The TC video has a lot of details about why awnings are a great idea, and about how other places are still using them and getting good results; but the reasoning offered for why we don't use them any more... still boils down to "we forgot" and "AC".
Well, I think he made a bit of a stronger accusation too then just "AC".
In that, if your property had awnings the implication was it didn't have AC (I guess people can't read/trust a listing) so you needed to remove the awnings to advertise that you had AC.
We still sometimes use things like awnings, just in the form of 'porches' or modern-looking 'slat awnings'
Changes in architectural fashion has made some forms of awning look dated.
Fabric awnings need upkeep to keep them looking smart. When the awnings are above ground level, it's semi-expensive upkeep. Building owners are tempted to keep those tired, sun-bleached awnings in place rather than renewing them - contributing to the dated reputation of awnings.
Awnings also face competition from interior curtains and blinds, which are much simpler to maintain.
And there's shifting building use. A few decades ago an office worker would prize a desk by a big window with lots of natural light to read paperwork by, but in the age of PCs nobody wants direct sunlight on their screen. Internal blinds let workers control the light levels to match their needs.
Also, I imagine it was a hassle making sure they were closed and secured when a storm came up - and expensive to repair (not to mention dangerous) if you forgot it...
I had an awning and a pool enclosure in South Florida. So did most houses in the neighborhood. Then the 2004 hurricane season happened, and there was neither of each around anywhere ever again.
It surprises me to read about "fixed metal frame" awnings. You don't _have_ to make that trade off.
In the Netherlands a lot of houses have electrically retractable awnings (or even just mechanically windable by hand), especially above the giant windows facing the back yard.
During winter and bad weather, we retract the awning. When it's too sunny, we deploy it.
"Many"? It seems to me like there are many without. Homeowners Associations everywhere keep blocking them as well because they ruin the street image, so they say. Oh and they block AC too because it's too noisy and the outside unit is too ugly. And so many homes are stuck with scorching summers.
In the Netherlands it costs around a grand, as for maintenance... Haven't needed to do any in more than 15 years. The actual screen retracts into a weather proof metal casing, so there's not that much that goes wrong, whereas fixed awnings are exposed to the full weather gamut 24/7.
Let me put it this way: it's cheap enough that a lot of social housing and other cheap forms of housing inhabited by the "lower class" feature them.
A government paying for a thing does not in any way imply that the thing is a good use of money. How many decades of fabric replacements could you get from the savings of bolting on a simple metal frame as compared to an elaborate electromechanically actuated arm mechanism?
This is such a silly argument. A movable awning isn't some complex apparatus, it's literally a hinge and two sticks. You're trying to frame this as some kind of an expensive problem when it really isn't.
Connected to a gear that needs oil, a chain that needs oil and can rust, or a rope that withers. Being overly dismissive of failure modes isn’t a good look. I don’t claim that fixed awnings are God’s gift to humanity, just that they don’t have some of the drawbacks associated with moving parts. The amount of emotional reaction I’ve received to that completely factual statement is frankly ridiculous.
You're overlooking the fact that these are incredibly common in the Netherlands, yet the massive problems you describe are nowhere to be found. Most people get away with giving them some love maybe every few years when they get creaky, if even that. Your argument is about as reasonable as saying we shouldn't have door hinges or door locks because moving parts have drawbacks. It's silly, these systems are so simple that they require next to no upkeep for years at a time.
Indeed we shouldn’t have hinges or locks because moving parts have drawbacks, in contexts where that matters. For instance portals that don’t need a door at all, or walls that don’t need to open. Would you argue that every open passageway should have a door blocking it, and every wall should have hinges installed? No, that’s ridiculous. It’s equally ridiculous to get this angry about the simple fact that fixed awnings have upsides, and depending on the context they might be a better choice than retractable ones.
All I said is moving parts have drawbacks. That’s true. Then a million people kept on the thread to try to claim otherwise, yourself included. Now you’re resorting to 4chan style comebacks, so that’s fun.
Northwestern Europe usually gets a storm at hurricane level 2 every one or two years and several at level 1 per season. There's a reason the name for these storms – Orkan – is derived from hurricane.
For comparison, that's similar or slightly higher in strength than hurricane Sandy when it hit the northeast of the US.
That's why if you have fixed awnings in this region of europe, they're usually removed as soon as fall hits (which compromises on the fixed part) or made of metal (which compromises on the "awning" part IMO).
Even a working family, if they're earning very little, may be living in subsidized public housing.
Renters have lots of rights over here, allowing them to customize a lot about the apartment. Awnings are usually owned and installed by the renters themselves.
So a family that has so little income that they need to live in subsidized public housing may still have enough income to buy a retractable awning.
> A government paying for a thing does not in any way imply that the thing is a good use of money.
Agreed, nor is the inverse implied of course. But what is your point?
> How many decades of fabric replacements could you get from the savings of bolting on a simple metal frame as compared to an elaborate electromechanically actuated arm mechanism?
That's what I'm saying, fabric doesn't really need to get replaced in 15 years and going from personal experience. The mechanism is simple enough to be reliable as well.
Ultimately, it's impossible to analyze the cost benefits of this. It's a matter of personal taste and what the harshness of the local climate allows. I don't doubt that fixed awnings are cheaper - but actuating awnings fix their drawbacks, and the maintenance they introduce is minimal in my experience. And frankly, for the price of giving up a single vacation in 15+ years, it's not that expensive. Again, cheap enough that those in social housing can make the choice to get them installed.
ETA: my point of mentioning social housing is to say that people with lower income can still get them. The government doesn't pay for it. I just wanted to paint a picture of the relative cost.
What is your point in stating that public housing uses them? (aka the government buys them).
No clue why this turned into a huge debate. I don’t have a dog in this fight, all I’m saying is that america has retractable awnings, they have some downsides, and a government (or a “low class” individual) buying something doesn’t convince me it’s a good investment.
> What is your point in stating that public housing uses them? (aka the government buys them).
Who said anything about the government buying them? The renters in public housing usually buy and install them by themselves. That's why usually every balcony has a different type of awning, in a different state of disrepair.
While I'm nowadays in IT, when I was a child our family lived in this type of public housing, and we had a retractable awning of exactly that kind that my parents had installed themselves.
While this is true, awnings aren't that expensive, and while I don't have the knowledge to do the maths, they will earn themselves back over time with how much heat they keep out and how much you'll need to run the AC.
That changed in the last decade, among other things the population is dissatisfied with immigration.
I cannot tell you if that is justified, but I can say from personal experience that in some cases the praised Dutch directness turned to racism.
Things like, people not believing that you have a phd, or refusing to take your credit card because the color of skin does not match the ethnicity of the name.
The Netherlands has a higher population density than the US (520 people per square km vs 37) and lower GDP per capita ($62k vs $82k), so I'm not sure if that framing is exactly useful. In absolute numbers, yes, there's fewer people, but they're packed into a very small area so you have to be smart about how you do that.
I think the builders of the past would be amazed by modern technology like argon filled double paned windows with advanced window films to reflect the heat instead of letting it in.
But yes, let's bring back the awnings too. Sometimes the low tech ways are easiest and best. I will say that I don't think awnings alone can save a stick built modern house from the heat. Part of the key to old houses staying cool was high thermal mass: lots of brick and stone that could stay cool during the day. As great as modern insulation is at keeping hot and cool separate, a modern insulated wall doesn't cool it's surroundings like a high thermal mass wall would.
