Sierra Club Green Home

LIVING CLOSER TO THE SUN No, this is not about space travel. This is about tapping into the rays of the sun to get us through those winter months, using the ideas developed by the ancient pueblo people who lived on the colarodo plateau as much as 2,000 years ago and developed the simple principles which we can borrow from today to help cope with climate change and over the peak oil. So this could be big news for a prospective home builder, but the idea is very old and very tried and true. Here are some of the basic principles and constraints: (1) Pueblo homes faced SOUTH to take advantage of winter sun. You need to know the suns position at approximately Christmas day to asssure that the south side of your new abode gets 6 hours or more of sun at that time of year. If you don't want to wait till christmas, consult one of the many manuals for installing solar panels. (2) Glass and insulation were not available to the early pueblo solar communities, but we can use them to bring passive solar much further to the north. Todays building codes in Wshington call for about R-19 in the walls and R-25 in the cielings. I have abouit 1/3 of my south facing wall in double-glazed glass. (and this needs to be clear glass, not low-E or tinted glass). Also, most of our glass surfaces need to be on that south wall instead of the north (worst) west (almost as bad) or east (not quite as bad) sides. Sadly, glasss windows lose almost at night as they gain in solar warmth in the daylight hours. I solve this problem with portable foam insulation panels that cover the windows at night and get taken down at sunrise. Does anyone else out there have some better ideas? (3) The pueblo solar folks built their homes of massive blocks of adobe and/or stone. We call this THERMAL MASS. This thermal masss is like a giant storage battery. With out this feature, our new home would be an oven in the daytime and an icebox at night. We can achieve this in our home with walls and/or partitions of stone,concrete, concrete block,brick or even adobe or rammed earth. (4) INSULATION needs to placed on the OUTSIDE of those heavy exterior walls to preserve all of that precious thermal mass. This is in direct contradiction of standard building practice, so you will be going against the flow here. (5) OTHER: There's lots of other tricks to get the most of your new, super green home. Send me an E-mail at erlansonkh@hotmail.com and I will be glad to share more ideas. I live about 100 miles south of the Canadian border in eastern washington. I spent about 25% more on this do-it-yourself home in construction costs to achieve passive solar capability. A typical winter day is in the 20s and nights in the teens. Nevertheless, about 40% of my wintertime heat comes from solar. Spring and fall are almost 100% solar. The balance comes from biofuels (recycled apple trees) and electric. One final thought: If we wait for government and industry to respond to the chalenges we face today, we may wait too lomg. It is up to us, our families and our communities to take action to ensure that our planet remains our home, our source of life, and a place for the future generations that will be here when we are gone.