Having gone through the search for housing three times in two locations in the years since graduating, I’ve picked up a few tips for choosing that are not often considered. Most people will look at the price, location, layout, appliances, and make a decision from there. While these are important factors, they are an incomplete look at how your new home will affect your life once you move. Here, I will explain the additional factors I now look for. Some points are framed around someone working a typical Monday-Friday daytime shift in the northern hemisphere, but the core ideas can easily be altered to apply more widely.
The first tip is, if you commute by car or bike, you should live east of where you work, if that isn’t detrimental for other reasons. The reason if pretty simple: there are large chunks of the year when your morning commute will be a bit after sunrise, and when your afternoon commute will be soon before sundown – in other words, the times when the sun is low in the sky and decreases visibility. The best direction to be going for both cars and bikes at this time is away from the sun, because that way it doesn’t blind you, or the drivers of cars that could hit you in the case of biking. Living east of work ensures that the sun will be at your back both times of day. Living south or north would mean some peripheral impact, but it’s still better than living west of work, where you’ll fight the sun both ways.
While on the topic of directions, my next tip is to pay attention to the directions the walls of the place face. If you are living in a standalone house, then obviously you will have walls facing all directions, but the direction the walls in the bedroom(s) face is still important. Specifically, look at the direction of bedroom windows. Some people like east-facing bedroom windows so that the sun rising in the morning lights their room and helps them wake up. I was once one of these people, but now sleep with blackout shades, so it doesn’t make a difference (One day I’ll get around to that automatic-morning-shades-opener…). Others will actively dislike this, as it can wake them up earlier than they’d like, so think about which camp you’re in, and pay attention accordingly.
If you’re looking at an apartment, you’ll likely only have one or two of the sides exposed to the sun, so in this case there’s more to consider than just the bedroom windows. Here, you have the opportunity to, with a bit of clever planning, use physics to your advantage to decrease your utility bills. The strategy here depends in part on the climate you’re living in – you’d want the coolest apartment in Arizona, but the warmest one in Montana.
If you are more concerned about it being too cold than too hot, you want to choose an apartment with south-facing walls, and north-facing if vice versa. East- and west-facing apartments are better than choosing the opposite of what you should. This is because the sun is to the south while it’s high in the sky, provided you’re in the subtropics of the northern hemisphere.
Regardless of whether you favor warm or cold, another general rule to save energy is to have as many faces of the apartment be adjacent to other apartments as possible. In both hot and cold weather this is beneficial because in the cold, other apartments will be warmer than outside, and in the heat, other apartments will be cooler than outside. Heat loss across walls is proportional to the difference in temperature across the wall. Because other apartments will have more moderate temperatures, the difference in temperature will always be larger across external walls, meaning you’ll lose more heat in the winter and gain more in the summer.
The ceiling and floor are also useful to consider. Again, it is generally preferable to have them touching other apartments, rather than the ground or air, so aim for middle floors, if there are any. The possible exception to this is choosing the top floor if you’re in a place with cold but sunny winters, since you’d get additional heat from the sunlight, which may exceed the additional heat loss to the air. As far as I know, most places (and especially the cold places) get more sun in the summer than winter, in which case the roof would be more of a detriment, because you don’t want the additional heat in the summer. However, I won’t claim to know all the climates in the world, so that is a possibility.
If you end up needing to choose between the top and bottom floor, keep in mind that less heat generally passes through the floor (the one touching the ground, not internal floors), than through the roof of a building, so barring the unlikely sunlight advantage of the top floor described above, the bottom floor is better.
To close, for those who enjoy anecdotal evidence: last year, in an apartment with three of the six faces exposed to the outside and mostly southeast-facing windows, my roommate and I lasted the entire Pennsylvania winter without turning the heat on once.
Bonus thought of the day: All personal phone numbers fall in a well-defined and know set, {000-000-000, 000-000-0001, … , 999-999-9999}, so it’s more accurate to ask “Which phone number is yours?” than “What is your phone number?” Note that the results of actually doing so are unclear.
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