Moving to a world where we combine passive cooling and high thermal mass construction with the benefits of modern tech will be key in my opinion.
Awnings have a nice property that fancy windows don’t: they can reduce heat gain in the summer while still allowing more heat gain in the winter. A nice south-facing window that lets the low winter sun in can provide a lot of desirable heat in the winter in a cold climate.
(Also, removing a given amount of summer heat via air conditioning is considerably cheaper than adding that same amount of winter heat via gas or heat pump in many climates, because the indoor-outdoor temperature difference is much higher in the winter.)
They're on a free standing trellis that doesn't touch the house.
Two actually, a vertical mesh straight up from the garden bed adjacent to the brick paved verandah, and another that's almost horizontal with a slight slope away from the house.
Most of the summer growth is dense on the horizontal (like an awning) with grape bunches developing and hanging down for easy picking when rips.
English ivy (hedera helix) can damage mortar, but grape vines don't have holdfast structures like hedera that can sink into mortar. Plus, hedera helix is so dense that rotting vegetation and sheltered animals can also cause problems. Grapevines have tendrils that grab onto and twine around something like wires or a trellis.
Most vines, including Ivy don’t damage bricks walls that are build well. I don’t know about grapes but most ivy uses “suction cups” to trap on directly to the bricks. I think the misconception that they damage mortar might come from the moisture the plants can trap which can then damage the masonry. Or maybe it’s because the plants hide damage until it gets serious Mortar doesn’t last forever after all. Anyway, if you build your house or wall properly you can grow stuff on it with basically no downsides outside of having more bugs (and the things that eat them) on your wall that you might want.
It might not work so well on the Lego brick walls that are glued onto the front of concrete these days, but that would just be a guess.
For those interested in digging into this passive solar design concerns itself with solar gain optimization. Passive house is a standard that makes use of these concepts as well but goes alot further.
> argon filled double paned windows with advanced window films to reflect the heat instead of letting it in
We replaced the old double-paned windows with new triple-paned with 60% IR filter. There's hardly any tint, but boy did it make a difference. Especially in the living room which has a very large window which catches the sun from noon to midnight in the summer.
Before the wood floor in the living room would be baking hot where the sun hit, uncomfortably so at times. Now I can't tell the difference.
We added it just cause it didn't cost much extra, figured why not. Very glad we did.
> Part of the key to old houses staying cool was high thermal mass: lots of brick and stone that could stay cool during the day.
That only works if you don't have long hot spells. I live in a house with high thermal mass - reinforced concrete filled cinderblock. It was built by a commercial builder as his own house in 1950. There's enough thermal mass to keep the interior temp stable for three days. No need for air conditioning.
This worked fine until Northern California started having week-long stretches of 100F+ temperatures. That didn't happen until about ten years ago. Once all that thermal mass heats up to ambient, it won't come down for days.
I live in about a 200 year old New England farmhouse that’s a mixture of post and beam and stick. I definitely observe that for one or two hot days, especially with passably temperate nights, inside will definitely be cooler than out. But once the house heats up, it takes days to get it cool even if temperatures have gone down outside.
> Sometimes the low tech ways are easiest and best.
They’re not even easiest and best, but they’re additive and in the grand scheme of things awnings (and shutters) are not that expensive, so it’s a small investment for a permanent benefit.
While modern building materials are very good at keeping the heat out, they aren't perfect. My house was built without awnings or AC and with modern window tech, but we opted to have awnings and screens installed nevertheless and they made a huge difference in how much heat from sun is coming into the house (not to mention the bright light itself).
For my case, I think it's irresponsible to be installing AC without first making sure the house is optimized for keeping the heat out.
> As great as modern insulation is at keeping hot and cool separate, a modern insulated wall doesn't cool it's surroundings like a high thermal mass wall would.
Why does modern insulation hold less thermal mass? Is it just that trapped air has less mass than stone?
That's exactly the reason. Technically it's actually the amount of energy needed to heat a volume of material, not the physical mass, that is important. But for many materials the two go hand in hand.
Touch a cold blanket and cold stone countertop and tell me which feels cooler, then do the same thing for a hot blanket and a hot countertop.
Sure, the stone is more conducive meaning you feel the temperature sooner. But it also has a lot of thermal mass, meaning it can give off or absorb more heat.
I've geeked out on thermal mass as much as the next guy, but I don't think it's a good solution at scale. Adding thermal mass is expensive, both due to the materials cost and that it's a niche building technique. Insulation, heat pumps, and solar all benefit from mass production and technology improvements. Combine them with light-colored roofs and solar panels, and that can probably beat thermal mass construction.
The material costs for adobe are almost certainly close to zero if you live in an area that can benefit from using it.
The labor costs for adobe have become very high, mostly it seems because the descendants of the families that started the amazing adobe brick "factories" no longer want to be dirt farmers.
> can probably beat thermal mass construction.
You have to define what "beat" means. My hundred year old adobe did not rise above 81F as an interior temperature this summer, despite outside highs around 100F. That would be possible (or even lower!) with the technologies you mentioned, but my adobe house did that with no energy utilization at all.
Curiously enough, here in Spain they're still pretty common nowadays, as lots of houses purposely incorporated green awnings, both to protect an exponentially-growing number of these houses from harsh sunlight during summer season, and to presumably 'soften' the arrival to the city of an increasing quantity of newcomers from rural Spain, as they already were very familiarized with them and, the designers thought, would find spots of green on the building more appealing comming from a greener countryside.
What percentage of US buildings would you say have air conditioning? The amount of UK homes that have AC is basically 0. Although I guess most commercial buildings would have it. I wonder if this is because UK homes are mainly brick, would that make a difference? Absolute max temp here in summer is 40 degrees C for 1 or 2 days and 30 degrees is pretty rare on most days in summer. When I saw the title I'd assumed this was about rainfall and guttering, which is something we do know about in the UK!
We have a retractable on our south-facing patio door/window near San Jose and it's made a huge difference in terms of heat rejection after we installed it. On hot summer days it makes a noticeable difference. And since it's retractable it doesn't make the back room permanently dark. It's one of the major items that lets us survive a south bay summer without air conditioning. We'll probably upgrade our gas furnace to a heat pump eventually and get AC "free" but in the meantime this was a much cheaper stopgap.
I don't understand why newbuild flats are obsessed with using so much glass. Almost everyone I see is being covered up, sometimes even with just cardboard.
Took the train to Amsterdam the other day, on the way there is an apartment building where the shared hallways are on the train-tracks side of the building, it's floor to ceiling glass. Some sections of it had cardboard or even aluminium foil to try and keep the sun / heat out, that one looked like a greenhouse.
Likewise, I work for an energy company, in summer the aging AC (which they keep low because an energy company's policy and marketing is actually the opposite of what they provide) cannot keep up because there's nothing keeping the sunlight out but flimsy shades on the inside.
Anecdotally, it feels like Americans generally don't care about natural lighting. About twenty years ago, my wife was looking for apartments and asked the leasing office if there was any unit available facing south or east. Apparently it was unusual enough a question that the apartment manager asked back if it was for religious reasons.
This article would suggest the opposite though - when AC made it feasible everyone removed the awnings that were blocking light thus maximizing natural light.
But that's the thing - You probably don't want to sit outside under direct sunlight in a summer afternoon, do you? Unless you live very far up north, having summer sunlight hit your floor is not very pleasant, either. A well-positioned awning can block summer sunlight while allowing in most of winter sunlight.
