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oh, if only it was this easy.
Lloyd Alter
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It used to be: if you lived in the north, you built out of wood frame, and if you had the money you covered it in brick. If you lived in the southwest, you built solid, thick walls with lots of thermal mass. If you lived in Florida, you built light, quick and on stilts because you were going to get blown out to sea every ten years anyways.
Then everything got homogenized, and soon houses in Arizona subdivisions were indistinguishable from those in Calgary. Energy was cheap, so you used it to cool the former and heat the latter.
Now that energy isn't so cheap and we are nervous about security of supply, people are looking at different, better walls. But they still should be appropriate for climate; not every wall shown in this section is appropriate for every part of the country.
Nor is energy conservation the only thing that you have to worry about; there is also the embodied energy in the production of the wall. That is why I tend to favour wood framing; it is light, and is built from a renewable resource. Others familiar with hurricanes and tornadoes wouldn't touch the stuff.
The choices we make in the building blocks that we use are tempered by history, local culture, availability of materials and appropriateness for the use. We have tried to list the pluses and minuses of each, but choose among them carefully; There are more considerations than just energy.
