Passive Heating Options
Advanced Living Homes designs each new home, where possible, to have some form of passive heating and cooling. This is not necessarily an additional cost to construction of your new home, as most new homes in New Zealand are built on top of a great source of passive heating - the concrete floor.
The principle of solar passive heating is very simple. Glass allows ultra-violet rays through. Those rays heat up objects in your new home. Those objects then radiate that heat, but as infra-red, not ultra-violet radiation. The windows cannot easily transmit that type of radiation, so the heat is trapped inside your new home. How much mass the object being heated has determines how much energy it can store, and consequently how long it can radiate the stored heat out for. That is why we recommend including areas of the interior concrete floor be left un-carpeted, especially close to the windows and exterior doors,
We have other tools to develop such free heating, including the placement in our designs of "trombe" walls. These are mode of a thermal material such as concrete, hemp-lime, adobe etc, and placed on the North-facing sides of your new home. The thermal mass is covered by a glazed material, usually a dark glass, with an air space between the glazed material and the thermal mass. There is a vent left at the top and the bottom of the thermal mass to allow for air flow into the air space. During the day the glazed material attracts sunlight and the thermal mass stores the attracted sunlight in the form of heat. The air in the air space is circulated out of the air space and into the building by heat convection. The cool air from the building goes through the vent and into the airspace, heats up, then the heated air rises out of the top vent back into the building.
Passive solar cooling reduces the need for air conditioning in homes. It can be implemented simply by using for north-facing windows, fewer windows on the west, shade trees, thermal mass and cross ventilation. Some of the same strategies that help to heat a home in the winter also cool it in the summer. A well-designed overhang in the north-facing windows admits the low-angled rays of the winter sun, while providing shade from the high angled summer sun.
Other forms of passive cooling involve placement of high windows on the south side of your new home and thus create a thermal conduit for the warm air coming in the north-facing windows to convect to the rear, creating a pleasant draught of air through your new home. This is easily attained with 2-storey home designs.
Contact us today to discuss how we can incorporate these free forms of temperature control into the new home we design and build for you.