My deck gets direct sunlight with no easy way to block it when the sun is high in the sky. As a result I don’t actually use the deck much until later in the day.
In hot areas, even the shade of rooftop solar panels can make a substantial difference inside a building. And there's the ultra low tech method of just planting more shade trees.
Unfortunately with most US build tract housing, there's not enough room between most houses to provide dedicated shade by most any method. I wonder if shade between the roof gaps between houses would be useful.
Problem with shade trees is that trees have the unfortunately tendency to loose branches or fall during severe weather and having them next to your house isn't ideal when that happens. Also, depending on where you are located, those trees may end up being a great way of letting a wildfire spread to your home.
Even if the trees aren't shading the house directly, they will have a cumulative cooling effect; they capture the sun before it hits and warms up the ground, they have constant evaporative cooling, etc.
I added an awning to my roof top deck door because the door wasn’t weather proofed enough to constantly being hammered by Seattle autumn rain. No matter high tech you go, a low tech solution of just something to make sure your door isn’t hammered directly by the rain is good enough to solve that weird leak you have in your 4 year old home.
I live in a complex and my neighbour on one side has a metal awning over their back door. A neighbour on the other side enclosed their patio in glass and it has windows that can open so that they are at the same angle as an awning.
As a result during summer mornings both of them are blasting me with tight beams of sunlight which increases the temperature in my place while forcing me to keep my curtains closed until later in the morning when they stop blinding me.
Houses also made use of the "stack effect". A cupola was put on the roof apex. The cupola was vented on the sides and was open to the attic. Wind blowing across the roof would accelerate because of the slope, then flow through the cupola, sucking the hot air out of the house and creating a cool draft through it.
I don't have a cupola on my house, but did design in the stack effect. You can definitely feel the breeze coming up through the house. It makes the house several degrees cooler without A/C.
The house also has unusually large eaves, which serve the same purpose as awnings.
The house costs half as much to keep comfortable as my previous home.
What scares me about eaves and cupolas is that they seem attractive spots for bats and insects to nest. I have a covered sort of outdoor hallway leading to my home, and it's swarmed with all sorts of flies during the summer because it's not as hot as out in the sun. What's your experience?
Flies: they get inside and nestle in my fruit, annoy me and distract me, get in my face.
Bees and wasps: they settle and build nests in nooks and crannies of roofs. I don't have a problem with bees per se, although they can probably keep disturbing eating in the garden. Otoh they may pollinate flowers in the garden. Wasps on the other hand are truly a pest. I've lived in a house with wasps in the roof, constant wasps in the attic, leading to an unusable attic for about a year.
Bats: no idea, never had them so far. But I've lived in a neighborhood where they were nestled inside the outer layers of roofs. Just like other animals I imagine they "shit and piss all over the place" so to speak. But they're also protected where I live, so once they are there, you can't even get rid of them.
In Ireland at least most people who have bats in their attics don't even know they're there - there's only 1 species (out of 9) who make any kind of noticable smell (unless you already have problems with ventilation and/or damp)
I'm from Brisbane and it seems like a lot of new build free-standing houses don't have awnings around here. I think most still have pretty deep eaves, which do an ok job.
However, based on what I can see from my train window right now, it looks like most new apartments/townhouses and even office buildings have some sort of awning or window covering.
Yeah was going to comment that this is a heavily American perspective and possibly even a heavily American city dwelling perspective.
Lots of countries even where electricity is cheap use awnings as it's just better to not need to cool something down if it can be avoided.
My childhood home in WA (Western Australia) had awnings, along with shade trees and a patio and it made a huge difference. noticed especially where the west facing Window got setting sun in summer and had no awnings
>and the fabric covering would need to be replaced every 8-10 years depending on exposure and climate.
Absolutely not.
I recently drove past my childhood home. The canvas awnings that were there 30 years ago are still there, and look fine. Almost everything else about the house has changed.
Still the question is valid, the canvas colors and patterns are standardized so they are easy to replace. But anyway the discussion is not very relevant as I don't think the cost of replacing the canvas is that much.
Yeah they will have a longer lifetime than that, at worst they will start to fade with the year. But, that's UV that's hitting a consumable, instead of your house or things inside of it.
I practically begged the idiot planners in Ireland for awnings so we could have shade in summer and fewer chances for water ingress and they didn’t care at all. Helps explain why Irish houses are so mouldy.
I can’t say enough good things about The Craftsman Blog. Was my primary source for learning how to rebuild my 100-year-old double-hung windows. Lots of good stuff to explore.
I've even calculated optimal dimensions for pergola-type awnings on my house, but I detest the condescension directed towards insulation. The author has apparently never sat next to an uninsulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early August.
> never sat next to an uninsulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early August
I must admit, although I’ve of course sat next to an uninsulated west Denver wall baking in the sun in early August and an insulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early July, I’ve never actually sat next to an uninsulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early August.
I’m sure this comes as quite a shock, given our people’s pastime. Hopefully you can forgive my great transgression.
Awnings, deep overhanging eaves, attic exhaust fans, floor plans designed for cross-ventilation, strategic shade trees - a century ago, there were lots of strategies for keeping cooler without A/C.
And a 1950's house built with none of those advertised "I'm cutting-edge trendy, and rich enough to just run my new A/C all the time" to everyone who saw it.
This is even worse in the tropics. We used to have high ceilings, ceiling fans, cross-ventilation, shady trees, awnings. Now you get a stuffy high-rise concrete box with floor-to-ceiling glass facing the scorching afternoon sun, and AC working overtime.
This weekend I was in a small early-20th century home with marvelous cross ventilation - they hardly need anything else. I assumed it was a happy accident of the design, but now I wonder if it was intentional.
Pretty sure it was, my whole 1920s neighborhood was built that way. The downstairs is glorious and with the shade trees barely needs AC for a few days in August.
Upstairs is hot. But… the house was built with a finished downstairs and diy upstairs. The diy job wasn’t as good from a ventilation perspective.
It was no accident. If you look at (say) catalogs of house plans which were printed in that era, "room has cross ventilation" is a touted as a feature.
I might just be unusually sensitive to this, but there is a downside to awnings that hardly ever gets mentioned. Yes, an awning keeps your house cooler by blocking sunlight, but it also blocks sunlight, reducing the natural light inside your house. This means you either sit in the dark or use more artificial light, which is fine except natural sunlight is (for me at least) very beneficial for mood and for maintaining the circadian rhythm.
I know lots of people who don't mind living in darkness or seem to have a personal vendetta against the sun, and maybe those people would be genuinely better off with awnings, but I don't think they're for me.
I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to find this -- yes exactly! They block the light, they block the sky, they block the view.
Back in the day, windows were small and there were awnings and interiors were dark. Often made even darker with dark wood, dark colors, etc. It could be downright gloomy.
Then a kind of aesthetic revolution happened where windows got bigger, walls got white, awnings went away -- and it's all so much brighter and joyous.
And if your windows let in too much heat in the summer so you have to run your AC more, it can be counterbalanced in the winter when you can run the heat a lot less during sunny days.
I think the reason this doesn’t get mentioned so much, is because the sun is absurdly bright during the day. I imagine a well designed awning doesn’t affect the light levels of your home to any perceptible degree.
There is plenty of light being reflected off of nearby surfaces to still brighten up a house with an awning. They’re mostly for reducing direct, intense sunlight.
Plus, if it bothers you that much, there are awnings that retract or fold away.
