My Passive Solar Tiny House
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- čas přidán 22. 07. 2024
- An introduction to the passive solar design features of my strawbale tiny house. This 450 sq ft house uses south facing windows to heat itself during winter, supplementing heat provided by a wood stove. Roman-style thermal curtains on all windows help to conserve heat. A cantilevered second floor and overhangs keep the sun out during warmer times of the year. This is one of many passive solar strawbale houses at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.
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I am a renewable energy engineer, and I have to say that this is fascinating. Your grip on the passive solar structure is spot on. Very inspiring. Great job brotha!
Hey it's great to have positive feedback! Thanks for the compliment.
I love the idea of the tiny house and sustainability! It's great you are doing this!
This is the best! Thank you for making this video
Gorgeous! Love everything you have done. Also your dog is cute.
Many great points.
Your indepth explanation was exactly what I was looking for. I love tiny houses, but few integrate passive solar design or other smarter ideas for energy savings - maybe because they are mostly on wheels. Local builders aren't going to know how to construct either tiny homes or passive solar houses.
I'm glad you enjoyed the video!
The home is smart and good looking.
Thank you!
thank you
Awesome video! Just subbed. What would you do different in a tropical climate?
I've never built in a tropical climate, but I wouldn't bother with strawbales there. You don't need insulation, unless it's really hot. Humidity would be an issue I imagine too. Cob, the mixture of clay, sand, and straw (or any fiber), would probably be ok, though the humidity could be an issue. Wattle and daub might be better so the wall are thinner but still strong.
Can you add a video on how to make those curtains?
I should make one sometime. I haven't needed to make new ones since I finished the ones for my house. Mine are needing some maintenance though.
PS You should make a step by step video explaining how long each part took and which parts were the hardest. Also what informational resources you used. Just a suggestion : )
+Plant Paradise that's a good idea. I thought I would do videos every once in a while on the various details of the way my house is built. People seem to like the natural building focused episodes.
How is your house performing now as regards condensation? It seems that a light clay-straw mix for insulation would not help much with this but I would be delighted to be wrong.
My house doesn't have any moisture problems. You can usually tell because there will be mildew on the earthen plaster. I don't have that. It's more a matter of temperature differentials between inside and out, and how much moist air is allowed to come into the cool house in summertime.
How do you have an upstairs floor? I wouldn't think cob could support a load.
There is framing in my house. There is post and beam framing on three walls and stick framing in the south facing walls. The house is actually strawbale with lime and earthen plaster finish. It's not a great idea to do a load bearing strawbale house. A cob wall could probably support a second story if it was thick enough at the base, but if there was an earthquake, it could be a problem. There are many cob buildings in Great Britain.
Can you tell how you made the curtains. The different layers.
That would be a good video to do sometime. I made these curtains before I had my channel, so I didn't do a how to. The curtains are pretty easy to make. The Warm Windows fabric makes putting them together really simple because the fabric already has all those layers sewn together. All you have to do is sew on whatever fabric design you want for the interior. The exterior fabric on the warm windows is also UV resistant so it hasn't degraded at all.
Where did you purchase the worm window fabric.
warmcompany.com/product/warm-window-insulated-fabric-54-x-15-yard-bolt/
You can also find it from a google search. They sell it at Jo-ann Fabrics.
Did you mean that the sun rises the temperature by 7 degrees or to 7 degrees (Celsius)? What temperature, on average, are you getting in winter?
Well the house heats up to in the 70s F on a sunny day with the thermal curtains open if it's not below 20 degrees. It really depends on the temps outside. I usually don't have to light a fire all day on a sunny winter day and it will be comfortable. If it's cloudy I will have to light a fire to keep it warm during the day. If it's cold outside I usually have to light a fire to keep it warm overnight.
Do you think this would work on the east coast in a 800 sq ft house?
+Jennifer Fleet Strawbale houses are good for temperate regions so yes, I think it would work fine on the east coast and with a bigger sq footage.
Good work.
Passive house, but not Passivhus, which should not normally require additional heating.
True, but most passive houses require the use of a lot of synthetic fossil fuel products with a high embodied energy and are not applicable to all locations. I do have some parts of my house that are high embodied energy and are made from fossil fuel, but there is a lot more natural materials. But all this tech is improving rapidly and hopefully soon there will be more effective natural options available for a passive house.
Is it legal or illegal in the US to collect some fire wood in the forest or wood fallen down after a storm? I mean, there are huge rural areas such as the Appalachian mountains, Alaska, Oregon with a lot of wood. Here in central and northern Europe people are collecting fire wood for free as you are breathing oxygen.
It is legal to collect wood in national forests and conservation areas, but you usually have to get some kind of permit. It is free though, and you don't have to stick to fallen wood, you can cut down live trees too. You can't go onto private property and do it without permission of the owner. Another good source is tree cutting services, where trees are cut or removed by professionals. It's probably possible to get firewood from those people if you pay them, or they may be overwhelmed with the amount they get.
Thanks. I wonder. There is MUCH fire wood, but less people are heating with it.
Yes, but with our current population, if not for the use of fossil fuel for heating, there wouldn't be any trees left in most northern nations. But there is also a lot of wood wasted. That's what we mostly heat our houses with.
On the west coast, there is an abundance of logging (which I don't necessarily support), and this creates large "slash piles" of trash lumber that many locals use to heat their homes. When I mean large I mean ranging from a school bus to a large house.
@@HardcoreSustainable probably. In another southern state, a man who had 100 acres would almost exclusively use his downed trees for his wood stove. I'd been taught before meeting him that downed trees wouldn't be good for firewood, but he is a super smart guy and his house always toasty (I was friends with his wife).
I think an outdoor wood furnace (my neighbor had one) might be able to safely burn pine - which the south has plenty of and there are always many downed pines after storms - but double check that. I know that pine's creosote makes it unsafe for burning indoors.
Have you though about growing eucalyptus it grows fast.
I think our climate is too cold for eucalyptus to survive. It's more of a Mediterranean/subtropical/tropical tree. I've seen them in coastal and southern California, but nowhere else. Don't even know if they grow in Florida, though it seems they should be able to.
@@HardcoreSustainable crepe myrtles are too common, perhaps, but are often pollarded after winter has set in (maybe late December?), so top branches completely removed allowing lots of light into windows and onto house. Some gardeners hate this shape, some love it.
A major contributor to pollution is wood burning. We are fortunate to live near farms and burn corn for heat which burns very cleanly.
This is true. I have been concerned about the smoke in our village. My house doesn't burn a lot of wood because of its passive solar design.
@@HardcoreSustainable Most excellent how hard you try to make less damage to the earth. We looked up the insulating blinds material.
how expesnive or how hard to build are rocket stoves? They take up a lot more space indoors?
I saw one tiny home where the builder got creative with the flue - making it almost in a zigzag pattern so that more of the flue stayed inside the house to heat it. It would've been cheaper and easier to simply build it straight up, but he'd lose that extra heat. Not sure how that affects the smoke - must be done carefully, I guess.
@@genkiferal7178 True. Your claim doesn't have much to do with my comment. There are various ways of not wasting the warm chimney smoke.
@@genkiferal7178 It can be relatively inexpensive to make a rocket mass heater, but they do take up more space. I have another video on a rebuild of a rocket mass heater. You can direct the chimney through cob mass, but the more it zigs and zags, the less it draws and the cooler the smoke ends up when it goes out, thus allowing deposit of creosote. But that's basically what rocket mass heaters do.
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