Taking Advantage of Passive Solar

While solar panels are the easiest and most common way of getting solar energy, you don’t actually have to install anything to start taking advantage of solar energy right now. Passive energy has already been used for hundreds of years and dates all the way back to ancient civilizations. While you’ll still probably want to install solar panels at some point, passive solar is a great way to start going solar right now.

Passive solar heats your home just with the sun.

With passive energy, the sun heats up your home without the need of any electronic devices. It does this based on multiple different factors that you’ll have to keep in mind, especially if you’re looking for a new home or are building one.

For starters, you’ll need an aperture for the sunlight to easily be able to pass through. In most homes, this is large windows, usually with a wall made of nothing but windows to get the most out of the sun’s rays. On top of that, builders will also often put a special coating on the windows that will reflect harmful UV rays from the glass, which will not allow these harmful rays to enter your home.

The next thing you’ll need to account for is if your home is actually retaining the heat after the sun goes down. This means you’ll need dark surfaces that can contain the heat. Things like concrete, ceramic tile, brick, or stone are all dense, dark materials capable of absorbing the heat.

You also won’t want your living space to be too hot during the summer, so you’ll need control over our building. Things like awnings, blinds, and shutters are all ways to keep your passive solar powered home cooler during the summer.

Why you should get passive solar.

So, now that you know how to achieve solar, you might be wondering what benefits you’ll get.

For starters, you’ll save money. If your home is warm during the winter due to the sun and cool during the summer due to your blinds and shutters, you’ll be less likely to feel the need to turn your heating and cooling systems on. You also don’t have to pay to use the sun’s light.

It’s also great for the environment. Even if you can’t go fully solar just yet, just using significantly less energy with passive solar will be a huge benefit to our environment.

You’ll also have a quieter home since you won’t have to deal with a noisy A/C or loud radiator.

And you’ll have a more aesthetically pleasing home, with large windows to look out of and nice floors made out of things like stone, which come in a variety of beautiful shapes and colors.

The downside: adding passive solar to an already built home.

The one major downside to passive solar is that if your home wasn’t built with it in mind, it’s a lot more difficult to achieve and could require some expensive renovation. You might want to just wait until you move, because if you’re going to spend as much renovating as you would spend on solar panels, then solar panels are the better option, anyway.

Want to learn more about various ways to bring solar energy into your home? Check out the HahaSmart blog for tons of resources and tips!

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