| | | | There is no reason that a well-designed solar home would cost more than a conventional home, nor is it necessary to "hide" from the building inspector. Considering the high & ever-increasing costs of both energy and of building materials, the "conventional home" has become an economic and environmental disaster. There is no excuse for not striving for something better. We keep hearing the pundits debate just many more years might pass before our fossil fuel supplies are exhausted. Really, the year doesn't matter very much, because meanwhile supply/demand factors are forcing prices upward with ever-increasing rapidity. Within the lifetime of your next new home, such increases must surely result in energy prices beyond the reach of the average consumer -- WHAT WILL YOU DO THEN??? What will that home be worth if comfort cannot be accomplished? Coupled with the economic idiocy in Washington D.C. which is hell-bound toward hyper-inflation, all of us must either prepare, or die! |  Welcome! I'm Ron Klotz-Zellhoefer, now "retired" from Arizona to New Mexico. | | | I built this SolarSense website simply to share my lifetime of experience in home design/construction, real estate, computers and solar home design. I am "retired" now and really have nothing to sell here. So just maybe... you'll see the light and build yourself a better home this next time, while saving money and living better. My approach to solar homes is strictly "Passive", meaning heated by the Sun, and which can easily include cooling by Nature when appropriate. It all makes "SolarSense". The construction techniques given here are appropriate for owner/builders and for contractors. | 
| Passive solar homes are viable in any climate which enjoys generally sunny days -- most of western USA is ideal, and colder climates do not By utililizing photovoltaic and wind electrical generation, there is a further advantage of allowing the use of far-less-expensive acreage out from cities; the lovely remote land in the hills and mountains. While this website is not focused on lifestyle or the environment, solar homes do, by their very nature, provide considerable contributions to both. | | Passive heating is accomplished by capturing the sun's warmth during the day, storing the heat in Thermal Mass, that being almost any heavy material one might think of, earth, rocks, concrete, water, metal. Insulation, while certainly needed, is lightweight stuff which serves nothing as termal mass. Therein lies the fallacy of frame houses and manufacturered / mobile homes. The thermal mass absorbs the temperature of it's adjacent air. During the nights and cold days with little sun, the heat is released to maintain a comfortable temperature. The objective is elimination of conventional furnaces along with their associated costs -- energy consumption, noise and pollution. The SolarSense approach to passive solar suggests building the home using Soil Cement (or regular concrete) for both walls and floors, providing the thermal mass necessary to store large quantities of "good temperature" to carry your comfort thru the night and beyond -- those "bad days" with little sun... |  | | Passive cooling can be accomplished by using the coolness of the earth. At my Black Dike property in low mountains outside Tucson, Arizona, the temperature just 5 feet underground is 56 degrees Fahrenheit. If you can't do something with that, well you just aren't thinking! This is a construction pic of the cooling tunnels for the home on Black Dike. They are poured of Soil Cement, the basic construction material for all my solar home designs. Certainly other materials can be used for ducting, this was simply appropriate for the site conditions on Black Dike. This website will provide the basics of making, forming and pouring soil cement, using an approach suitable for anyone with basic construction knowledge. It's done without investing excessive money in forms and bracing, and in fact the forms later become part of the roof structure! |  | | You'll see Black Dike, 18 acres in the Sierrita Mountains far outside Tucson, Arizona. It is very remote, secluded and beautiful and had no utilities except for an old debris-filled hand-dug well. Soon after we bought it, we were THERE with a 5th-wheel RV and 2 solar panels - we hauled our drinking water in 5-gallon jerry-cans, but life was good! |  | | The RV was replaced with a very small home - a small delight! It began as a hexagonal gazebo built for a shaded respite from the Arizona sun. Later it was enclosed, and then more than doubled in size. While it's a cute & comfy little place, there was no initial plan that the Gazebo Guest House be enclosed or become a home. It's solar orientation is excellent and provides daytime solar heating, but it's just a simple steel-frame building. It's thermal mass and insulation is impossibly inadequate -- winter nights require some propane heating. |  | | Finally we started the Hilltop House, a modest (1040 SqFt) truly passive solar home, heated and cooled by nature, serviced by PV solar electricity and a little propane for cooking only. Business problems put this project "on hold" with only the utilities, footings, and cooling tower and tunnels completed. Later Black Dike was sold, and the new owners are continuing their development of the home and other facilities. |  |
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