David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 13 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
WRIGHT: That's a good beginning. As you get deeper into the climatic design concept, though, you'll find that that is just the beginning. There are many other ideas you can use. Sometimes it's good to build underground, for instance . . . sometimes not. And there are all kinds of things you can do with cross-ventilation: simple things . . . maybe just putting in a few windows that open and close. Or more sophisticated things . . . such as mounting a flat-plate collector on the south side of the house so that the heated air which rises through it creates a partial vacuum which pulls cooler air into the building through a moistened evaporative wick on the structure's north side.
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Anything's fair, you see. The whole idea, first and foremost, is to use every trick you can to passively condition that new living space. In some micro-climates, this first step alone might take care of 95% of all your needs. In others, maybe only 30%. It doesn't matter. Thirty percent is still better than nothing . . . and actually, that 30% away up north somewhere in, say, British Columbia might save you more money in a year's time than 95% saves you further south.
OK. Once you've done everything you can passively, you start filling in the gaps with active systems. They'll be more complicated and they'll require more maintenance than your basic passive systems, but they're still the next best thing going. Combined with the passive setups, the right active solar systems-in many climates-can get you up to a 90, 95, 100% conditioning of your living space. And even if it doesn't do that well, you're still way ahead of the game.
Your third line of defense should be a good little auxiliary stove that'll burn wood or some other renewable fuel. And your last choice of all is commercial energy in any form . .
preferably as efficient a form as possible: Heat pumps, in other words, are better than electric space heaters or air conditioners.
PLOWBOY: How do you analyze a site when you're getting ready to design a house, David? How do you go about it and what tools do you use?
Once you've built your house like a thermos bottle, you take the idea one step further. You aim it toward the south and you put a cork in it.
WRIGHT: Let's say that someone in Oklahoma contacts us-it's happened-and asks us to come and design a house.
All right. The climate in Oklahoma differs considerably from the climate we have here on the coast of northern California. The ocean moderates our seasonal temperature swings and we have fog in the summer and about three days of clear weather to one of cloudy during the winter. Oklahoma's summer weather, on the other hand, is much hotter and much more humid . . . and its winters can be quite cold and harsh compared to ours. It's obvious that we're going to have some trouble trying to design a house for Oklahoma's climate while living on the coast of California.
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