MNN - Mother Nature Network

and these get to big-box stores. Until then they can be put together, but it's too much for an average person to be feasible. Most heat-cold is lost in corners, through studs, the foundation & floor (heated air rises but heat radiates so the room being hotter loses heat down as well that way. Basically our homes radiate their difference in temperature, heating the outside in winter, cooling it in summer and we pay the bill, all the insulation can do is slow it down, there's no thermal-mass to store too much thermal energy to make it hard to change temperature at all, that's the idea. Thermal-mass can be sandbags, water, stone or dense bricks put in the sunny spot in winter and a dark corner in summer for the best effect, that's all there is to working with an existing home, find where and how much works for a room and make it look good to live with it. A properly design home using thermal-mass uses only 10% of the thermal inputs the same building needs without it. An existing home can easily reduce their needs to about 1/3rd of current usage by applying wainscots of bricks and such to external walls, no other changes to lifestyle to save energy this is just for the physical building. We fail to have the products to heat from below using fluid transfer at the moment, so, using baseboard units below the bricks seems most efficient per watt of what's available, but you get the idea, putting the heat below the thermal-mass to add energy, a wainscot being low in the room will naturally stay cool so likely won't need cooling in summer for most rooms. I have way too much engineering and design work on this ... but the point is this, from historical archeological studies in Phoenix, AZ, it was proven that every ten years since the Civil War there have been boom-n-bust cycles in housing where the middle-class is emptied into poverty and the rich stay about the same, every ten years since 1868 or so ... put that up against the pit house, the hogan and adobe that works and our housing is in scientific terms some 100-times less efficient thermally. Engineering in thermal-mass into housing could have been done in the engineering bloom of the 1930's, almost a century ago as far a techincal requirements to predictively do it. There is no Liberal money left here in America ... it was crucified by a parasitic, captive-market capitalism feeding off of monthly bills and boom-n-bust cycles where the wealth of the middle-class is taken from them and moved to the rich, every ten years like clockwork.