Yes, this is what makes it so hard to replace with artificial lighting! I enjoy that absurdly bright sunlight. My house has extra windows over most of my windows and these specifically allow that sunlight in to add ambient lighting. During daytime most of my house is fully illuminated even with the lights off and blinds drawn because of these upper windows. You might describe what I have as the exact opposite of an awning and it’s one of my favorite features.
This is the main reason I went for screens, which are a fine mesh fabric that cover the whole window, but you can still see outside - over shutters, which are double layer aluminium whatsits that really keep anything and anyone out. I mean it still gets pretty dark in the house with them closed, but in the hottest days of the summer, dark means cool and cool is good.
We don’t use awnings because of roof overhangs. Local architects compute the sun angle for the given location. During the winter you can allow more light in and during the summer when the sun is higher, you can let less light in.
This is not true for any house I've lived in. No awnings, but there was also definitely no effort to compute roof angles to maximize shade in the summer.
Depending on the home's orientation you may not be able to pull that off at all even if you tried.
The majority of the time the house angle is determined by the street it is on. The house is usually aligned directly with the street, with zero regard given to sun angles and shading.
In my area, very little thought seems to be given to house details like solar exposure and orientation of the house. They put them up as fast as possible, built to code minimums.
This was written in a very confident way, but I can say with at least as much confidence that my house was mass produced in a factory and assembled locally in the middle of nowhere without any regard for local architecture.
My house has strategic overhangs (and trees with summer foliage to the south) leading to drastically different winter/summer insolation. (in addition, the dark stonework on the ground floor functions to passively clear light snow in spring and early winter)
It was built in the XX, but according to local vernacular, which likely (we have a few examples surviving from the XIII) predates both the modern profession of "architect" and metal-framed awnings.
(my friend the architect has plenty of local work, but maybe that's because we live in different countries?)
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
The American Southwest, especially the Sonoran Desert, was once a refuge for those who suffered respiratory ailments. Doctors would "prescribe" a change of scenery for allergies, asthma, tuberculosis, COPD, etc. People moved here because there was so little pollen in cleaner air, due to sparse population, as well as the lack of grass and other conventional foliage.
However we also have a little feature we lovingly call "Valley Fever" which is a fungus, spread mostly by dust storms. As more Midwestern folks immigrated here, and the Snowbirds set up shop, they all wanted traditional lawns, trees, and golf courses, just like "back home". So by the 1980s-1990s, Phoenix was barely differentiated from Chicago or Kansas in terms of front yards.
Now, those gardens definitely kept things cool in a local area. They needed things like flood-irrigation, so deep water often covers lawns. Deciduous or even evergreen trees can afford a lot of shade where you really, really need it. Unfortunately, monsoon microbursts often topple those kinds of trees, which have shallow roots in impoverished, sandy soils.
Ironically, due to lack of water, and Greta Thunberg, we're reverting to desert landscapes (called xeriscape) and so the new urban domestic hotness here is to install little "drip irrigation" tubes, palo verde, cactus, succulents, yucca, etc. Needless to say, they don't provide enough shade, and the humidity stays quite low.
Phoenicians today are clamoring for more artificial shelter and shade. Bus stops here are works of art with elaborate means of warding off the daytime heat. The city centers are still "heat islands" with murderous temperature increases during summertime ("summertime" in Phoenix lasts from March through October...)
The "new hotness?" Xeriscape has been promoted at least back to the 1990s.
Palo Verdes can get pretty damn big with significant shade factor, but they tend to blow a coat of a billion tiny yellow flowers in season and make a huge mess that the HOA kvetches about.
The problem isn't activists, it's the climate. The Colorado River system has been in a drought for 20 years, and for all we know it'll be in a drought for 100 more. (It's not clear to me this is anthropogenic, my impression is that it's a natural cycle of drought exacerbated by global climate change, but it's beside the point.)
Read up on the Colorado River Compact. Where the Water Goes by David Owens is a very accessible primer. The tl;dr is that the water was portioned out to the Western states (including Arizona) during an unusually wet period, and we're now in a period of drought. They simply didn't understand this in 1922. With the advent of dendrochronology, we now understand that this river system is prone to droughts that can last hundreds of years.
The scientists (various disciplines did). They were explicitly ignored by the compact negotiators. John Fleck has written about this quite a bit at https://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
Apologies, I oversimplified while trying to summarize, what I meant was that they didn't understand that it was an unusually wet period and that the Colorado was subject to megadroughts. It's my understanding that they also oversubscribed the river even given those inflated numbers, redoubling the problem.
I haven't read Science be Damned, I'll add it to my TBR, but I'm guessing that's what it's about?
They absolutely did understand that it had been an unusually wet period. They may not have understand the picture we now have of historical megadroughts. The scientists apparently urged the compact negotiators to not use the numbers they did, and were ignored.
I haven't read any of Fleck's books, but I read his blog regularly. He's commented quite often on the way the science gets ignored in favor of political/social and sometimes business goals.
The "Technology Connections" youtube channel recently discussed awnings too. (And it had more or less the same message as this blog.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhbDfi7Ee7k
And that has way more details than this. The only why supplied here is "we forgot" and "AC"
The TC video has a lot of details about why awnings are a great idea, and about how other places are still using them and getting good results; but the reasoning offered for why we don't use them any more... still boils down to "we forgot" and "AC".
Because those are the actual reasons.
Well, I think he made a bit of a stronger accusation too then just "AC".
In that, if your property had awnings the implication was it didn't have AC (I guess people can't read/trust a listing) so you needed to remove the awnings to advertise that you had AC.
AC was indeed important. But also:
We still sometimes use things like awnings, just in the form of 'porches' or modern-looking 'slat awnings'
Changes in architectural fashion has made some forms of awning look dated.
Fabric awnings need upkeep to keep them looking smart. When the awnings are above ground level, it's semi-expensive upkeep. Building owners are tempted to keep those tired, sun-bleached awnings in place rather than renewing them - contributing to the dated reputation of awnings.
Awnings also face competition from interior curtains and blinds, which are much simpler to maintain.
And there's shifting building use. A few decades ago an office worker would prize a desk by a big window with lots of natural light to read paperwork by, but in the age of PCs nobody wants direct sunlight on their screen. Internal blinds let workers control the light levels to match their needs.
You’re right, there’s one other reason: they went out of style because not having them meant you had… AC. Ok I guess it’s just those two.
I suspect it's not really "forgot". I suspect it's "awnings require ongoing maintenance".
Also, I imagine it was a hassle making sure they were closed and secured when a storm came up - and expensive to repair (not to mention dangerous) if you forgot it...
I had an awning and a pool enclosure in South Florida. So did most houses in the neighborhood. Then the 2004 hurricane season happened, and there was neither of each around anywhere ever again.
It surprises me to read about "fixed metal frame" awnings. You don't _have_ to make that trade off.
In the Netherlands a lot of houses have electrically retractable awnings (or even just mechanically windable by hand), especially above the giant windows facing the back yard.
During winter and bad weather, we retract the awning. When it's too sunny, we deploy it.
typical row house layout with big windows on both sides: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorzonwoning
retractable awning: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonnescherm
"Many"? It seems to me like there are many without. Homeowners Associations everywhere keep blocking them as well because they ruin the street image, so they say. Oh and they block AC too because it's too noisy and the outside unit is too ugly. And so many homes are stuck with scorching summers.
We have them in america too. But every moving part comes with inflated costs for both acquisition and ongoing maintenance.
