Passive solar design

So, what is a passive solar designed house?  There are several ways of building the passive solar part.

The picture on the left shows the basics-

• There needs to be an aperture, or the way the sun gets in. (The windows). Designers need to be careful in regards to the amount and placement of the windows.  Too many windows and the house warms up to much cools down to quickly.
• The absorber- this is the material that absorbs the sunlight and stores it as heat.  This is normally masonary, concrete, sometimes even water.
• The thermal mass.  The material that is behind the absorber and stores and helps distribute the heat.  The thermal mass is often the same as the absorber except that it is mass that holds the majority of the heat.  To little mass and the house heats up too quickly, and cools too rapidly, creating uncomfortable temperature spikes  More is better in this case and helps an even flow of the-
• distribution.  How the heat is distributed is an important aspect of the passive solar home.  Most use conduction, convection, and radiation to distribute the heat which is totally natural, requiring no equipment.  Sometimes, however, fans and ducts are used to distribute the heat.
• Control of the amount of intake and escape.  There certainly can be too much of a good thing and the designer needs to keep in mind the summer sun as well as the winter.  In the picture you can see that the designer extended the eaves out, partially blocking the sun in the summer months. Also, the amount of windows are a two edged sword, as mentioned above.  Not only can too many windows let in too much sunlight, at night too many windows tend to allow the heat to escape too easily.  A careful balance needs to be maintained.

So, during the day the sun enters through the aperture, hits the absorber and heats up the thermal mass.  When the sun goes down, the house begins to cool, the thermal mass starts to release it's heat and helps keep a constant temperature through out the house.
There are several different ways to approach designing a passive solar home, some of which I will detail later. To be honest, Teri and I started with the idea of passive solar as the main idea around the philosophy of our house, but are moving closer to the geothermal portion- due mostly to our New England setting.  I still hope, however, that the passive solar portion is a significant part of our supplementary heating.

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