Design For Limited Planet Living With Natural Energy

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David, with his wife, Barbara, built the house almost single-handedly with some subcontracting for electrical and plumbing work and a couple of part-time crews who worked two-week stints. The house took them less than six months to complete and cost the couple around $13,000, not counting their own labor. The interior is basically a two-story-high room with a balcony. Although the house is small, the window wall gives the interior a feeling of generous space.

David Wright's concept of a solar "heat sink", such as the one they adopted in this house, was popular in the late 1930's. Houses were marketed and sold as "solar houses", but they never adequately solved the basic problem: what to do with the excess heat during the day and how to stem the heat loss at night. (Night losses usually exceed the daily heat gains.) Superior insulation and the thermal building mass of adobe were Wright's solution to that problem. To augment the natural insulation provided by the adobe walls, fifteen 50-gallon water-filled oil drums, buried beneath the living room window, soak up the sun's warmth. Water holds about four times as much heat as adobe, and also absorbs it and gives it off faster. To further reduce heat loss at night, accordion-fold shutters made of canvas and 2-inch polyurethane panels are raised and lowered by a hand-operated crank and pulley to cover the vast expanse of the window wall at night.

Since completion, the house has required practically no maintenance. The Wrights found that space heating based on the concept of thermal lag follows natural rhythms and puts the body's metabolism in tune with it. "The body heats up and cools down gradually with the building," David explains. During the winter months the Wrights found that the house stores about five days' worth of heat, enough to carry through an average cloudy period in New Mexico. For auxiliary heat, they have a wood-burning Franklin stove, which uses less than a cord of wood a year.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The complete, 215-page book, Design for a Limited Planet, may be purchased from any good bookstore or ordered for $5.95 (plus 75¢ shipping) from Mother's Bookshelf, P.O. Box 70, Hendersonville, N.C. 28739.

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