If House Faces South, Adding Solar Is Easier
Oct
04
The active solar retrofit problems facing a homeowner whose house already faces south and has plenty of unshaded roof and/or wall space are much less demanding than those for a homeowner whose house faces another direction.
If you’ve won the orientation battle, you must still confront three basic questions, however: Does the collector area tilt at the appropriate angle for solar collection at your latitude? (And if not, is there room for more collector area to make up the difference in quantity of heat collection?) Do you have room for the storage tank or rock bin and the distribution equipment? And is your house heat-conserving enough to make solar heating viable and economical?
The house at lower right, for example, faced south and had plenty of room for the storage tank in the basement and excellent energy-tight construction. Its drawback was its roof angle: too shallow for good winter heat collection. The collectors had to be propped on racks to face the low sun.
Another house, at lower left, had a good roof for the collector area (though the collectors had to be divided between two roof spaces), but no space adequate for the storage tank inside the house. The solution was to bury the tank in the yard.
Still another house, at upper left, had a roof with the right tilt angle and an orientation within 15° of south, as well as space enough inside for the air system’s components. The catch was the house’s ability to conserve heat. A big, rambling structure, it didn’t have a great deal of insulation, and the old leaded windows were much too expensive to double glaze. So the system—a fairly small one—simply provides heat to a study, a workroom, and three bedrooms. The rest of the house is largely conventionally heated.
The last house shown here has none of these problems. This is because, even though its owners were not yet ready to invest in the solar system itself, they designed their house with solar in mind, so that when they can afford the system, the house will be very easy to retrofit.
Absorption Chiller Cools Hot-desert Home
Year-round hot weather combined with consistently bright sunshine prompted the architect of this house to make cooling the major objective of the home’s design. He began by using some passive techniques for evading the sun to avoid heat gain (reversing the approach solar designers take in cold climates, where heat gain is the desired goal).
First, he oriented the house so its basic U-shape turned away from the sun to embrace (and shade) a northside courtyard and swimming pool. Even the north- facing windows and patio doors are deeply recessed for shade.
Then he planned a minimum of south-facing openings in the house—just a few small windows, protected from the sun by deep embrasures, slatted overhangs, and well-positioned trees.
Finally, he designed the house’s low, sloping southeast and southwest profile to discourage the sun. Since the berms could not touch the walls (a restriction imposed by the mortgage company) for extra thermal protection, the architect shaped them to form a moat of shade around the perimeter of the house.
Having reduced the house’s cooling load to a minimum, the architect added his most significant cooling effort: a full-size active solar-assisted absorption cooling system. Three tiers of flat-plate collectors on the house’s south roof supply high- temperature water to the absorption chiller equipment inside the house, to activate the device’s literal refrigeration of the house air.
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