Man Heats 4,000 Sq. Ft Home for $2.50 Per Day Using Passive Solar Technology
Why spend lots of money heating your house when nature can do it for you? Upstate New York resident John Kosmer has taken passive solar to a new level in his home, which only costs $2.50 a day to heat. That’s less than $1,000 a year of heating expenses in an area of the country that gets mauled with snow multiple times a year.
Kosmer worked with Building With Integrity and Adirondack Alternative Energy to construct his passive solar house. Four-inch thick rigid polyurethane is installed on the exterior walls and under the roof, while pre-finished concrete siding covers the exterior of the home.
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But the real key to Kosmer’s low heating costs is his windows. 53 vinyl-framed Simonton windows are strategically placed throughout the house, letting sunlight into the white interior of the structure.
A wood stove also rises multiple stories into the atrium, where heated air is carried up into grilles in the attic ductwork. The air is then redistributed throughout the house, which stays at a temperature of 68 degrees.
A project of this magnitude may be out of your reach if you live in a 100 year-old poorly-insulated home, but it’s worth considering if you’re on the hunt for a new house.
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When we lived in Minnesota, we had a 4000sf home that was super-insulated. Over the 12 years we lived there, we paid an average of $265 per year to heat that home - in Minnesota with 7 months of winter and very cold temperatures. That’s less than many of our neighbors spent per month, and it includes the two years when Enron was inflating the costs of natural gas. When we bought the home and later sold the place, it cost about the same as other conventional, inefficient homes. Our new home in Arizona uses half the energy to heat as other homes and nothing to cool. We have no air conditioner…and it too cost the same to build as conventional construction. This can be done. It just takes some planning.
Hey Alan…wood is one of the most renewable resources on the planet..
I have a pellet stove. While it heats my 1100 square foot condo to an almost unbearable warmth, since the rise in the cost of diesel, the cost of pellets has gone up a lot. I can heat my house with 1 40 lb bag of pellets a day. However a bag that used to cost $3.50 now costs $5.50, so it is no longer very much cheaper than electric heat.
I am going to try a window inserted solar heater this winter. For about $50 cost of materials it can raise the daytime room temperature by a few degrees.
So what is “passive solar”? Are there any solar panels installed on the house?
As I understand this, the house is insulated well enough that it is able to recycle the heat generated inside. Am I correct?
What about the materials to make the house? How eco-friendly is the polyurethane? Maybe there will be even better options in the future with new technology being developed.
To the above commenter: You don’t need air-conditioning in New York.
this article is priceless!
Yes, the insulation makes it very affordable to warm the house. I think the same result could be achieved by retrofitting old buildings.
We’re 70 miles north of Toronto, Canada, or about the same latitude as northern New York State. Our retirement house, built in 1980, faces almost south, with a fair amount of double-glazed modern window area on the front, and roof overhang that lets in the low-angle winter sun but keeps out the high-angle summer sun. This was based on the ideas in an old textbook of mine, “Farm Structures” (by Barre & Sammet, 1950, published by Wiley).
For the first 25 years we heated mostly with wood we cut in our own bush. On many sunny winter days, with temperatures around zero degrees F, we’d let the wood furnace go out by 8 or 9 a.m. and not have to light it again until 5 p.m., because of the passive solar heating. There was some air circulation from the wood furnace blower that ran low speed when no fire was on, but sometimes when the winter sun made the dining room too hot we used a portable fan to help move the air more, or turned the furnace blower to high.
There was no extra cost involved in orienting and designing our house to take advantage of passive solar heat. As James Kachadorian says, “The carefully designed and constructed solar home need not cost any more to build than a comparably sized non-solar conventional home.” (”The Passive Solar House”, 2006, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont).
Our house is on north-sloping land, such that only one storey has southern exposure, and the roof overhang provides the required shading from the high-angle summer sun. If there had been 2 storeys facing front we’d have needed shading such as awnings for the lower windows.
We could have had even more window area facing almost south than we have, but as Kachadorian says, “Do not overglaze”. Dan Chiras (e.g. in “The Homeowner’s Guide to Renewable Energy”, 2006, New Society Publishers) says “…south-facing glass should fall within the range of 7 to 12 percent of the total square footage of the home”. Too much south-facing window area could make the interior too hot at times (even in winter!), and mean we’d need to use energy to remove the excess heat. I haven’t worked out our percentages but our experience suggests that we have enough. We don’t have air conditioning but we would probably need it if we had more front windows.
But with appropriate design and orientation, passive solar heating (and lighting) and passive cooling can save a lot of energy, with great benefit to the environment and people’s personal finances. So why aren’t all new houses and other buildings built that way? Maybe it is because
“Modern construction has tended to employ fossil fuels as a replacement for good design. Large
house builders will offer the same house design in many orientations, therefore paying little
consideration to solar gain. In fact, building regulations often dissuade developers from providing
creative designs as they can use pre-approved building reg. designs. There are a dozen pre-
approved designs that are used repeatedly by the large developers for domestic housing, just
changing the brick/stonework adding a gable, porch or garage to create an appearance of a
variety of designs.” (www.foe.co.uk/resource/consultation_responses/naw_energy_efficiency.pdf).
The above quote was from a 2003 submission from Friends of the Earth in Wales to their local government, but I’m thinking the same thing may apply in North America.
I think a federal government that loans money for building, or provides insurance for lenders that do, should amend its regulations so new buildings would have to be designed and oriented so as to make use of solar heating and natural cooling if such funds were to be lent. States and provinces should make similar changes to their building codes.
The Municipal Development Plan of the City of Lethbridge, Alberta, encourages passive solar heating. It says “East-west streets the best”. This is advised partly because it reduces the impact of the strong west winds common there, but also because on east-west streets, either the back or the front of the house will normally face south, which offers “the best opportunities to maximize solar access, through either back or front windows”, while the east and west sides of a house are likely to have few windows.
Politicians at all levels and in all jurisdictions should know that encouraging design and orientation of buildings to promote passive solar heating and natural cooling can not only significantly help the environment, but can also help “the bottom line” of the building owner (and voter!), particularly in these days of volatile energy costs.
Why be so negative to those who are trying. Let people be proud for the changes they have made. For some who maybe have been spoiled, it is a major change. If everyone, billions of people, at least made a few changes to be more environmentally friendly, just imagine how huge of an impact that would make. I can’t afford a new 40mpg vehicle but won’t buy a gas guzzler. I have about 40 flourescent bulbs in my home but can’t afford solar right now. I open my blinds instead of flipping on a switch, unplug things I’m not using. So maybe I can’t afford to be really environmental, but at least I use my pennies to make a lifetime of difference.
Making the changes don’t happen all at once. So maybe his air conditioning is $2000/yr, but I’m sure what he has done is just the first step of a long process. It’s also not just about saving money. It’s about making a global impact.