7 Passive Solar Design Elements for Your Custom Home
Building a custom home gives you a unique opportunity. You can make your home much more efficient and comfortable than the cookie neighborhoods being built in bulk. Those standard house designs are great for building them fast, but they often lack the subtlety and natural harmony with the land and surrounding environment. One of these options is passive solar design, the art of conveying and blocking heat from the sun to improve the efficiency and comfort of your home.
As a custom home builder, 2x4 Build can turn your home into something completely else; an energy-efficient fixture that uses your neighborhood's natural sunlight exposure to provide natural heat in the winter and keep the home cool in the summer. Today, we're taking a closer look at seven of our favorite passive solar design ideas that only custom home builders can truly take advantage of.
1) Face Your Windows to the South
Here in the northern hemisphere, south is our sun direction. Your south wall and roof will always catch more sun than the north. The best way to keep the cold out while letting the sun in is a bank of south-facing windows. Not only will you get delightful direct sunlight during the winter, but your home will also be welcoming a few extra BTUs every sunny day, straight through those glass walls. South-facing windows can be well-insulated against cold air while bringing in extra heat all winter long.
2) Insulate Your North Wall
As for your north wall, make sure it is extra insulated against the cold air and the lack of heat due to indirect sunlight. Your north wall is more likely to become a heat-sink in the home and therefore needs added protection. Place fewer windows on the north side of the house and add thicker insulation to the walls on that side to fight off the winter chill.
3) Choose Flooring that Absorbs Solar Heat
The other half of the heat-from-windows trick of passive solar design is your floor. To truly absorb heat from winter sunlight, you need a floor that qualifies as an "absorber". This usually means a floor that is dark in color and designed to warm when exposed to direct sunlight. You will want a dark-colored floor in the concrete or tile variety. These not only absorb heat in the moment, they soak up heat all day and can provide additional warmth for some time into the night. Clay tile is the current preferred passive solar flooring.
4) Cantilever Your Second Story
To cantilever your second story is to extend it slightly from the top of your first story. What this means is that your second story creates an attractive overhang above your lower windows. This clever little custom building trick allows you to optimize the amount of sun you soak up throughout the day on both stories and to calculate for the difference between winter and summer sun.
Winter sun shines closer to the horizon, horizontally into your south-facing windows. Summer sun shines from further overhead, and is much more intense during the warmer months. The goal is to welcome winter sun while blocking summer sun with rooftops, awnings, and other forms of shade.
A cantilever provides summer shade to your lower windows while allowing both the upper and lower stories to optimally absorb winter sun.
5) Properly Insulate Your Attic
Attic insulation matters. A poorly insulated attic can result in a home that is freezing in the winter and baking in the summer because outdoor temperatures are allowed to come in. Use insulating shielding between your roofing tiles and beams, and between the beams and the drywall. Also make efforts to go well above-code when insulating the attic and entire home.
As an important note, don't sacrifice attic ventilation for insulation. They both must work perfectly to keep your home comfortable and prevent ice dams on the roof.6
6) Invest in High-Quality Windows
High quality windows are a must. The perfect windows for passive solar design insulate against airflow and temperature transference while also allowing you to flood your living spaces with warming sunlight. It's important to talk to your contractor about the right windows for each design. As any North Carolinian knows, double-paned windows are your best bet for providing clear view and warm sunbeams without allowing the cold winter chill to come through.
7) Use a Thermosiphoning Panel System
Lastly and quite interestingly, there is thermosiphoning. Thermosiphing uses a unique combination of conduction and vents to convey heat into the house. A thermosiphoning panel is usually metal and absorbs the sun's heat in an air pocket between the walls. If the heat is desired in the home, vents can be opened to allow the thermalsiphining heat to enter. In the summer or when the home is warm enough, these vents can be closed and that natural source of heating is controlled.
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Many of these passive solar design tricks are only available when building your custom home from the ground up. Interested in more ways to make your home comfortable and energy efficient with clever use of the sunbeams naturally shining on your lot? Contact us today!
