Wednesday, February 5, 2014

People in glass houses really feel the heat

From the Wall Street Journal:

The skyline of New York is dotted with new glass condominium towers featuring some of the most expensive and sought-after apartments in the city.

But a new study is warning that there could be a price to pay for the grand views: Some high-rise apartments could become as overheated as a hot yoga studio in a prolonged summertime blackout, similar in duration to the one that followed superstorm Sandy.

In the winter, the study found that in a prolonged cold wave interior temperatures would plummet in glass towers during a blackout to a low of 35 degrees over seven days, but would fall even more in single-family homes and older brick apartment towers built with little insulation.

The study is part of a campaign by the Urban Green Council, a building industry group that worked on post-Sandy planning, to push New York developers to meet higher performance standards in the future. The council has called the glass-walled construction "a major step backward" environmentally; instead, it favors less exposed glass in new towers as well as expensive triple-pane glass and other improvements.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is it not ironic that the building that the developers and their friends the politicians hold in contempt - the single family owner occupied brick building, is the most energy efficient - and those or so pretty glass towers for an additional million violate all the green blather they throw at us.

Taking up public sidewalks for trees lost in backyards and giving the kids bikes will solve this, of course.

The politicians tell us so it must be so, right?

J said...

as a taxpaying worker who frequents these buildings,these buildings have the heat on full blast and have created a lot of falling ice hazards all winter.

Also the glare from these towers from the sun during the day is like looking into the eclipse.