This was a start to finish project for me. This is a passive solar house I designed and built myself. About the only thing I didn’t do was the masonry, which I REALLY hate to do. I even bought a chainsaw and cleared the lot. We moved out of this house in early 2001 but my guess is this picture was taken about 15 years ago considering my son is now 20. That’s his uncle Wayne playing ball with him and Nan is in the distant background. The 12’ satellite dish is another project I enjoyed and it was up in the air on a 20’ pole. It was a trick and a half getting the dish up there. This was pre-internet (for me at least) and I had no reliable information. I had to figure out how to aim and track it using high school geometry and a TI scientific calculator. Got it first pass. That was an exciting day.

The solar aspects of the house are actually pretty interesting. Air continuously flows through the house using a large circulating blower and then passes through an air-to-mass (100 tons) heat exchanger that exists under the basement floor. The air then passes through the masonry walls of the basement and up into the house. If the air temperature is warmer than the mass, heat is imparted to the mass; if it is cooler than the mass, heat is imparted to the air. The house was super insulated and its energy needs were modest. Any heat source, from solar gain to body heat, was used. We heated this very large home comfortably for about 20 years with a single small wood fired furnace in the basement to supplement our lack of full time sun. I put in an electric backup in the late 80’s but seldom used it and then only on long stretches of cloudy days in the fall or spring. When we got ready to sell the house I installed a small oil fired hot air furnace in the system. I actually wish I had done it earlier. Most years the total heating cost was a couple hundred dollars and very easy to manage. This is in upstate New York where we have pretty severe winters. The system worked well and elegantly. It was simple to use and its only maintenance was changing the HEPA filter once or twice a year. Of course the system required about $10K up front to put in. When I designed and built it in the very late 70’s the Federal government was subsidizing solar homes with a significant tax credit. Without this subsidy very few people would ever do this and these subsidies no longer exist. As I write this, we are about to go to war with Iraq. Make your own conclusions.

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