In the Netherlands it costs around a grand, as for maintenance... Haven't needed to do any in more than 15 years. The actual screen retracts into a weather proof metal casing, so there's not that much that goes wrong, whereas fixed awnings are exposed to the full weather gamut 24/7.
Let me put it this way: it's cheap enough that a lot of social housing and other cheap forms of housing inhabited by the "lower class" feature them.
A government paying for a thing does not in any way imply that the thing is a good use of money. How many decades of fabric replacements could you get from the savings of bolting on a simple metal frame as compared to an elaborate electromechanically actuated arm mechanism?
This is such a silly argument. A movable awning isn't some complex apparatus, it's literally a hinge and two sticks. You're trying to frame this as some kind of an expensive problem when it really isn't.
You forgot the actuator.
It's a stick with a handle that you turn
Connected to a gear that needs oil, a chain that needs oil and can rust, or a rope that withers. Being overly dismissive of failure modes isn’t a good look. I don’t claim that fixed awnings are God’s gift to humanity, just that they don’t have some of the drawbacks associated with moving parts. The amount of emotional reaction I’ve received to that completely factual statement is frankly ridiculous.
You're overlooking the fact that these are incredibly common in the Netherlands, yet the massive problems you describe are nowhere to be found. Most people get away with giving them some love maybe every few years when they get creaky, if even that. Your argument is about as reasonable as saying we shouldn't have door hinges or door locks because moving parts have drawbacks. It's silly, these systems are so simple that they require next to no upkeep for years at a time.
Indeed we shouldn’t have hinges or locks because moving parts have drawbacks, in contexts where that matters. For instance portals that don’t need a door at all, or walls that don’t need to open. Would you argue that every open passageway should have a door blocking it, and every wall should have hinges installed? No, that’s ridiculous. It’s equally ridiculous to get this angry about the simple fact that fixed awnings have upsides, and depending on the context they might be a better choice than retractable ones.
Touch grass my dude. You're trying to make the argument that hinges are bad and then calling other people angry over the internet.
All I said is moving parts have drawbacks. That’s true. Then a million people kept on the thread to try to claim otherwise, yourself included. Now you’re resorting to 4chan style comebacks, so that’s fun.
Reading your comments, including down the thread I'd want to remind some guidelines:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Your comments currently stand close to trolling and it is annoying.
You may find other useful ones, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In the Netherlands? If its bolted on, it won't even last a year. The North Sea has a lot of storms ;)
I’m sorry you have such little faith in your engineers, but I can assure you structures can be made that can handle your storms.
Northwestern Europe usually gets a storm at hurricane level 2 every one or two years and several at level 1 per season. There's a reason the name for these storms – Orkan – is derived from hurricane.
For comparison, that's similar or slightly higher in strength than hurricane Sandy when it hit the northeast of the US.
That's why if you have fixed awnings in this region of europe, they're usually removed as soon as fall hits (which compromises on the fixed part) or made of metal (which compromises on the "awning" part IMO).
I'm sure they can. But at that point you're looking at expenses higher than just making the damn thing retractable, and with worse functionality.
What? Who mentioned the government paying for them? Who said that the fabric needs replacing often?
The parent…? Who pays for public housing? And what relevance would the weather otherwise have..?
You might be misunderstanding something.
Even a working family, if they're earning very little, may be living in subsidized public housing.
Renters have lots of rights over here, allowing them to customize a lot about the apartment. Awnings are usually owned and installed by the renters themselves.
So a family that has so little income that they need to live in subsidized public housing may still have enough income to buy a retractable awning.
> A government paying for a thing does not in any way imply that the thing is a good use of money.
Agreed, nor is the inverse implied of course. But what is your point?
> How many decades of fabric replacements could you get from the savings of bolting on a simple metal frame as compared to an elaborate electromechanically actuated arm mechanism?
That's what I'm saying, fabric doesn't really need to get replaced in 15 years and going from personal experience. The mechanism is simple enough to be reliable as well.
Ultimately, it's impossible to analyze the cost benefits of this. It's a matter of personal taste and what the harshness of the local climate allows. I don't doubt that fixed awnings are cheaper - but actuating awnings fix their drawbacks, and the maintenance they introduce is minimal in my experience. And frankly, for the price of giving up a single vacation in 15+ years, it's not that expensive. Again, cheap enough that those in social housing can make the choice to get them installed.
ETA: my point of mentioning social housing is to say that people with lower income can still get them. The government doesn't pay for it. I just wanted to paint a picture of the relative cost.
What is your point in stating that public housing uses them? (aka the government buys them).
No clue why this turned into a huge debate. I don’t have a dog in this fight, all I’m saying is that america has retractable awnings, they have some downsides, and a government (or a “low class” individual) buying something doesn’t convince me it’s a good investment.
> What is your point in stating that public housing uses them? (aka the government buys them).
Who said anything about the government buying them? The renters in public housing usually buy and install them by themselves. That's why usually every balcony has a different type of awning, in a different state of disrepair.
While I'm nowadays in IT, when I was a child our family lived in this type of public housing, and we had a retractable awning of exactly that kind that my parents had installed themselves.
While this is true, awnings aren't that expensive, and while I don't have the knowledge to do the maths, they will earn themselves back over time with how much heat they keep out and how much you'll need to run the AC.
The Netherlands seems like the most sensible country on earth. How did they manage it?
That changed in the last decade, among other things the population is dissatisfied with immigration.
I cannot tell you if that is justified, but I can say from personal experience that in some cases the praised Dutch directness turned to racism. Things like, people not believing that you have a phd, or refusing to take your credit card because the color of skin does not match the ethnicity of the name.
Low population and high income from natural resources.
The Netherlands has a higher population density than the US (520 people per square km vs 37) and lower GDP per capita ($62k vs $82k), so I'm not sure if that framing is exactly useful. In absolute numbers, yes, there's fewer people, but they're packed into a very small area so you have to be smart about how you do that.
I think the builders of the past would be amazed by modern technology like argon filled double paned windows with advanced window films to reflect the heat instead of letting it in.
But yes, let's bring back the awnings too. Sometimes the low tech ways are easiest and best. I will say that I don't think awnings alone can save a stick built modern house from the heat. Part of the key to old houses staying cool was high thermal mass: lots of brick and stone that could stay cool during the day. As great as modern insulation is at keeping hot and cool separate, a modern insulated wall doesn't cool it's surroundings like a high thermal mass wall would.
Moving to a world where we combine passive cooling and high thermal mass construction with the benefits of modern tech will be key in my opinion.
Awnings have a nice property that fancy windows don’t: they can reduce heat gain in the summer while still allowing more heat gain in the winter. A nice south-facing window that lets the low winter sun in can provide a lot of desirable heat in the winter in a cold climate.
(Also, removing a given amount of summer heat via air conditioning is considerably cheaper than adding that same amount of winter heat via gas or heat pump in many climates, because the indoor-outdoor temperature difference is much higher in the winter.)
Even better, depending on climate, grape vines.
Our house (Australia) has trained vines on the sunny side that are thick with leaves and grapes in summer, bare and leafless in winter.
Ideal for seasonally sensible shade and warmth.
Don't the vines damage the house?
They're on a free standing trellis that doesn't touch the house.
Two actually, a vertical mesh straight up from the garden bed adjacent to the brick paved verandah, and another that's almost horizontal with a slight slope away from the house.
