Designing a passive solar home is not the end of the road for sustainability. There are many more choices you can make to improve your home's sustainability and, at the same time, reduce the impact of traditional living on the environment.
Modern wood stoves are not simple metal boxes to burn fuel in. They are much more efficient than traditional fireplaces and can be just as attractive. Stoves also rely on a renewable source of energy. Most modern wood stoves fit into one of two categories: radiant or circulating.
There are two main ways you can improve your home's ecological impact when it comes to water: installing alternative systems for domestic and outside water use, and implementing an alternative wastewater system.
Masonry heaters are wood stoves with the welded steel or cast iron casing replaced by bricks and mortar. They are very efficient at warming an entire house, producing much higher temperatures from their fuel than standard metal stoves. Like all forms of heating, they have certain benefits and drawbacks.
A big part of the passive solar home equation resides in cutting down on how much heating and cooling you need. The lower your demands, the bigger the percentage you can cover with renewable solar energy. There are two main culprits of internal heat gain in the average home:
At first glance, you might think that it's impossible to have too much or too little thermal mass. After all, if there's loads of it, your home will store more heat; if there's very little, you'll still get the benefits of what you do have.
But it's not as simple as that.
In an ideal passive solar world, homes would be built as a long string of single rooms, so that every room would be heated by the sun and there would be no need to transport warmth from warmer to cooler rooms. In practical terms, long houses are rarely appropriate: traffic flow inside such buildings is often difficult and housing lots in towns and cities tend to be square or rectangular, rather than extended oblongs.
The mainstays of modern home insulation are fiberglass, rigid foam and cellulose. But there are natural alternatives to these which are worth considering, especially if you're going for super-green construction!
One unusual feature of many passive solar homes is that they are partially buried. Given the natural human dislike of living underground, this often strikes people as a "caveman" approach to efficient living but, in reality, it is an efficient means of conserving potentially enormous amounts of energy. And no, living in a home that uses earth berming or earth sheltering is not like living in a cave!
