Great Green Idea: Green Energy: Make the Sun Work for You with Passive Solar Home Design

Make the Sun Work for You with Passive Solar Home Design

With an ever increasing concern over environmental degradation, your home is one area where you can take it upon yourself to make "going green" the utmost focus. There are ways in which, through the design of your home, you can take advantage of natural resources without even having renewable energy power generation in your home.

A design technique called passive solar home design is a method by which one's house is oriented in such a way to take advantage of natural sunlight, heating, and shade. This is a pretty simple concept that is not too sophisticated to understand. It merely uses techniques that allow one to take advantage of all the natural resources available on one's plot of land. With the use of intelligent materials selection, the result is a highly efficient and sustainably designed home.

Design is optimized to keep your home well lit with natural light from the sun. Many studies have shown that natural solar lighting is a natural mood enhancer and that artificial light is actually bad for our psyches. So by building your home with passive solar design, you are not only going to have a better mental clarity, but your electrical usage from artificial lighting will be significantly minimized.

Passive solar design also involves orientation that allows for better energy efficiency. These homes are designed to take advantage of natural shade and other sunblocks to keep the heat out during the summer. They are oriented in such as way as to take advantage of available sunlight in the winter. This creates an overall more stable internal temperature, and it also helps to keep your house at a more comfortable temperature, without the excessive use of heating and cooling systems.

The basic method by which these homes are designed is with an advanced understanding of sun and wind patterns on your plot of land. This will give the builder a better idea of how to appropriately orient the structure in order to optimally achieve the most efficient passive solar conditions for inside your home.

Orientation is not everything though. Design looks to incorporate areas with which the earth's thermal mass can help to increase the efficiency of the home. Trees and other types of shading are of the utmost importance to maintaining a steady internal temperature. And with the use of specially glazed windows, you are able to take advantage of the sun when you need it and block it out when you don't.

The basic concept behind passive solar housing design is to use intelligent planning to take advantage of all the natural resources one has to their advantage. Working with the land and orienting your home to achieve the maximum efficiency, coupled with the use of shade trees, specially glazed windows, and highly insulated structures provide an efficient home that is easy to heat and cool, and that has massive amounts of natural light.

One does not have to be in the market for a new home to take advantage of certain aspects of passive solar design. New techniques that allow you to retrofit your home with double or even triple glazed windows, add insulation, and additional shading or thermal mass allow for the opportunity to take advantage of some of these passive designs to increase the efficiency of your home. When you want to reduce your impact on the environment and even save some money along the way, consider passive solar design. By using intelligent design, you can design an optimally efficient home that maximizes energy obtained through natural sources, passively.