David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 10 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
But this is like building that water heater we talked abou and putting the collector on top. When you do it that way, you have to pump an awful lot of commercial energy into the sys tem to make it work. It's the same with a building. When you leave all its thermal mass outside where the summer's heat o the winter's cold can get at it, you're working against yourself You're just guaranteeing that you're going to have to spend, great deal of money on insulation and commercial energy in you want to stay comfortable inside that structure.
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What you really want to do is turn the idea around and pu your insulation on the
outside-just under the weather skinand keep your thermal mass inside. Build your house like ; thermos bottle. Insulate it just under its outer surfaces and keep all its heavy masses inside. That way, they can act a thermal flywheels that help you coast right through the sea sonal and daily temperature changes that buffet the exterior c the building.
And once you've done that, it's a simple matter to take the idea one step further. Once you've built your thermos bottle you aim it toward the south and you put a cork in it. That is You put some large glass surfaces on the south side of you building and you add some big insulated shutters or othe movable panels that you can open or close to uncover or cove those windows.
And as you get more sophisticated, you learn to position the homes you build so that the natural terrain around them she] ters the structures from winter winds while leaving them open to summer breezes. And you begin to shape the houses s they'll take better advantage of the low winter sun while block ing out the high summer sun. And so on.
PLOWBOY: That sounds almost too . . . .
WRIGHT: I know. It sounds too simple to work. I run into that lot. Every time I explain what I'm doing, someone asks m4 "Well, if an idea this simple works so well, why wasn't it use before?"
And that's just the point. It was used before. In a thousand different ways by almost every indigenous architecture that the traditional cultures of the world have ever evolve They're almost all just variations on this same theme.
Those troglodyte dwellings in Tunisia . . . the south-facie pueblos here in the U.S. Southwest . . . those traditional of adobes with walls that were three feet thick ... and so man: many other forms of indigenous architecture. When you real] begin to study them, you realize that they've all been precise] engineered to take maximum advantage of the micro-climal for which they were designed. They were precisely engineere for the prevailing winds, precipitation, and solar fall of the particular regions where they were built.
The first Tunisian troglodytes didn't have our mode insulations to work with . . . but they got an identical effect burying their homes 40 feet under the earth's surface. It's the same with those old adobes: Adobe may not be a very go( insulation . . . but it starts to work like one when you pile it t. in walls that are three or four feet thick. And that goes for the pueblos I've mentioned too . . . especially when you su temper them by putting them up on the side of a south-facir cliff where the winter sun can strike them but the hotte summer sun can't.
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