Most of the summer growth is dense on the horizontal (like an awning) with grape bunches developing and hanging down for easy picking when rips.
English ivy (hedera helix) can damage mortar, but grape vines don't have holdfast structures like hedera that can sink into mortar. Plus, hedera helix is so dense that rotting vegetation and sheltered animals can also cause problems. Grapevines have tendrils that grab onto and twine around something like wires or a trellis.
Most vines, including Ivy don’t damage bricks walls that are build well. I don’t know about grapes but most ivy uses “suction cups” to trap on directly to the bricks. I think the misconception that they damage mortar might come from the moisture the plants can trap which can then damage the masonry. Or maybe it’s because the plants hide damage until it gets serious Mortar doesn’t last forever after all. Anyway, if you build your house or wall properly you can grow stuff on it with basically no downsides outside of having more bugs (and the things that eat them) on your wall that you might want.
It might not work so well on the Lego brick walls that are glued onto the front of concrete these days, but that would just be a guess.
For those interested in digging into this passive solar design concerns itself with solar gain optimization. Passive house is a standard that makes use of these concepts as well but goes alot further.
> argon filled double paned windows with advanced window films to reflect the heat instead of letting it in
We replaced the old double-paned windows with new triple-paned with 60% IR filter. There's hardly any tint, but boy did it make a difference. Especially in the living room which has a very large window which catches the sun from noon to midnight in the summer.
Before the wood floor in the living room would be baking hot where the sun hit, uncomfortably so at times. Now I can't tell the difference.
We added it just cause it didn't cost much extra, figured why not. Very glad we did.
> Part of the key to old houses staying cool was high thermal mass: lots of brick and stone that could stay cool during the day.
That only works if you don't have long hot spells. I live in a house with high thermal mass - reinforced concrete filled cinderblock. It was built by a commercial builder as his own house in 1950. There's enough thermal mass to keep the interior temp stable for three days. No need for air conditioning.
This worked fine until Northern California started having week-long stretches of 100F+ temperatures. That didn't happen until about ten years ago. Once all that thermal mass heats up to ambient, it won't come down for days.
I live in about a 200 year old New England farmhouse that’s a mixture of post and beam and stick. I definitely observe that for one or two hot days, especially with passably temperate nights, inside will definitely be cooler than out. But once the house heats up, it takes days to get it cool even if temperatures have gone down outside.
> Sometimes the low tech ways are easiest and best.
They’re not even easiest and best, but they’re additive and in the grand scheme of things awnings (and shutters) are not that expensive, so it’s a small investment for a permanent benefit.
While modern building materials are very good at keeping the heat out, they aren't perfect. My house was built without awnings or AC and with modern window tech, but we opted to have awnings and screens installed nevertheless and they made a huge difference in how much heat from sun is coming into the house (not to mention the bright light itself).
For my case, I think it's irresponsible to be installing AC without first making sure the house is optimized for keeping the heat out.
> As great as modern insulation is at keeping hot and cool separate, a modern insulated wall doesn't cool it's surroundings like a high thermal mass wall would.
Why does modern insulation hold less thermal mass? Is it just that trapped air has less mass than stone?
That's exactly the reason. Technically it's actually the amount of energy needed to heat a volume of material, not the physical mass, that is important. But for many materials the two go hand in hand.
Touch a cold blanket and cold stone countertop and tell me which feels cooler, then do the same thing for a hot blanket and a hot countertop.
Sure, the stone is more conducive meaning you feel the temperature sooner. But it also has a lot of thermal mass, meaning it can give off or absorb more heat.
Fiberglass insulation reduces convection but has no mass like rock wool
Rock wool works by reducing convection. It's mass is not a major factor in its functionality.
Adobe and stone are things with thermal mass, not insulating fiber thickness.
I've geeked out on thermal mass as much as the next guy, but I don't think it's a good solution at scale. Adding thermal mass is expensive, both due to the materials cost and that it's a niche building technique. Insulation, heat pumps, and solar all benefit from mass production and technology improvements. Combine them with light-colored roofs and solar panels, and that can probably beat thermal mass construction.
The material costs for adobe are almost certainly close to zero if you live in an area that can benefit from using it.
The labor costs for adobe have become very high, mostly it seems because the descendants of the families that started the amazing adobe brick "factories" no longer want to be dirt farmers.
> can probably beat thermal mass construction.
You have to define what "beat" means. My hundred year old adobe did not rise above 81F as an interior temperature this summer, despite outside highs around 100F. That would be possible (or even lower!) with the technologies you mentioned, but my adobe house did that with no energy utilization at all.
Thermal mass is also known as "dirt" or "rocks", and is not expensive.
Older technology is often neat in a lot of ways and has certain benefits, but there's a reason why we moved on.
Could do both though, it’s not an either-or situation.
What happens when they break?
You replace them.
I was referring to the cleanup of toxic materials and the safety aspect.
Argon is a largely non-reactive noble gas. What toxins?
And Argon makes up a little less than 1% of the air you breathe.
Glass and a noble glass is like the least toxic combo you could have. They're both inert.
There’s Argon in those? Interesting. I wonder if anyone’s tried adding an electrode for plasma effects.
I wonder how long the argon actually lasts in practice. The industry claims 20 years under normal conditions.
Yeah, the gas leaks out after a while, then your double pane glass fogs up on the inside and costs $$$ to replace.
Curiously enough, here in Spain they're still pretty common nowadays, as lots of houses purposely incorporated green awnings, both to protect an exponentially-growing number of these houses from harsh sunlight during summer season, and to presumably 'soften' the arrival to the city of an increasing quantity of newcomers from rural Spain, as they already were very familiarized with them and, the designers thought, would find spots of green on the building more appealing comming from a greener countryside.
What percentage of US buildings would you say have air conditioning? The amount of UK homes that have AC is basically 0. Although I guess most commercial buildings would have it. I wonder if this is because UK homes are mainly brick, would that make a difference? Absolute max temp here in summer is 40 degrees C for 1 or 2 days and 30 degrees is pretty rare on most days in summer. When I saw the title I'd assumed this was about rainfall and guttering, which is something we do know about in the UK!
We have a retractable on our south-facing patio door/window near San Jose and it's made a huge difference in terms of heat rejection after we installed it. On hot summer days it makes a noticeable difference. And since it's retractable it doesn't make the back room permanently dark. It's one of the major items that lets us survive a south bay summer without air conditioning. We'll probably upgrade our gas furnace to a heat pump eventually and get AC "free" but in the meantime this was a much cheaper stopgap.
I came to say the same thing. Ours is above our back sliding glass door which is about 8’ wide. Does a great job keeping the room cool in the summer.
I went to Granada a few years back and the vast majority of the apartment buildings I saw out there had awnings.
Meanwhile, my new build, West facing single aspect flat in London regularly heats to 30+ degrees celsius because no one thought about heat management.
I don't understand why newbuild flats are obsessed with using so much glass. Almost everyone I see is being covered up, sometimes even with just cardboard.
Took the train to Amsterdam the other day, on the way there is an apartment building where the shared hallways are on the train-tracks side of the building, it's floor to ceiling glass. Some sections of it had cardboard or even aluminium foil to try and keep the sun / heat out, that one looked like a greenhouse.
Likewise, I work for an energy company, in summer the aging AC (which they keep low because an energy company's policy and marketing is actually the opposite of what they provide) cannot keep up because there's nothing keeping the sunlight out but flimsy shades on the inside.
