I've Got Solar Energy Working for me now!

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

For example: Walk into the bedroom, living roomeven kitchenof almost any new house built in nearly any part of the country, and what will you find? Even if the sun is shining brightly outside, you'll probably have to turn on a light if you want to see really well inside the room.

Wouldn't it make better sense to just let the sun shine in? And if you'll go that far, what's wrong with designing some solar heat storage into the living room floor? Or doing away with a few of the wooden walls inside the building in favor of climbing cucumbers or other towering plants? (Most walls are merely privacy screens anyway. So why not "grow" walls which will provide that screening... and feed you too?)

Hey! Maybe we're onto something. Instead of designing our houses so stupidly that we even have to light them artificially during the day ... let's let enough sunshine into our homes to light them ... to heat them ... to turn them into greenhouses! Let's let our houses not only shelter us ... but warm and feed us too! Let's fill 'em with plants we can eat ... plants that will add moisture and oxygen to the air ... plants that the elderly, the handicapped, the young, all of us can enjoy right through the winter!

And let's construct those homes, as much as possible, from native materials and design each one so its greenhouse section can feed excess heat to the rest of the building on cold, clean winter days ... and vice versa the following nights and on overcast days.

THE SOLAR ROOF

It was this kind of reasoning that led me to retrofit a greenhouse to our small mountain cabin nearly four years ago. And to face the cottage and the east and west sides of the greenhouse with 12 inches of native rock (the north side of the greenhouse attaches to the cabin and the south side is a six-inch-thick frame wall). And to insulate the east and west walls of the greenhouse with three and one-half inches of fiberglass (the south side is insulated with six inches of the material). And to add brick walls (the bricks were salvaged from burned-out buildings) to the greenhouse's interior (the mass of these wallsinside the insulation acts. as a "thermal flywheel" and evens out day and night temperatures in the building ... see the Andy Davis Interview in MOTHER NO. 46, the David Wright Interview in MOTHER NO. 47, and the article about the Savell construction system in MOTHER NO. 48). And, perhaps most important of all, it was this line of reasoning which led me to finish off my cottage's addition with a heating system I've come to call the Solar Roof (even though part of the system is a water storage tank under the greenhouse).

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print