correct, but I think transit systems and bike infrastructure are a more realistic means to that end.
@saidsoftly ??? I have no idea what you mean by "maintain them"
Plus, somehow, we don't deal with moldy ductwork despite it being humid AF in the summer. Maybe our dry winters are enough of a relief, but I think that issue is overblown.
And coming from a place where rigid ductwork is largely the /default/ I'm puzzled by your aversion to it, honestly.
@saidsoftly I mean, cheap and easy usually wins the game.
For the record, though, I'm not talking about leaving the ductwork exposed. I've never heard of anyone having a mold problem from ducting that's enclosed in either a soffit or within the floor joists as is common here.
Bottom line, though, you completely eliminate energy losses as a consideration when you keep the ducts within the conditioned space. Perhaps because we're all cheapskate Midwesterners, we'd never consider otherwise.
@saidsoftly I would say that we're a little more likely to spend a bit more upfront to save long-term in large part because our climate is so extreme.
And it's endlessly humorous to me that what we've been doing as a rule for 50+ years is suddenly being discovered in milder climates.
Like, the framing of this article is genuinely hilarious to me! The house I grew up in was built in the 1930's and used a trunk and branch ducting system.
https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/minimizing-energy-losses-ducts
@saidsoftly I don't think it's marginal, though! Certainly not in an attic.
Assuming zero leaks (which, good luck with that) you're running a lot of air through a tube with maybe R13 insulation, and that tube happens to run through a 140° space.
Or, you could run it all below a ceiling with R50 insulation, eliminate the temperature gradient, and leaks don't matter anymore.
This article claims 25% losses on the low end.
@saidsoftly Now, is that article correct? I dunno! But even if you can save just 10% on your cooling bill, when you're looking at building a new home, what I'd call proper ducting might add 10 to 15 dollars to a monthly mortgage.
That's money well spent as far as I'm concerned. Imagine how much less strained the Texas grid would be if they just built their homes like we do up here!
@saidsoftly That's fair, and retrofits vs. new builds is a big part of this discussion. Mostly I'm talking about new builds and best-practices.
But to be honest, the losses from ducts are another reason I think ductless mini-splits might start taking off.
Eliminate all the ceiling penetrations in the attic, insulate it more, and switch to a mini-split system and you can probably cut your energy use in half. That's nothing to sneeze at.
@TechConnectify My whole floor is a radiator.
And even with that, I resort to fireplace on a very cold winter nights.
@saidsoftly That's kind of what I'm hoping to do.
I'm seeing a lot of... weird practices in other parts of the country. They don't seem weird when they're normalized, and that's the whole problem.
But a lot of it is mindset, too. Not enough long-term thinking. If it increases the cost of a new build by $20K to go with 2X6 exterior stud walls and run the ducting properly, you will almost certainly see that paid for by the end of a 15 year mortgage.
Basically, I hope to spread Midwesternism ;)
@saidsoftly And just for reference, despite being in the climate that I'm in, my three bedroom townhome has energy bills that are consistently around $100. Summer electric is ~$60/month, gas about $30. They just about invert in the winter, though on a really cold month gas might poke above $90.
There's nothing exceptional about my home, really. It's just built how we build things here.
@saidsoftly Fair, but that's why I would hope building codes would become more stringent.
"But that's communism!"
@saidsoftly Eh, perhaps.
But if I may, your original position was that the losses are too minimal to be worth rectifying. If we agree that 25% loss is average, and that a 20% drop in a energy bill would be the result of a "proper" Midwestern-esque design, does that change your position?
I'm mainly hoping to challenge assumptions here. Because it's only not worth doing when people believe it's not worth doing, and oftentimes that's really the only sticking point.
@RAOF @hipno Yeah, the Australians in my audience were really confused by A) mini-splits being novel and B) me calling it a heat pump rather than a reverse-cycle aircon.
I really, reallllly just want someone in the South or West to be like "y'know, they have some pretty awful weather up in the Midwest, yet they live the somehow. I wonder what their homes are built like" and then get their asses up here to learn a thing or two.
- replies
- 0
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 0
@TechConnectify I'm sure you know what I mean. 😸
BTW, do you have airlocks at your houses entries?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windfang_(Architektur)
@smokku They're pretty common, yeah! But interestingly, less so on the front door - it's usually at the back or side, and up here we call that a mudroom. But you could also have an attached garage that would *kinda* count, so long as you thought to close the overhead door before you went in. Obviously less effective, though.
But, get into large buildings and they pretty much all have a double-door vestibule airlock if not a revolving door.
@kazriko Molten salt energy storage is an option for flatlands.
I lived in San Diego years ago, and while the water heater and washer/dryer were in the garage, the furnace was in a tiny closet on the main floor. The duct work ran through the floor between the upper and lower levels, which seemed quite reasonable to me, basically no heating or cooling would be wasted to the outside.
Of course the single pane aluminum windows and the almost complete lack of useful insulation made a sane design kind of pointless...
@immibis @smokku @morpheo ...it's actually not.
Insulation stops heat transfer in both directions. The same techniques that hold heat in in the winter will also keep heat from entering in the summer. However, you need to have some provision to remove heat energy (i.e. a heat pump) in order to maintain a lower-than-ambient temperature.