Anecdotally, it feels like Americans generally don't care about natural lighting. About twenty years ago, my wife was looking for apartments and asked the leasing office if there was any unit available facing south or east. Apparently it was unusual enough a question that the apartment manager asked back if it was for religious reasons.
This article would suggest the opposite though - when AC made it feasible everyone removed the awnings that were blocking light thus maximizing natural light.
But that's the thing - You probably don't want to sit outside under direct sunlight in a summer afternoon, do you? Unless you live very far up north, having summer sunlight hit your floor is not very pleasant, either. A well-positioned awning can block summer sunlight while allowing in most of winter sunlight.
My deck gets direct sunlight with no easy way to block it when the sun is high in the sky. As a result I don’t actually use the deck much until later in the day.
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Humans and vast over-generalizations.
Ace and Gary
In hot areas, even the shade of rooftop solar panels can make a substantial difference inside a building. And there's the ultra low tech method of just planting more shade trees.
Unfortunately with most US build tract housing, there's not enough room between most houses to provide dedicated shade by most any method. I wonder if shade between the roof gaps between houses would be useful.
Problem with shade trees is that trees have the unfortunately tendency to loose branches or fall during severe weather and having them next to your house isn't ideal when that happens. Also, depending on where you are located, those trees may end up being a great way of letting a wildfire spread to your home.
Even if the trees aren't shading the house directly, they will have a cumulative cooling effect; they capture the sun before it hits and warms up the ground, they have constant evaporative cooling, etc.
The bigger problem with trees is the damage its roots can do to foundations.
Which is a great pity because I’d welcome planting more trees around suburbs.
Shade trees covering the roof doesn't sound very compatible with those solar panels though
I added an awning to my roof top deck door because the door wasn’t weather proofed enough to constantly being hammered by Seattle autumn rain. No matter high tech you go, a low tech solution of just something to make sure your door isn’t hammered directly by the rain is good enough to solve that weird leak you have in your 4 year old home.
I live in a complex and my neighbour on one side has a metal awning over their back door. A neighbour on the other side enclosed their patio in glass and it has windows that can open so that they are at the same angle as an awning.
As a result during summer mornings both of them are blasting me with tight beams of sunlight which increases the temperature in my place while forcing me to keep my curtains closed until later in the morning when they stop blinding me.
Sounds like the awnings are very effective for their owners then.
Houses also made use of the "stack effect". A cupola was put on the roof apex. The cupola was vented on the sides and was open to the attic. Wind blowing across the roof would accelerate because of the slope, then flow through the cupola, sucking the hot air out of the house and creating a cool draft through it.
I don't have a cupola on my house, but did design in the stack effect. You can definitely feel the breeze coming up through the house. It makes the house several degrees cooler without A/C.
The house also has unusually large eaves, which serve the same purpose as awnings.
The house costs half as much to keep comfortable as my previous home.
What scares me about eaves and cupolas is that they seem attractive spots for bats and insects to nest. I have a covered sort of outdoor hallway leading to my home, and it's swarmed with all sorts of flies during the summer because it's not as hot as out in the sun. What's your experience?
Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Flies: they get inside and nestle in my fruit, annoy me and distract me, get in my face.
Bees and wasps: they settle and build nests in nooks and crannies of roofs. I don't have a problem with bees per se, although they can probably keep disturbing eating in the garden. Otoh they may pollinate flowers in the garden. Wasps on the other hand are truly a pest. I've lived in a house with wasps in the roof, constant wasps in the attic, leading to an unusable attic for about a year.
Bats: no idea, never had them so far. But I've lived in a neighborhood where they were nestled inside the outer layers of roofs. Just like other animals I imagine they "shit and piss all over the place" so to speak. But they're also protected where I live, so once they are there, you can't even get rid of them.
In Ireland at least most people who have bats in their attics don't even know they're there - there's only 1 species (out of 9) who make any kind of noticable smell (unless you already have problems with ventilation and/or damp)
Yes, absolutely.
Awnings are still pretty common in Australia.
We have them on our house. In Australia it's very much worth getting awnings and ceiling fans as well as having a heat pump.
In summer afternoons they can make a really remarkable difference.
I'm from Brisbane and it seems like a lot of new build free-standing houses don't have awnings around here. I think most still have pretty deep eaves, which do an ok job.
However, based on what I can see from my train window right now, it looks like most new apartments/townhouses and even office buildings have some sort of awning or window covering.
Yeah was going to comment that this is a heavily American perspective and possibly even a heavily American city dwelling perspective.
Lots of countries even where electricity is cheap use awnings as it's just better to not need to cool something down if it can be avoided.
My childhood home in WA (Western Australia) had awnings, along with shade trees and a patio and it made a huge difference. noticed especially where the west facing Window got setting sun in summer and had no awnings
>and the fabric covering would need to be replaced every 8-10 years depending on exposure and climate.
Absolutely not.
I recently drove past my childhood home. The canvas awnings that were there 30 years ago are still there, and look fine. Almost everything else about the house has changed.
How do you know it was never replaced? If it was the same, I'd be concerned about how much PFAS or other forever chemicals were used
Canvas has been canvas for an exceedingly long time right? Has anything about it really changed?
Not everything that lasts is PFAS/forever chemicals, please don't fearmonger.
Still the question is valid, the canvas colors and patterns are standardized so they are easy to replace. But anyway the discussion is not very relevant as I don't think the cost of replacing the canvas is that much.
Yeah they will have a longer lifetime than that, at worst they will start to fade with the year. But, that's UV that's hitting a consumable, instead of your house or things inside of it.
I think this Johnny cash ad is a great period piece to explain
https://youtu.be/2jkIVfpICeo
I practically begged the idiot planners in Ireland for awnings so we could have shade in summer and fewer chances for water ingress and they didn’t care at all. Helps explain why Irish houses are so mouldy.
I can’t say enough good things about The Craftsman Blog. Was my primary source for learning how to rebuild my 100-year-old double-hung windows. Lots of good stuff to explore.
I've even calculated optimal dimensions for pergola-type awnings on my house, but I detest the condescension directed towards insulation. The author has apparently never sat next to an uninsulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early August.
> never sat next to an uninsulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early August
I must admit, although I’ve of course sat next to an uninsulated west Denver wall baking in the sun in early August and an insulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early July, I’ve never actually sat next to an uninsulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early August.
I’m sure this comes as quite a shock, given our people’s pastime. Hopefully you can forgive my great transgression.
Awnings, deep overhanging eaves, attic exhaust fans, floor plans designed for cross-ventilation, strategic shade trees - a century ago, there were lots of strategies for keeping cooler without A/C.
And a 1950's house built with none of those advertised "I'm cutting-edge trendy, and rich enough to just run my new A/C all the time" to everyone who saw it.
This is even worse in the tropics. We used to have high ceilings, ceiling fans, cross-ventilation, shady trees, awnings. Now you get a stuffy high-rise concrete box with floor-to-ceiling glass facing the scorching afternoon sun, and AC working overtime.
Whoever designs and/or approves buildings like that should be forced to live in them.
This weekend I was in a small early-20th century home with marvelous cross ventilation - they hardly need anything else. I assumed it was a happy accident of the design, but now I wonder if it was intentional.
Pretty sure it was, my whole 1920s neighborhood was built that way. The downstairs is glorious and with the shade trees barely needs AC for a few days in August.
Upstairs is hot. But… the house was built with a finished downstairs and diy upstairs. The diy job wasn’t as good from a ventilation perspective.
