The Paul Isaacson Family Lives In The House Of The Future
(Page 2 of 6)
March/April 1978
By the Mother Earth News editors
THE IDEA IS STILL PAYING OFF
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The completed Isaacson house receives that same gift on a daily basis. When it's zero outside and nearby conventional dwellings of comparable size are losing 55,000 to 60,000 Btu's per hour ... the subterranean structure is giving up just a miserly 12,000 Btu's per.
But that's only half the story! As good -or, perhaps, even better-is the part about where those Btu's of heat come from in the first place. In the case of the conventional homes, the whole 55,000 or 60,000 Btu's are furnished the expensive way: by the local fuel oil dealer or natural gas or electric utility. In the Isaacsons' case, on the other hand, a large percentage of its small heating needs are already provided by that "big-and free!-utility in the sky": the sun. And eventually, virtually 100% of those needs will come from that same source.
"Right now," Paul points out, "a fair percentage of our home's heating load is provided directly by the sun. It shines through the two domes onto the darkbrown tile-on-concrete floor of the solaratrium. This heats the tiles, the space above them, and-to a certain extent?the rooms that surround the atrium. And it works. Well enough, in fact, that the only supplemental source of heat we now use is a small 41,000-Btu electric mobile home furnace. During the winter it runs about two hours each morning, then shuts down the rest of the time."
Most of us, of course, would be pleased as punch to get by that inexpensively. But not Paul. He's currently planning the installation of an active air-type solar heating system to supplement the passive system already built into his subterranean residence.
"And that shouldn't be very expensive to put in," Isaacson calculates. "The rule of thumb for most solar homes is that you need at least one square foot of collector surface for every two square feet of living space. However-thanks to our dwelling's modest heating demands and the passive solar gains we're already making-we figure we're only going to have to install 200 square feet of collector for our whole 2,000 square feet of space."
The add-on active solar heating system will store the Btu's it captures in 30 tons of rock. Ducts will then lead from the storage bin through the ceiling to all parts of the house. And an "environmental control center" (a small computer wired to heat sensors scattered around the dwelling) will switch a fan on and off and open and close 17 dampers to direct the warmth where it's needed. The control unit will also draw heat from the large greenhouse dome and-on the few occasions when neither the storage bin nor the big bubble has any Btu's to spare-kick on the electric heater as a last resort.
THERE'S STILL MORE TO THE ISAACSON HOUSE THAN MEETS THE EYE
But that, of course, is a rather obvious way to set up the heating system for a house like this. What, perhaps, is not so obvious are a couple of the finer points of the basic structure's design ... points that contribute greatly to both the buildin's comfort and its energy efficiency.
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