Nobody builds a house with 4 inches of brick though.
Have you ever been to a very hot country and wondered why they build with stone? Because it insulates.
Also half the comments in this thread are talking about how environmentally friendly wood houses are... and the other half are pointing out that a 'wood' house in the US is really vinyl.
But masonry doesn't work (there or anywhere) by insulating -- they use it for it's high thermal mass, which let's you effectively use the cool night air to keep the building cool during the day.
That's what insulation is - a material which changes its temperature more slowly than another material. You can do that by being a big thermal mass so that heat transfers but takes a long time to have an impact as a kind of thermal 'flywheel', or you can do that by making heat transfer in the material slow by having a high 'insulative value'.
Thermal mass and insulation are not the same concept. For example, if the environment is continuously hot or cold, thermal mass has no impact while insulation still does. This is most apparent during winter in a cold place, where the environment is always colder than you want the interior, and so thermal mass does not help. R and U values measure only insulation, not mass.
> My house is cool in the summer because it's still warming up from the winter.
That makes no sense. The amount of thermal mass you have in a home will help even out temperatures between day and night, but not between entire seasons.
Nobody builds a house with 4 inches of brick though.
Have you ever been to a very hot country and wondered why they build with stone? Because it insulates.
Also half the comments in this thread are talking about how environmentally friendly wood houses are... and the other half are pointing out that a 'wood' house in the US is really vinyl.
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