What is passive solar? It is the use of the sun to help meet a building's energy needs by means of architectural design such as arrangement of windows and materials such as floors that store heat, or other thermal mass. What this means is that you don't need any other heat source like propane, it uses sunlight only.
Instructions on how to build a passive solar greenhouse.
Passive solar barn.
Passive solar chicken coop.
~marisa
6 comments:
This is essentially an earthship design. Have you heard of them?
http://earthship.net/
Stephen,
Thanks for the link, I've never heard of this before, very fascinating! I can't wait to read up on this even more.
Yeah, they're pretty amazing. At one point my wife and I were sold on building one, but that was before we heard about Agricultural Urbanism...
Check out the documentary "Garbage Warrior."
http://www.garbagewarrior.com
And on Netflix:
http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Garbage_Warrior/70105873?strackid=3242ebbc2f00ed09_0_srl&strkid=2112519658_0_0&trkid=438381
Interesting. I didn't realize strawbale was an expensive option--I thought it was one of the cheaper methods of home building. But then, I haven't seriously researched it!
A good movie to check out is called "Building with Awareness." You might be able to find it at a local library. It talks about many passive means to conserve energy and resources.
Stephen and Sydney, I just put both your movies in my Netflix queue, thanks for the suggestions!
Laura, Michael and I were really surprised to find out that it was more expensive to build a strawbale home as well! We had always heard how inexpensive it was. I think if you build a super small home and do the majority of the work yourself it would be inexpensive.
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