David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 15 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
There are all kinds of subtleties that come into play when you're designing one particular house that takes maximum advantage of one particular micro-climate . . . when you're de signing a house that operates on just the natural sources o energy in that micro-climate.
RELATED CONTENT
Want to know how to build your own photovoltaic system, how to construct a solar water pump, or eve...
It’s not every day that you get a chance to tour a green home. Well, here’s your opportunity! Every...
A string of new solar manufacturing plants are scheduled to open within the next few years....
You can build this super-simple and super-effective solar collector in just one hour!...
From California to New Jersey, utilities across the nation are pursuing developments in solar power...
Every house has a different storage mass, geometry, ex terior profile, heat loss factor, amount of window area, and s( on. Each house has a different performance curve tailored a: precisely as we can to the weather, temperature, and other climatic changes of its particular site . . . and to the prefer ences of the people who'll live in it. This can be done and it's lot of fun doing it . . . but it requires a hell of a lot more finesse than just sticking an air conditioner in one of the windows.
It's still kind of difficult to figure out in advance how well a passive system will work too. Engineers know exactly how many Btu's of heat a particular model of a wall furnace will put out . . . but no one knows exactly what happens to the sun'; energy when it changes wavelength and bounces around inside a structure. We're all learning those things, but it's still fairly common for a passive system to perform 20 or 30% better-oz worse-than projected.
And then there's the problem of getting people to understand that you don't just move into a passively conditioned house the way you move into a house that runs on commercial energy. You have to learn to give and take. You become much more aware of the weather. You don't just throw a carpet down on the floor if the floor happens to be one of your thermal storage masses . . . because that carpet will act as a piece of insulation between the solar energy coming in the windows and the storage floor and, as a result, your living space will heat up too fast during the day and cool off too fast at night.
If you're too lazy or too inflexible to take all this in stride, you're going to hate living in a climatic house. If you can handle these kinds of change, though, you're going to be way ahead of the game as the cost of energy continues to climb. You're going to save yourself a bundle of money and you're going to be able to live with a lot more independence and self-determination than the poor souls who still get their daily fix of energy from the utility companies.
PLOWBOY: Which design philosophy do you think will win out in the end?
WRIGHT: There's no question! We've been living in a petroleum economy for some time, but we're already making the transition to a solar economy. It's inevitable. It's only a matter of time until every home and apartment building takes care of its own needs with passive heating and cooling and generates its own electricity with photovoltaic cells or some kind of neighborhood solar-powered generator.
And that's gonna free a lot of people from the corporate economics that now control us in a very omniscient and yet mysterious way. We won't have to spend so much of our time paying off those corporations the way we do now and that's going to elevate the quality of our lives.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 | 15 |
16 |
Next >>