It was no accident. If you look at (say) catalogs of house plans which were printed in that era, "room has cross ventilation" is a touted as a feature.
It was probably intentional because they had no other means of cooling the house.
so... now they're an advertisement for zero energy homes >:D
I might just be unusually sensitive to this, but there is a downside to awnings that hardly ever gets mentioned. Yes, an awning keeps your house cooler by blocking sunlight, but it also blocks sunlight, reducing the natural light inside your house. This means you either sit in the dark or use more artificial light, which is fine except natural sunlight is (for me at least) very beneficial for mood and for maintaining the circadian rhythm.
I know lots of people who don't mind living in darkness or seem to have a personal vendetta against the sun, and maybe those people would be genuinely better off with awnings, but I don't think they're for me.
I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to find this -- yes exactly! They block the light, they block the sky, they block the view.
Back in the day, windows were small and there were awnings and interiors were dark. Often made even darker with dark wood, dark colors, etc. It could be downright gloomy.
Then a kind of aesthetic revolution happened where windows got bigger, walls got white, awnings went away -- and it's all so much brighter and joyous.
And if your windows let in too much heat in the summer so you have to run your AC more, it can be counterbalanced in the winter when you can run the heat a lot less during sunny days.
I think the reason this doesn’t get mentioned so much, is because the sun is absurdly bright during the day. I imagine a well designed awning doesn’t affect the light levels of your home to any perceptible degree.
In my experience that’s true anyway.
There is plenty of light being reflected off of nearby surfaces to still brighten up a house with an awning. They’re mostly for reducing direct, intense sunlight.
Plus, if it bothers you that much, there are awnings that retract or fold away.
> the sun is absurdly bright during the day.
Yes, this is what makes it so hard to replace with artificial lighting! I enjoy that absurdly bright sunlight. My house has extra windows over most of my windows and these specifically allow that sunlight in to add ambient lighting. During daytime most of my house is fully illuminated even with the lights off and blinds drawn because of these upper windows. You might describe what I have as the exact opposite of an awning and it’s one of my favorite features.
This is the main reason I went for screens, which are a fine mesh fabric that cover the whole window, but you can still see outside - over shutters, which are double layer aluminium whatsits that really keep anything and anyone out. I mean it still gets pretty dark in the house with them closed, but in the hottest days of the summer, dark means cool and cool is good.
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Because we have tinted glass and double-pained windows.
Site seems down, here's the latest Wayback Machine snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20240421045028/https://thecrafts...
We don’t use awnings because of roof overhangs. Local architects compute the sun angle for the given location. During the winter you can allow more light in and during the summer when the sun is higher, you can let less light in.
This is not true for any house I've lived in. No awnings, but there was also definitely no effort to compute roof angles to maximize shade in the summer.
Depending on the home's orientation you may not be able to pull that off at all even if you tried.
And tract houses use the same designs but rotated and flipped for an entire development. No one is calculating any kind of roof angles there.
The majority of the time the house angle is determined by the street it is on. The house is usually aligned directly with the street, with zero regard given to sun angles and shading.
In my area, very little thought seems to be given to house details like solar exposure and orientation of the house. They put them up as fast as possible, built to code minimums.
This was written in a very confident way, but I can say with at least as much confidence that my house was mass produced in a factory and assembled locally in the middle of nowhere without any regard for local architecture.
It mentioned "local architects" after all...
The statement is still wrong. Awnings and local architects are both extinct so clearly the architects didn't kill the awnings.
My house has strategic overhangs (and trees with summer foliage to the south) leading to drastically different winter/summer insolation. (in addition, the dark stonework on the ground floor functions to passively clear light snow in spring and early winter)
It was built in the XX, but according to local vernacular, which likely (we have a few examples surviving from the XIII) predates both the modern profession of "architect" and metal-framed awnings.
(my friend the architect has plenty of local work, but maybe that's because we live in different countries?)
I mean yeah, if you have a big house with large porches / overhangs that'll work. But those are luxury houses which only few people have access to.
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From the HN guidelines:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
My solution is to not have any windows.
Still popular in Spain.
The American Southwest, especially the Sonoran Desert, was once a refuge for those who suffered respiratory ailments. Doctors would "prescribe" a change of scenery for allergies, asthma, tuberculosis, COPD, etc. People moved here because there was so little pollen in cleaner air, due to sparse population, as well as the lack of grass and other conventional foliage.
However we also have a little feature we lovingly call "Valley Fever" which is a fungus, spread mostly by dust storms. As more Midwestern folks immigrated here, and the Snowbirds set up shop, they all wanted traditional lawns, trees, and golf courses, just like "back home". So by the 1980s-1990s, Phoenix was barely differentiated from Chicago or Kansas in terms of front yards.
Now, those gardens definitely kept things cool in a local area. They needed things like flood-irrigation, so deep water often covers lawns. Deciduous or even evergreen trees can afford a lot of shade where you really, really need it. Unfortunately, monsoon microbursts often topple those kinds of trees, which have shallow roots in impoverished, sandy soils.
Ironically, due to lack of water, and Greta Thunberg, we're reverting to desert landscapes (called xeriscape) and so the new urban domestic hotness here is to install little "drip irrigation" tubes, palo verde, cactus, succulents, yucca, etc. Needless to say, they don't provide enough shade, and the humidity stays quite low.
Phoenicians today are clamoring for more artificial shelter and shade. Bus stops here are works of art with elaborate means of warding off the daytime heat. The city centers are still "heat islands" with murderous temperature increases during summertime ("summertime" in Phoenix lasts from March through October...)
The "new hotness?" Xeriscape has been promoted at least back to the 1990s.
Palo Verdes can get pretty damn big with significant shade factor, but they tend to blow a coat of a billion tiny yellow flowers in season and make a huge mess that the HOA kvetches about.
The problem isn't activists, it's the climate. The Colorado River system has been in a drought for 20 years, and for all we know it'll be in a drought for 100 more. (It's not clear to me this is anthropogenic, my impression is that it's a natural cycle of drought exacerbated by global climate change, but it's beside the point.)
Read up on the Colorado River Compact. Where the Water Goes by David Owens is a very accessible primer. The tl;dr is that the water was portioned out to the Western states (including Arizona) during an unusually wet period, and we're now in a period of drought. They simply didn't understand this in 1922. With the advent of dendrochronology, we now understand that this river system is prone to droughts that can last hundreds of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_North_American_me...
> They simply didn't understand this in 1922
The scientists (various disciplines did). They were explicitly ignored by the compact negotiators. John Fleck has written about this quite a bit at https://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
Apologies, I oversimplified while trying to summarize, what I meant was that they didn't understand that it was an unusually wet period and that the Colorado was subject to megadroughts. It's my understanding that they also oversubscribed the river even given those inflated numbers, redoubling the problem.
I haven't read Science be Damned, I'll add it to my TBR, but I'm guessing that's what it's about?
They absolutely did understand that it had been an unusually wet period. They may not have understand the picture we now have of historical megadroughts. The scientists apparently urged the compact negotiators to not use the numbers they did, and were ignored.
I haven't read any of Fleck's books, but I read his blog regularly. He's commented quite often on the way the science gets ignored in favor of political/social and sometimes business goals.
Interesting. Thanks for the correction and the reading material.
My solution was to not have any windows.
How about an awning that's actually a solar panel? I understand these are a thing for RVs.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhbDfi7Ee7k
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who cares?