Papercreters: [papercreters] Re: Passive solar papercrete homes?

Thursday, June 11, 2009

[papercreters] Re: Passive solar papercrete homes?

The people in the house are still going to generate the same amount of heat with or without more insulation. Same goes for cooking, laundry and other household activities. If you keep as much external heat from entering the house as possible, you can still use ventilation to remove the internal heat and you are ahead of the game. Wide porches are keeping the sun off the building thus keeping the external heat from entering the building same as insulation does. Doors and windows to catch breezes are fine if you have breezes. It has been my observation that places where it is hot and excessively humid do not always have dependable wind and breezes still neccessitating some some sort of powered venting. I have never been to Houston but where live in Arizona, the summer temperatures regularly get to 115 to 118 and never drops below 100 until after midnight. The wind blows a lot and when you open a door or window you get 115 degree heat coming in which is not good to say the least. The interior heat must be cooled somehow. I use swamp coolers which work well till the humidity goes up which it does in July or August. They still work, only not as efficiently as when the humidity is low which it is most of the time.Of course out humidity is not the same as Houston or most places in that area or the Midwest or South. I live off grid so it is not practical to run AC as it uses too much power. By keeping the sun off the building with shade cloth, trees and overhanging porches combined with radical insulation in the building itself one can keep reasonably cool. One must also realize that a lot of the people promoting passive cooling and heating are dealing with theories and many have never actually put these to work. Online forums of all kinds have a lot of people with theories that may or may not work. I have also read a lot of stories where people have had elaborate homes built using passive heating and cooling only to find that they don't always work as advertised.

--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, Garth & Kim Travis <gartht@...> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
> Actually, yes for heating more insulation is better. For cooling, this
> may not work. Too many people in Houston have put in extra insulation
> to watch their electric bill go up. The reason: Humans living in the
> home create heat. A super insulated home may cost more to cool, since
> the human generated heat has no where to go. A balance between
> ventilation and insulation is what is required in a hot, humid climate.
>
> Deep porches, lots of windows and doors that take advantage of the
> prevailing breezes. High ceilings without ceiling fans, I want the heat
> to stay there and not come down and haunt me. This is a bare start to a
> comfortable home here. I too have lived in both extreme cold,
> [Edmonton, Alberta, Canada] and here in hot, humid, Gulf Coast Texas.
> The building styles are very different. We do not use AC, it is not
> needed with a properly built home.
>
> Bright Blessigns,
> Kim
>
> donald1miller wrote:
> > Passive solar homes are built to capture heat from the sun during daylight hours and then releasing it back into the structure at night. This is the last thing you want to do in the summer. A properly built pc home would have thick walls with would provide great R value and keep the heat out of the house. This would work to your advantage in the winter as well, keeping the cold out of the house. I have lived in extremes of both cold and heat and the more insulation you have in the walls and ceiling the easier it is to heat and cool.
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