On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 09:49 -0300, Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> Bob Axtell wrote:
> 
> > Ranch style homes are also easier to heat and cool; the second
> > story either gets too hot or too cold vs the bottom level.
> 
> Where I come from, the traditional way is to heat the ground floor with
> kitchen and living room up to normal temperatures, and heat the (mostly)
> sleeping rooms upstairs only with a reduced temperature (traditionally only
> the "waste" heat from downstairs, but nowadays all rooms have usually
> individually temperature-controlled heating and it's just set to a lower
> temperature). This helps reduce heating costs.
> 
> I've always wondered how you can live in a house that has not a controlled
> temperature for every individual room. (At least in an area with cold
> winters.)

I'm not sure what you think makes living in a house with a single
control more difficult, we just end up wasting energy heating the whole
house. The heating system (forced air is most common in my area) is
designed to heat the house evenly. A well designed system accomplishes
this task quite well, with perhaps a degree of deviation from the
warmest to coldest area of the house. Unfortunately designing the system
well isn't that straightforward, and is NOT the cheapest way to do
things, so you'll often hear of houses where one room is always much
colder then the others.

My house is a good example. It is designed very well from a heating
point of view except for ONE room, which is always 2 degrees colder then
the rest of the house. The reason being it's the furthest from the
furnace and it's vent bends so many times the air velocity at the
register is quite small. We tried a few things (i.e. putting an inline
fan) but settled on a separate electric heater just for that room.

Forced air heating has one MAJOR advantage over almost any other heating
system: adding central air is a breeze. In many areas of the world that
need major heat in the winter AC isn't much of a concern in the summer.
However where I live (Toronto, Canada) our humidity is very high in the
summer making AC almost a necessity.

The only thing I wish my house were different were fuel choice. My dad
(in Europe actually) decided to build his house with forced air (very
rare in Europe at the time). The neat part is he has duel fuel. He has a
wood furnace and a natural gas furnace. Whichever furnace is active
heats water that circulates through a heat exchanger in the duct work,
heating the house. The benefit is he can heat with wood (about half the
price) when he's home, and the system automatically switches over to the
gas furnace when the wood is burnt up (good in the middle of the night
on really cold nights, or when they are away from home).

TTYL

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