time to tighten up the home

 every year we look around to make the old home more comfortable. You
know, seal some cracks or add some more insulation. triple up on window
glazings. You?
--
Karma, What a concept!

  RoseBud wrote:


You?

I dont bother. But then I designed and built it properly in the first place.

 

Discovered the beauty of an air lock?  A wood stove that uses outside
air.?? Oriented most of the windows Southward? adjustable shading for
the summer. Thermal heat storage?
Incorporated an Rex Roberts ideas?
We're here to help others, ya know.
--
Karma, What a concept!

 RoseBud wrote

I dont bother with those, mainly because the house is passive solar
and I dont go in and out often enough to matter and those dont work
very well in the non winter when I want an outside inside effect.


Dont use anything other than passive solar anymore and an electric throw
which is sort of like an electric blanket but for use on the armchair in winter.


Northward in my case, I'm in the southern hemisphere, hanging on upside down
down here.


The eaves are have been designed so that no sun comes in in summer
but come right in in winter with massive great patio doors all down the
north side of the very long thin house that runs east/west.


In theory the sun heats the concrete floor inside those patio doors.

I dont have carpet anywhere, quarry tiles on the concrete floor.

You dont actually get as much thermal heat storage that way as I had hoped
for tho, the sun doesnt heat that great a depth of the concrete floor.


The house was designed before he published any of those.

 Derald wrote


Usually 4-5 months are colder than I prefer.


Not that intense, we dont get snow, ever. Overnight lows can get
down to -5C but dont usually, daytime maxs are usually 10C or so.


months?

10C or so.


It isnt in winter.

I did manage to get one room stinking hot in a different
house with a wood burning slow combustion stove in a
room with a decent sized window to the north in winter.


I just stopped stuffing more wood into the stove that time.


Only with observing that it doesnt work that well.

Its so dry here in summer that what you call swamp coolers work fine
and cost very little to run because you are just powering a very large fan.
Humiditys often get down into single digit percentages here in summer.

And we can get 10 days over 40C, solar induced summertime ventilation
doesnt really work very well in those conditions, the air outside is so hot.

Swamp coolers work fine and virtually everyone has them in all the houses
and even the big metal sheds etc used for working on machinery etc.


I basically have lots of very large patio doors, 8'x8' square down the N and
south sides of a very long 100' house that isnt all that deep in the N/S
direction.
13 of those doors. I have them closed overnight. Open them up when I get up
before the sun gets up and let the breeze blow right thru the house with a
very outside/inside effect with flyscreens on those doors to keep the
mosquitoes and flys out. The mozzies are 4 engined around here, its an
irrigation area. Once the room temp has got over about 31C, usually by
about mid day, I close the doors and turn the swamp cooler on and run
it thru the afternoon until the evening. Its usually cooled down considerably
by then and I turn the cooler off and open the doors again. I do like it warmer
than most people do and visitors can prefer the cooler is left on longer.

I almost never run the cooler overnight, close the doors before going to bed.

Very very ocassionally its too warm overnight and leave the cooler on
but have to get up halfway thru the night because its too cool for me.


Only in the sense that there is a layer of sand under concrete between
it and the soil. Its not much of an insulation. There isnt any real need to
insulate there, the soil is a pretty decent thermal mass itself.


Not in the house.

I was involved with a solar greenhouse that had a couple of quite large
rooms quite literally filled with what we call road metal, crushed rocks,
with a massive metal grate up from the concrete floor to form an air
plenum, with those rooms full of thermal mass heated with solar air
heaters which were basically black painted metal roof panels under
plexiglass with the whole thing computer controlled.

Dont have anything like that in the house tho, its too expensive an
approach for a house basically and most prefer to use the rooms
for people instead of for rocks. It would work well tho if you dont care.


http://books.google.com/books?id=8kDZNAAACAAJ


More documented some ideas about house design.


Yeah, lots of it with house design.