Stories tagged with "passive solar"

Passive Solar Design Overview - Part 5: Distribution, Ventilation, and Cooling

This is a guest post from Will Stewart, a Systems Engineer in the energy industry.

In this final article in the passive solar design overview series (see Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4), we will cover the techniques used to avoid hot and cold spots in a passive solar building, how to provide fresh air, and how to provide cooling (in many situations).

Wind directed HRV cowlings at BedZed

Practical Passive Solar Renovation - Part 1: Easy First Project

Editor's note: Below is a guest post by Will Stewart on practical passive solar improvements that we might implement right now. Please also see his series of Passive Solar fundamentals

While you are absorbing the fundamentals of passive solar design, you might also be itching to put some of you new found knowledge into action to realize lower energy bills, help a son/daughter with a school science project, or simply have a winter project to occupy you enough to keep you out of the Mayberry jail. With that in mind, the first project we will look at is one that has applicability across a wide range of homes, whether owned or rented. And if you move, you can take it with you. You can even configure it as a solar dehydrator for your garden and fruit tree produce. And once you gather the materials, you should be able to put it together in a couple of hours.

Advice to President Obama: Grasping the Building Energy Bull by the Horns

This is a guest post by Will Stewart, who has written a series of passive solar essays on The Oil Drum recently.

Mr. President, your inaugural address recognized “the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet”. You’ve touched on two crucial challenges that America faces; reducing our dependence on energy sources of a foreign or fossil nature, and reducing the damage we cause to our own biosphere through pollution from many of those same power sources. Since the energy crises of the 1970s, we have been slowly sleepwalking back into a culture of excessive overconsumption, backsliding in our addiction to cheap, non-renewable, polluting energy sources.

Figure 1 - U.S. Energy Consumption by Sector

Figure 1 shows that the largest part of our energy consumption resides in the building sector, making this an area we must place a high priority on improving (and improving drastically). Fortunately, drastic improvements are within our grasp...

Passive Solar Design Overview: Part 3 – Thermal Storage Mass

This is Part 3 in a series on Passive Solar Design by Will Stewart, a Systems Engineer in the energy industry and longtime reader of theoildrum.com. As a new administration considers how best to make future infrastructure investments, it seems like some of the lowest hanging fruit is better utilization of the daily solar flux, not only directly with photovoltaic and hot water, but also in building construction and placement. I encourage our readers to further their understanding of passive solar concepts by reading/bookmarking this series.

Passive Solar Design Overview – Part 2 in a Series

This is Part 2 in a series on passive solar by Oil Drum reader Will Stewart. Passive solar is one of many practices attempting to increase the percentage of our baseline energy use we receive from renewable flows as opposed to fossil stocks.

Solar Irradiance by Wavelength (reaching the Earth)
Figure 6 - Solar Intensity at Sea Level by Wavelength

US Housing and the Passive Home Standard

Earlier this week we had a post on Passive Solar by Will Stewart. Today we have another post on Passive Solar Houses by TOD poster, Majorian, giving an overview of how much energy can be saved by building passive solar homes.



Passive Solar Design Overview – Part 1

Below the fold is a TOD:Campfire post on Passive Solar, from longtime TOD reader Will Stewart. Will is a Systems Engineer in the Energy industry - he will have a follow up post in the near future. Please add your own experience and expertise with passive solar, including links and images in the comment section - the sun is as close as we get to a perpetual energy subsidy.....how we best access and take advantage of it is the subject of tonights post. For submissions to this series, please email campfire@theoildrum.com or todcampfire@gmail.com.

The Energy Return of (Industrial) Solar - Passive Solar, PV, Wind and Hydro (#5 of 6)

Below is 4th in a series of installments by Professor Charles Hall of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and his students attempting to update the 'balloon graph' of EROI x Scale for fossil and renewable energy sources with help from theoildrum.com readership. Todays post deals with solar energy, specifically: Hydropower, Passive Solar, Photovoltaic, and Wind energy. Next will be Geothermal and Wave energy systems.