Solar Home Design – A Four Step Process

A solar home design is generally one of two processes. Either you are building your home from scratch and you want a house that takes the utmost advantage of the energy that the Sun can give each day. Or you have an already built house and you want to make it solar. This article will cover the fours steps in solar home design that you should go through when the house is already standing.

Of course, making an existing house solar powered will always be a compromise in terms of getting the most out of the Sun's energy. For instance, the aspect that the house is built on may not be suitable or optimal of solar harvesting. Quite often homes are built according to the number that a developer can fit into the land available. What is the best way to get most solar energy is the last thing on many developers minds in the past (although this may be changing as incentives come in).

With this said, provided the Sun shines in your location, you will still be able to utilize it's energy. Thus the first step is to check that the area that you live in is conducive to a solar energy system. This may be easy to do. You may see plenty of other homes in your neighborhood with solar panels.

Other than this, you may need to check on the climate from a meteorologist or the weather bureau. People selling solar systems in your area will have these sorts of details available but you may want an independent source. Things you need to determine are the number of days of sunshine per year. You also want to establish how cloudy your location is ? Are you in a smoggy area ? Few days of sunshine per year and cloudy and smoggy environments will obviously limit the amount of energy that you can generate from the Sun.

If it is viable to use solar systems in your area then the next thing to do is get an energy audit. An energy audit can be done by you or you can hire a professional to do the job. The point of an energy audit is twofold. You want to work out how much energy you actually need and you want to see if you are using energy inefficiently.

You should give yourself a few months to conduct the audit as each month may vary. The winter months will vary from the summer months too. Build a picture of your energy usage over the few months and average out for the year.

During this energy auditing process you may discover that you are doing things that are inefficient. For instance, you may be using incandescent bulbs as opposed to energy saving lights. You may have energy hogging appliances in the kitchen or bathroom. You may leave all your appliances on standby all the time using more energy than you think. You may have poor or non existent insulation or lagging in the home.

An audit can motivate you to get new energy efficient appliances or switch your TV set off rather than on standby. Or you may put in new insulation. Depending on the reasons why you want solar power, this may save you more money than the savings you may make if you installed a solar system.

And even if you do install a solar system, you will get better use of it if you are using energy efficiently. The next step is to determine what sort of system you actually need. Solar systems for the home fall into 3 categories : passive solar heating of the home, solar water heating and generating electricity.

Passive solar heating of the home involves creating a space that gets warm (a sun trap) that allows the heat to circulate throughout the home (a conservatory or atrium are often used).

Solar water heating also uses a passive design to heat water that is then passed into the plumbing system or used as is.

Getting electricity from the sun is a newer innovation but most research is going into this field of solar power. Solar panels or photovoltaic cells create electricity that can be used in the home. It can also be stored or sold to power companies making this solar system more economically feasible.

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