Comment by asdff

Well it was great for hundreds of thousands of years, then it was really bad for a couple generations, now it is just less bad for potentially forever. Hardly an improvement when you look at things in scales of our species time on this planet vs since grandad's day.

Yeah, that's easy to underestimate. Where I live they've even declared a ban on open fires; a number of people have a fireplace / pit / thing in their back yard which is used for social events, but during certain weather conditions that smoke lingers. And because firewood is expensive people will use whatever they get their hands on. Also, people don't have proper stoves, and people don't know how to make a proper fire, so the result is... a lot of noxious smoke and poor air quality.

What are average high and low temperatures where you live in the UK? I looked up the averages for the UK as a whole (which I’m sure can vary quite a bit once you get more local) but I found between 20C and 2C.

Where I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan average temperatures average between 32C and -6C. As for extremes, I have personally experienced there highs around 37C and lows down to -28C (still went to work in 3ft of snow).

So I will take my modern home with its ability to be well insulated and heated and cooled.

Yes, people lived there long before those modern conveniences, and they were cold and hot. They kept warm in the winter by keeping fires going inside their dwellings at all times. I even spent a week in autumn living in a recreation of one as a kid. Unsutprisingly, it was cold and everything smelled of smoke by the end of the week. Think of how much smoke and particulate we breathed in to stay warm (and there wasn’t even snow on the ground yet). I didn’t even mind it.

I’ll give the final word though to those living in even colder and more extreme climates, and any intrepid people living above the Arctic Circle.

Even then you don't get that sort of quality outside certain economic situations. The proverbial "old house" in california is a stick frame dwelling on a post and pier foundation over a crawlspace.

This is because it seldom rains. So when it does rain the soil is very hard and doesn't absorb much of it. So it comes down the hills and causes landslides and shifting soils in the alluvial valleys that much of californian civilization is built into (since channelized due to said wandering waters destroying early californian civilization multiple times until this was learned and tamed by the u.s. army). And then, of course the earth quakes, which destroyed an early brick structured version of san fransisco almost in its entirety in 1906.

Not to mention available american and canadian lumber connected by railhead to the entire continent. most of such reserves in europe were claimed for sunken ships over the previous centuries. So now you live in a 300 year old stone house probably with a basement instead of a timber building on post and piers because you have no cheap timber to this degree here and you have no earthquake risks or much shifting soil. Could you build a house like yours in the U.S.? Of course, if you pay a premium for it.

What's the average temperature in your house on a cold winter day?

Look at passive houses, almost fully airtight, 70%+ reduction in heating requirements, fresh air all day long thanks to hrv

The problem is that people want "cheap" houses, cheap houses coupled with modern regulations = sealed boxes. The average joe doesn't give a shit about building quality, it's all about getting something big and as cheap as possible.

While it's totally possible to build competently, my impression is that, in the US at least, there are tons of existing houses—built roughly between the 70s (energy crisis) and the mid-2000s when ventilation requirements became more common in building codes—that are fairly tightly sealed but lack any sort of real ventilation systems beyond like, kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans.

Having grown up and lived primarily in (uncomfortably!) drafty old houses, I've noticed the phenomenon ever since I was little kid because they have a distinctive stuffiness and smell of furniture/carpet/plywood even if nothing inside is actually new. I think many people are just used to it/consider it a normal smell of a house because so much of the housing stock is in this category.

Really depends where you live and who built the home. Most contractors in the Midwest still aren't sure about putting network cabling in and haven't heard of air exchangers. Seems like the drive is to save 50 cents wherever possible per PVC toilet flanges vs at least PVC and metal ones

The constant fan noise issue always seems a bit absurd to me. There’s an excellent mitigation available that also happens to be to extremely cheap: insulated flexible duct. The cheap mylar-fiberglass-mylar sandwich stuff that’s reinforced with a steel spiral, is sold in big boxes, and is favored by cheap contractors because it’s easy to transport and install.

This stuff is amazing: not only is it safe (no airflow in contact with fiberglass) and fairly well insulated, but it has excellent acoustic insertion loss. If you take 100 feet of rigid galvanized steel duct and talk into one end, someone at the other end will hear you loud and clear. If you take that same duct and install duct liner (and incredibly annoying process) like a fancy commercial installer, you won’t hear much at the other end. If you use 100' of flex duct, you will hear basically nothing. This stuff mostly outperforms even the most expensive commercial acoustic solutions!

Here’s a spec sheet from a random brand:

https://www.flexmasterusa.com/Portals/2/Downloads/Flex/6B.pd...

Wow, 12 feet of 6" duct attenuates 250Hz sound by 43dB! That will make that frequency close to inaudible even if the equipment end of the duct is quite loud as HVAC gear goes. Use wider duct or a longer run (or both) to get it even quieter and to make a bigger dent in the lowest frequencies.

So you stick you fancy fan somewhere that you won’t directly hear it (in mechanical space with a fiber-insulated wall between you and it) and you connect it to the living space with ducting that contains at least a decent length of insulated flexible duct. And you keep the grilles and ducts large enough to keep face velocities low so that the ducts and grilles themselves don’t make much noise, and you have a fantastic system.

Or you use extremely expensive specialized semi-rigid ventilation duct or rigid galvanized steel or uninsulated flexible aluminum, and you’re sad because your duct is a speaking tube.

> all kind of glues

Glues are getting better over time. Slightly nasty polyurethanes [0] and quite nasty solvent- and bitumen-based products are gradually being replaced with STPE, and STPE seems to be considered quite safe. It doesn’t even have a prop 65 warning!

[0] Polyurethane may well be harmless when fully cured, but the uncured isocyanates are most definitely nasty. Fortunately, they’re so reactive that they will aggressively react with water (even just moisture in the air) or almost any alcohol and produce much safer products.

Inhaled particulates are never good news. Varying degrees of bad, but none of it is good.

Not an easy silver bullet. They'll filter out pm2.5 but most don't touch VOCs. Most that claim to remove VOCs don't have enough volume of activated carbon to justify that. And even if you buy one of the ultra expensive machines that do filter VOCs, you're still left with rapid carbon dioxide accumulation which probably acutely harms cognition even at sub 1000 ppm levels, forcing you to open the windows which is self defeating.

You're really left with two good solutions, one is centralized airflow with appropriate HEPA filtering which many can't afford, or to move to a location with default clean air, again a difficult proposition depending on work etc.