So im looking for apartments or mansions since im moving out next year from my current place and i want to ask how bad is the heat retension of a house made from wood? Is it impossible to survive at night without a heater?
is a house made of concrete way better than a house made of wood? whta are the pros and cons of each?
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Depends which part of Japan you’re in
In my experience in winter in wooden houses are ice cold without a constant flow of heat, you can see your breath in the morning kinda cold. Concrete is much better at retaining heat. My place is concrete and I haven’t needed to use any heat so far and usually don’t until closer to January.
>… how bad is the heat retension of a house made from wood? Is it impossible to survive at night without a heater?
Depends.
The vast majority of houses and apartments, both wood and concrete, in Tokyo are not heated all night.
Whether a residence is made of wood or concrete does not matter as much as whether there was any real attempt to insulate the residence. Modern residences “claim†” to be insulated and here in Kanto—greater Tokyo— “modern” means concrete. The advantage of a concrete residence is fire and earthquake resistance as well as sound deadening. A concrete dwelling *”could”* be insulated well but often corners are cut (the same with wood houses).
Heating (and insulation) is a separate issue dependent on the money spent^† on construction/ not whether the building is made of wood or concrete.
†Japanese residences are built very shoddily except baths-toilets-earthquake measures. Methods of heating or non-heating are not considered or worried about.
It is best to buy a house with summer in mind in Tokyo and other population centers because of the humidity related mold problem. Usually wooden houses have better air circulation below the house.
Concrete houses are relatively rare compared to wooden houses, so it might be chard to find what you want, the right layout or the right location. Concrete houses are also considerably more expensive than wooden ones. A newer wooden house with double pane windows and heated floors will be pretty warm in the winter and still cheaper than a concrete house.
I moved from a small 4-room wooden apartment to a concrete 4-floor apartment building. The concrete apartment was noticeably warmer in the wintertime.
In addition, I could identify which fucking TV channel my next door neighbor was watching in the wooden apartment, and you could count every footstep the upstairs neighbor took, but I could almost never hear any noise at all from any of the neighbors in the concrete building.
Concrete vs wood will tell you literally nothing about how well a house is insulated. The highest insulation Zero Energy Homes are typically wood. The shittiest drafty ass houses are also typically wood.
To tell how well a house is insulated, you need to measure how well that house is insulated.
we just built a (130 m2 floor space) wooden house in april in osaka (for 17M yen).
on a sunny day the sun heats the house up to 23C during the day and then it gradually drops to 20C at around 11pm.
so far the AC has only consumed 40kwh this fall (1000 yen)