Go Solar and Save Big!

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Alternative builder Clarke Snell promotes passive solar home design, a technique that saves energy and reduces pollution. DAVE CHANNON

Great news! You have free access to a source of energy that can save you thousands of dollars on your home’s heating and cooling bills. You can harness this eco-friendly energy source using inexpensive, readily available technology, and it comes with a lifetime guarantee.

The energy source is the sun, and the technology is passive solar design— the conscious manipulation of building temperature by using the sun’s direct energy. If you are planning to buy a new home or remodel your current residence, put passive solar design on your “must-have” list.

Everyone is already aware of some of the advantages of solar design: We all appreciate the coolness of a shady porch or patio in the summer, or the warmth of a sunny window in the winter. But most people are not aware of the huge difference solar design can make in the amount of energy needed to heat and cool our homes. In most situations, a well-designed passive solar home stays cool in the summer without air conditioning, and in the winter it requires much less energy to heat. The combination of a woodstove and solar design is often enough to keep a house comfortably warm, even in very cold climates.

The best aspect of solar design is that if you’re building or remodeling a home, you can incorporate it at little or no extra expense. With oil and natural gas prices rising, and power blackouts becoming more common, it now makes more sense than ever to take advantage of natural heating and cooling rather than depending on fossil fuels.

After all, we already heat and cool our homes with solar energy. That’s because the fossil fuels we burn today are nothing more than stored solar energy. Plants captured that solar energy through photosynthesis, and then — over millions of years — heat and pressure transformed dead plants and animals into deposits of coal, oil and natural gas. I wish I had the biggest bullhorn ever made (solar-powered, of course) to broadcast this message: There’s a better way! Everyone should use solar design to save energy, save money and reduce pollution.

Location, Location, Location

In nearly every kind of climate, heating and cooling a building is a challenge. Maintaining a stable temperature for a tiny air mass (the inside of your house) is a difficult undertaking because of the constantly fluctuating temperature of a much larger surrounding air mass (the great outdoors). Unlike most other approaches, though, solar design makes the sun an ally rather than an adversary in this task; the key is adapting the design to the specific location where you live.

Building site. Two facts about the sun make solar design possible. First, the sun’s path through the sky changes throughout the year. Second, this path repeats the same cycle every year. That’s why for any given building site we know exactly where the sun will be during every season, so we can design our homes to capture the sun’s heat in the winter and block it during the summer.