Designing a solar home to suit us -Resources (Education)- E

Solar Home Chronicles 10

Friday, 19 October 2007

We found it fun to draw up house plans. Eric and I measured all of our furniture, and then cut their shapes, drawn proportionally, out of graph paper. Then, we arranged the shapes into room groupings, and put the rooms together to represent 2 floors. Invariably, our plans resulted in rather weirdly-shaped bathrooms – the place where all of our leftover space ended up. But at least our rooms fit all of our furniture.
The first thing that we learned from this exercise was that we have too much furniture.

Too many desks, too many bookshelves (but then, can you really have too many bookshelves?!), too many chairs… We also have too much junk in our basement and garage. With no basement, and only a small amount of attic space, our new house would have little room for storage. One of our first tasks, as we moved toward an energy-efficient lifestyle would be to deal with our accumulations of things over the years.

We wanted to design the main floor so that when we got old and feeble, we would be able to function on one level. In that spirit, we also wanted the main floor to be wheel-chair accessible. After spending time on our building lot during the summer, I decided that I wanted a screened-in porch _ because of the mosquitos! Eric wanted to have a workshop connected to the garage, so that he could build that long, cedar-strip canoe that he has always wanted to build. With 2 kids still living at home, so we would need room for them too.

Using the recommendations of Solar Nova Scotia, Eric and I tried to organize all of the main living area rooms on the south side (the sunny, warm side), and we buried the workshop, garage and storage on the main floor north side (where there would be no windows, and earth would be bermed against the outside wall). Early designs resulted in homes that were very wide (for lots of solar gain), but very shallow. We knew that the cheapest houses to build and heat are square, so we aimed for that. We grouped rooms that were connected functionally, and came up with what we thought were rather innovative designs.

Finally, Don came to see us, and we shared some of our ideas with him. I thought that it would be a short meeting _ maybe half a day. I didn’t realize that Don’s greatest love is designing homes, rather than just building them. So, our discussions went very late, and Don finally returned to Nova Scotia with lots of doodles and notes to inform his work.

On his next visit, it was exciting to see what Don had done with our ideas. Don noticed that our plans were very similar to a home he had already built in the Annapolis Valley, and so he put our dimensions into that design to show us. This is when Eric and I learned the difference between amateur efforts at design and professional efforts. Instead of a series of linked, squarish rooms (our plans), Don produced floor plans that were more unusual, with long diagonal view lines (something that we learned about in the Susanka books, to help make small rooms feel larger) and limited use of hallways (hallways being wasted space).

You will remember that a passive solar home has to have the following qualities: orientation to make the most of southern sunshine, appropriate windows to let sunshine in, a place to collect the sun’s heat inside the house, and some way to distribute this stored heat to the rest of the house as needed. In Don’s houses, the main floor is always concrete, with ductwork radiating through it from a central 2-story duct with circulating fan. The sun shines on and heats the concrete, and then the heat from the floor is released and circulated throughout the house using the ducts.

So, Don’s plan for us included this network of ducts. He also included his trademark interior balcony. This balcony serves to allow passage of warm air directly upstairs on the south side of the house, to be then re-circulated back downstairs via the 2-storey duct along the stairs on the north side. Additionally, the balcony allows sunshine from second-floor windows to beam down onto the concrete main floor, to enhance the solar collection of the home.

Despite our original desire to design a home that would look just like everyone else’s except being solar, we were generally impressed with Don’s more unusual plans. After a few tweaks and modifications, we looked forward to seeing the blueprints and materials list, to put into motion what we had spent so much time just talking about!

Next time: Some thoughts about building materials