Hot humid
Shade the house as much as possible with a high canopy of deciduous trees planted nearby. You can increase air movement by facing the house into cool prevailing winds and siting it high up slopes. In the same way as this Malay house, elevate the structure and make rooms and verandahs open to the wind. Light-toned walls and roof help.
Hot arid
Have most shade in the late morning and all afternoon and allow trees to overhang the roof Site the house to catch the summer winds and moisten the air with water and vegetation. With hot/cold extremes — day and night, summer and winter — a courtyard house of heavy materials to store heat and protect against the cold is ideal. Use light colours.
Temperate
Warm the house with winter sun and use trees and bushes to shelter itfrom cold prevailing winds. In summer, use deciduous trees and creepers to prevent overheating. Water in ponds reflects the winter sun into the house and also cools it in summer. Pitched roofs throw off rain and medium-toned colours absorb the sun’s heat.
Cool
Maximize the warmth from winter sun and shelter from cold winds. Avoid a site in a cold-air pocket. One option is a house built into the ground with an earth-covered grass roof. Plant dense screens of evergreen trees on exposed sides. Shallower, pitched roofs retain snow for extra insulation. Use thick insulating walls with dark tones.
Siting and climate
Most early peoples showed a great sensitivity to local conditions. Cultures in every climate region around the world have developed their own distinctive ways of coping with the climate. Whether it is living high up in tree houses in humid areas or dug down in cave houses in hot or cold locations, they all demonstrate the most efficient means of staying comfortable. With central heating and air conditioning, siting the house in relation to its locality no longer seems to be so important. But with the increasing pressure on world energy resources, these commonsense considerations are again becoming basic requirements.
The solar home
The way the sun heats the planet is the basic model for the solar home. Heat radiates from the sun and warms the planet’s surface. Heat is retained near the surface by the layers of the atmosphere and it is also stored in the land and water masses. Winds and water currents, themselves produced by the sun’s energy, then circulate the heat around the planet.
In a solar home, these four principles (radiation, retention, storage, and circulation) are at work. A structure heated by the sun absorbs and collects the sun’s energy. The fabric of the building retains the heat because of its insulating properties and also because any openings are covered with glass, curtains, or thermal shutters. The interior stores the heat in solid partitions and floors and thermal movement then circulates it. In this respect, you achieve the ultimate in energy efficiency in the well-designed, earth-covered home.
Solar methods of heating the home can be either passive or active. With a passive solar system, the sun warms the interior directly through windows or a “sunspace”. The building structure is designed to store the heat and release it at night or on cloudy days. Often, natural thermal movement — convection, conduction, and radiation — is all that is needed to circulate heat, but ceiling fans can help. (A word of warning: you will need some method of shading structures such as sunspaces during the summer months in hot climates.)
An active solar system relies more on mechanical components such as solar panels, which absorb the sun’s heat and store it in water tanks, rock beds, or similar. Pipes and ducts are required to distribute the heat with the aid of fans, pumps, and valves.
There are a number of advantages with passive solar systems. They require little or no maintenance, for example, since there are no mechanical parts. The initial installation cost and running costs are also low and so they repay the investment in a relatively short time. Very often, if you are building a new home, or even remodelling an existing one, it is possible to incorporate basic passive solar heating at virtually no additional cost and thus reduce both the size and cost of the conventional system. However, depending on the climate, it may be necessary to combine passive and active systems in order to achieve effective and flexible heating and cooling.
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