Our Solar SunHawk
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Nancy spent countless hours on the Internet and on the phone researching every aspect of the house — from building materials and their sustainability quotient to appliances and their energy efficiency. It took us weeks to decide on a roofing material. We looked at copper, composition shingles, slate and concrete, and finally decided on rubber shingles made entirely from recycled tires. They look exactly like slate from a distance.
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To cover the Rastra, we used stucco on the outside and plaster on the inside; we used no insulation or sheetrock on the main walls.
We used beautiful recycled redwood for barge rafters, fascia boards and decking. For our large 4-by-12-inch beams, we found some Douglas fir timbers reclaimed from a naval warehouse. And for the little bit of flooring that isn't concrete, we found some reclaimed walnut. For new wood, we bought sustainably harvested redwood.
In Sync With Seasons
As part of the passive-solar design, the walls and windows allow the winter sun to penetrate and warm the interior.
The living room's concrete floor and high ceiling have diagonal patterns that resemble tail feathers, and the piece de resistance is the stained-glass hawk installed above the south-facing French doors. On the winter solstice, sunlight streams through the window and the hawk "flies" across the floor from west to east. At exactly solar noon, the sunlight illuminates a slate hawk in the floor in front of our woodstove. A solar calendar runs the length of the living room floor from north to south; the passing of the seasons is marked by the way the sunlight falls on different portions. Concrete benches in the south part of the living room face the woodstove, creating a gathering place and a classroom atmosphere. Here we hope to house some of the sustainable-living workshops conducted through the Solar Living Institute ( www.solarliving.org ).
The house, with its southern orientation, low-emissivity windows and thermal mass, is capable of being heated completely passively, but we do have some active systems.
These include radiant floor heating, in which tubes run inside the concrete floors on the ground floor and second level.
At exactly solar noon, the sunlight illuminates a slate hawk in the floor in front of our woodstove.
Hot water is provided to the radiant floor in three ways: first, via two 4-by-8 - foot passive-solar collectors, each of which has 50 gallons of storage capacity; and second, through diverting the excess voltage from our photovoltaic and hydroelectric systems to waterheating elements in a 120-gallon storage tank. If all else fails, a propane burner kicks in, but we hope to avoid using any fossil fuels. Thanks to our contractor, the cooling system is equally unique. In the center of the house is an enclosed "fountain room," underneath which lies a 9-foot-deep rock storage bed. Two 1-foot-diameter culverts within the bed extend 150 feet deeper underground. In our part of the country, the air is consistently 67 degrees at that depth. Two solar-powered fans at the termination of the culverts pull cool air into the fountain room, where it mixes with the fountain water and provides natural evaporative cooling throughout the house.
