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csintexas
millennium club
Joined: 06 Feb 2006
Posts: 2174
Location: USA
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 Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 7:21 am Post subject: Little Green House of the Future |
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Here is my latest hobby project.
http://www.inspiredhabitat.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=2
We all know that the days of cheap oil will not be around for much longer. Currently there is no good alternate fuel source.
If we had to design a truly sustainable house and also the way we live in them and use them how would we do that?
What does a sustainable subdivision of the future look like?
How do we live in such a way that we use our resources wisely?
I'm not saying my ideas are actually green, they are just some ideas on the subject:
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-Chris Stewart
http://bcshdb.blogspot.com >
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lekizz
millennium club
Joined: 11 Jan 2006
Posts: 1212
Location: UK
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| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 5:03 pm Post subject: |
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Not sure about the double garage, hardly discouraging oil usage!!
I expect you have your own local reasons for designing the house like it is, you probably have considerably more sun (at a higher angle) and I expect the house shown is designed to avoid solar gain. The masonry could store 'coolth'. There certainly seems minimal windows. The trees will help with the summer shading.
In Europe, or cooler climates, I would expect an eco house to be quite different - plenty of thermal insulation, a modest amount of (double- or triple-) glazing for natural daylighting, orientation to take advantage of solar gain, steeper pitched roof for solar heating... |
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csintexas
millennium club
Joined: 06 Feb 2006
Posts: 2174
Location: USA
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| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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Yes, you know I find it difficult to shake loose of convention. (like the double carport)
The additional space is hardly big enough for a conventional car (16' deep)
I just thought it would be useful outdoor covered space but I could save additional materials there.
Yes everything is about avoiding sun around here most of the time. The front faces South and my thought was to use that side of the roof to heat water which would then be used for winter heating.
This allows the heat to be stored in the water and released slowly at night instead of heating the whole interior of the space with South facing glazing
so that it will remain warm enough during the night.
But I haven't done my math on that so it is just an idea.
I still think I might need to work through that idea some more. My first thought was to store the water in an underground cistern but then the water would have to be pumped out to circulate through the floor.
What if the cistern was actually the core of the house?
(this is just a basic idea and not a finished drawing)
(maybe it would be the center of a round house)
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-Chris Stewart
http://bcshdb.blogspot.com >
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lekizz
millennium club
Joined: 11 Jan 2006
Posts: 1212
Location: UK
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| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 7:08 pm Post subject: |
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Probably a more effective method would be to have a well insulated tank beneath the house. During the cool evenings the water could be pumped through some sort of low heat, small bore underfloor heating pipe system.
With a taller house you could make use of the rising warm air during the day to create a natural ventilation system. I have seen pictures of buildings in the middle east that use ventilation chimneys to create a stack effect. They use adobe in the dry southern states, don't they, maybe you could have an interesting adobe ventilation chimney! |
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csintexas
millennium club
Joined: 06 Feb 2006
Posts: 2174
Location: USA
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| Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 11:30 am Post subject: |
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I may be wrong, but from what I have read there is very little "power" in the small temperature gradients that thermal chimneys actually produce.
The ones I have seen from other countries are actually catching and channeling wind. Do you know of any technical information available on thermal chimneys?
Also if I where strictly relying on passive cooling than I might have to design in any small advantage that I can but in reality when the average daily temperature is 85+ degrees F. only the poorest people will not use AC. So if I have to design for AC that means the most efficient envelope is better.
I started with my tank located underneath the house but then I thought I could save pump costs by putting it inside the house so that the fixtures can be gravity feed and perhaps no hydronic floor heating would not be necessary.
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-Chris Stewart
http://bcshdb.blogspot.com >
The B/CS Home Design Blog |
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joelmckellar
Joined: 31 May 2006
Posts: 91
Location: Charleston, SC
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| Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 2:26 pm Post subject: |
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I disagree about the power of thermal chimneys. I live in Charleston (100% humidity & 90-100 degree summers - mild winters and great spring and falls), and my - lives in a traditional charleston row house in an attic apartment. Like most Charleston homes, the stairs run in the center of the house and there are wide porches rising up the southern facade.
As she's in an attic apartment, the windows are on either end, and there's an entrance from the lower floor. She just got a cat, and was afraid to leave the door open. We had both windows open, which allowed for a fairly good draft, but once we started leaving the cat out and opened the bottom door it was VERY noticably cooler.
I would suppose that low power chimneys are more the result of inadequate sizing than any fault of the concept. Also, I don't think you're going to get by in the summer on ventilation alone in most climates, especially SC and TX.
I have a small home, and I'm considering working a way to supply fresh, cool air from underneath a raised deck on the north side of the house. The deck provides shade for the air, and then I need to work out some way of expelling the air on the high side of the south face... Please let us know how this progresses!
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Joel McKellar, LEED AP
Real Life LEED - A blog devoted to practicing LEED professionals |
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csintexas
millennium club
Joined: 06 Feb 2006
Posts: 2174
Location: USA
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| Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 4:03 pm Post subject: |
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Do you think the power is actually generated from the thermal gradient or rather just the wind being channeled through the stairwell?
Yes like I said, if I where building a house with no AC than I thermal chimney would probably be a good choice. Since I would rather live in a 100 sq. ft. house with AC than a 3000 sq. ft. house without AC I think I need to design the house to use AC as efficiently as possible.
Yesterday was the first day I used my AC. Only for about 2 hours in the late afternoon. (and my office is upstairs in a poorly designed house) Downstairs it stays cool enough that I would not have had to use it.
I have found I can keep my house the coolest by opening windows at night and letting the house cool down as much as possible and then shutting the windows in the morning when the outdoor temperature goes above the indoor temperature.
When the weather is nice in spring and fall it takes very little window openings to make a well designed house comfortable. Once you reach a certain level of heat and humidity no amount of natural ventilation inside the house is going to keep you comfortable. That is why people had sleeping porches -so they could get out into the open air.
Thermal mass is far more important to regulating temperature than ventilation. And trees and plants of coarse work wonders. It is generally one or two degrees cooler at my house in the summer than 2 miles away at the airport weather station.
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-Chris Stewart
http://bcshdb.blogspot.com >
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