Converting Your House To A Solar Powered Home

Many affordable options are available to convert your house into a solar home and solar energy technologies can supply for many different uses in your home. Passive solar design will provide heating, cooling and natural light for your house. Power your appliances with solar electricity and solar water heating can provide hot water options for laundry and general household water use. When planning a solar home you should consider which solar energy options are most efficient for your situation.

Passive solar homes utilize home design to provide heating, cooling and natural light without the use of any unordinary equipment. A passive solar home basically will use the environment to accomplish great reductions in energy use. A passive solar home uses special hardware design to utilize the sun’s heat in the cold of winter and block the sun’s heat during summer months.

There are many different solar approaches you can use in a solar home. Direct gain, radiant heat from sunlight passing directly into a living space and being absorbed by your furnishings and usually achieved with south facing window installations. Indirect gain, which involves a wall that collects heat and distributes it throughout the home by the use of fans. And then there is thermal mass, items that naturally collect and store heat.

Another neat option is passive cooling, which mostly includes overhangs on windows and light blockage to block the sun during summer months for cooling a solar house.

A very common use of solar energy is to heat water. 2 types of heating options are available. The first is a closed loop system, a good option if your house doesn’t freeze. These systems use water filled tubes heated by the sun. Closed loop systems use anti freeze to collect heat from the sun and then the liquid is used to heat the house water using and exchanger.

Regardless of which steps you take toward changing your house to use solar energy, energy efficiency is the most important thing in your solar home.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.