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Is anyone living in a passive solar home? Or is an architect?

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SavannahLion:
I grew up in an A-frame (I have photos, I'll have to look for them) which was a sister to a matching A-frame which we tore down in the past two years (much to my disappointment). The one I grew up is up on the market now (again to my major disappoinment).


--- Quote from: RayB on January 22, 2010, 08:44:47 pm ---As a cottage, or a home? Cuz people laugh at those houses when they drive by. ;-)
--- End quote ---

While those of us inside laughed at you guys struggling to get home in a storm and the highway closed.  ;)

Contrary to popular belief, they can be larger than they appear. Some A-frames have multiple stories dug into the Earth creating below ground floors (or even pseudo basements). The A-frame I grew up in sported three stories, a sub basement and three sub-basements. From the front, it appeared as a tiny two story A-frame.

One A-frame design I saw sported two A-frames side by side on top of a house "foundation" and a linking deck. In the summer, the house appeared as it was, a large home with a rooftop deck and two paired A-frames. In the winter, the snow would hide the lower floors giving the appearance of two separate homes in the snow.

There's an A-frame in Tahoe that appears as a small A-frame from the street, but actually extends down the mountain and turns into a sprawling home overlooking the lake. Never been inside so I have no idea how much floor space it sports.

spystyle, if you really want to get an A-frame, I suggest renting one for a month or so and seeing how it's like. The A-frame I lived in had obscenely steep roof so we would never have to shovel snow off the roof. Unfortunately, this made for steeper than usual stairs (some A-frames use a ladder instead of stairs for this reason).

I'd say about 1/2 the A-frames I've examined don't have doors to most of the rooms. Either because of open floor plans or otherwise. This makes heating and cooling a ---smurfette--- since all the heat rises to the top. I spent many a sweltering winter sleeping in shorts in my loft room because my dad was too much of a cheap ass to install a fan to push the hot air back down.

On the floors with the roof as walls, you'll find you'll lose a lot of floor space with the furniture. Some people might read that last sentence and say, "yeah, no ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- dumbass." But they're not getting it. In a typical house, you can shove the furniture against the walls. You can't do that in an A-frame because you'll lose additional space between the wall and furniture. Some people arrange their furniture towards the center of the floor plan if the floor plan allowed it. My A-frame did not allow central furniture arrangements. A severe oversight I guess.

The house I lived in has South facing windows. Massive 2.5 story jobs exposing nearly every square inch on the south facing wall. It does the job well enough I guess. In general, it sucked ass since this area was the only place my parents would put the TV so there was a lot of glare during the day time. Curtains/blinds/whatever were a near impossibility due to the roof/wall line and the cheapness of my dad.

SavannahLion:

--- Quote from: spystyle on January 22, 2010, 07:39:19 pm ---Also architects won't talk to me when they discover I am trying to design this on a shoe-string budget.

--- End quote ---

That's interesting since, if I recall my history, A-frames were specifically designed to be built on a shoe-string budget.

protokatie:
I am from Maine, and as a teen I lived in a solar house. it wasn't an A-frame tho. It had a cool design tho. For one the whole south of the first floor  and half of each west/east side where glass (with sliding glass doors as the main entrance). That section of the house had earthen tile floors (to trap sunheat). Before sunset the glass walls would be covered in very heavy curtains. The primary winter heat for the place was a central wood stove with the chimney encased in a massive rough granite chimney (so that the rocks would get heated and keep the place cold after everyone went to bed). The bedrooms where upstairs with only a small grate in each room to let the heat from the 1st floor up). Basically it had three rooms (2 bedrooms upstairs, and one big room that was "divided" by the granite chimney heatsink) and a small bathroom.
Each bedroom had large skylights that could be opened in the summer for cooling.
Nicest and most "spacious" place I have ever lived in.
So there are more options than A-frames.

Blanka:
I'm an architect, and I'm much into energy saving measures, but I really don't like designing a place like it's a passive house. A house should be designed as a functional house first. With good insulation, enough flat roof to accommodate installations, any house can be made passive. The only thing I do is use the orientation for window positions.

spystyle:
Well thanks for all the responses fellas :) I am trying to learn architecture crash-course style and it's tricky. I think in about a year I'll have a sum of bucks to buy some land in the country and build a little country home. I'd like it to be passive solar.

Here in Maine it gets very cold. Homeowners spend like $1000 to $2500 and more every winter just to keep their houses warm, then many spend a lot on air conditioning every summer to keep it cool. All the while we are burning oil and coal and money. With a passive solar house it is much more efficient.

At the time of our last energy crisis a lot of people tried to design smarter houses and smarter cars - yet here we are in the exact same situation, another energy crisis! WTF !!! In Canada in 1977 engineers built a house that used 80% less energy, and Canada is cold too! Check it out :

http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/energy-efficient_houses.html

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/forgotten-pioneers-energy-efficiency

That house was the basis for the German PassivHaus :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

I was just talking with a mother-of-four last year, living here in Maine, who said she and many of her friends were having trouble paying their oil bills to keep their houses warm. It's a real problem that hits homeowners hard. But if their houses were designed with energy in mind they might not be in such a predicament.

Those people would benefit from a retrofit :
http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/green-basics/remodel-project-deep-energy-retrofit

It's unfortunate our government doesn't subsidize that.

We import oil from the unstable middle east. It's a dirty and finite resource. I don't want to build a house that needs 20 barrels of oil per year to stay comfortable. I'd like to build a house that works with nature rather than against it.

So I liked the idea of an EarthShip at first :

http://www.earthship.net/buildings/global-model.html

But many, including David Wright AIA, feel they are toxic on account of tires in the walls.


--- Quote from: David Wright AiA ---... I visited the headquarters in New Mexico last
year.  The whole concept sucks as developed by Reynolds.  The idea is ok but
needs to be updated and cleaned up, especially the use of toxic tires.

Cheers,
David Wright, AIA

--- End quote ---

His homepage :
http://www.davidwrightaia.com/

His book :
http://www.amazon.com/Passive-Solar-Primer-Sustainable-Architecture/dp/0764330705

So I don't anticipate having lots of bucks, I'd like to build a house that is about $25,000 - It doesn't have to be so big, like a 2 bedroom apartment, small but comfortable. But I don't know if that number is realistic. To make up for it's small size I could build a big barn next to it, or some other unheated structure if we wanted room to stretch out and have a workshop and such.

Because I anticipate having low bucks I was Googling for cheap house designs and came upon the A-frame :


--- Quote from: Pbrown --- An unmodified A-frame is without doubt the most cost-effective structure imaginable. Wood-frame with metal roofing, fiberglass insulation and wallboard inside - it just doesn't get much cheaper for finished space.

Of course, you'll only have windows on the ends unless you use skylights, which aren't cheap - at least for good quality ones that last. Even so, it is the cheapest structure for labor and materials.  
--- End quote ---

That text is from here :
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/homest/msg0918514831754.html

At first I thought A-frame's were completely wacky, but as I looked them up more they really started to grow on me. My daughter immediately liked them.

Then I asked at "Green Building talk" forum and a smart guy over there found the shape agreeable for passive solar :

http://tinyurl.com/yhjuqje

So it was settled then : a funky A-frame that is passive solar :)

The A-Frame was designed in the 1957 by Andrew Geller. In 1978 the US department of agriculture released plans for cabins and vacation homes and one was an A-frame cabin :

http://www.amazon.com/Vacation-Homes-Cabins-Dept-Agriculture/dp/0486236315

My fuzzy plan so far is to use that 1978 plan but modify it to be super passive solar :)

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