[Greenbuilding] CF analysis of tearing down a house vs. renovation?

[Reuben Deumling]

I agree with Alan's points especially.
Studying this exact question for domestic refrigerators I discovered that
the calculations performed once upon a time are sometimes no longer helpful
because the ratio (of embodied refrigerator energy to in use energy) have
changed so much. In the seventies, a typical US refrigerator's in use
energy x expected life could have been 10x the embodied energy: lots of
steel and fiberglass and 20+ year life, compared to a contemporary much
shorter-lived version made up largely of plastics, aluminum, glass,
micro-chips, copper, and various foams that are also plastics but have very
high embodied energy.

Secondly, focusing on efficiency is not always very useful, as we've had
lots of occasion to discuss here. The in-use energy (before/after) is far
more important.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/greenbuilding_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20130723/e5160c51/attachment.html>