The best advice is often the advice you hear every time you ask a question. In the case of solar energy, the best advice is always "fix everything you can fix before you start planning your project". If you plug all your leaks, improve your energy efficiency, and insulate your home properly, your solar energy installation can be smaller and will cost you less.
In most cases, we talk about thermal mass as something that absorbs and stores useful heat from the sun's light, releasing it when your home gets colder to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature. However, it is possible to use thermal mass as an effective cooling mechanism.
There are two types of cooling for passive solar homes: stuff that cools the house and stuff that cools the people inside the house. Humans do not react to heat in the same way as building materials, after all! There are two main ways of cooling a home's inhabitants:
That title might fill you with apprehension and, in many ways, you'd be right: analyzing such a complex thing as a home's energy performance without using software is a daunting task. But it is possible. There are even several books which include worksheets and detailed descriptions of how to build a more accurate assessment than the one we'll outline here.
Analyzing your passive solar home's energy performance by hand is long-winded, cumbersome, and prone to error. Between ten and twenty years ago, a variety of software tools appeared on the market, ranging from DOS-based utilities to basic Windows apps.
Over time, most of these programs have disappeared. Some were discontinued because they weren't popular enough, some vanished because they were based on obsolete operating systems, and others were simply discontinued through lack of support.
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.
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.
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:
One of the aspects of passive solar house design that surprises many people is the need for shade. If your heating depends on sunlight, why would you block it? Because not all sunlight is beneficial to a passive solar home – the high summer sun, in particular, can produce far too much heat, requiring some kind of shade to stop your home turning into an oven.
