Energy Efficient House Questions? Help me be green.?
i'm doing a project on energy efficient homes, and i need a lot of tips.
i have to build a model so i want some suggestions on what to include on it.
i'm already going to have solar panels & a wind turbine, trees, double paned windows, efficient bulbs, lots of insulation...
but i need more ideas, help!
(also, is there a certain shape of house that is more energy efficient?)
and i know windows should be on the south side of the house...does anyone have any other types of tips such as that?
Add a large pond in the back then you can talk about how it's more efficient for air-conditioners to reject heat out to water then to air. You can also talk about "natural swimming pools" where it's an ecosystem that cleans the water by having plants in the shallow regeneration area and circulating the water through sand and the regeneration area. Such pools can actually keep the water cleaner and healthier than municipal tap water. Of course some kind of windmill or solar panel would be needed to keep the water flowing in the pond since it is an ecosystem that depends on it.
If your yard is large enough and you have different elevations, you could have multiple ponds and pump water from the lower one to the upper one to store energy from the windmill (use a windmill that pumps directly instead of generate electricity) and then generate electricity by running the water through a micro turbine back down to the lower pond.
Keep in mind that if you put fish in the pond, you need a much larger regeneration area to clean up the ammonia from the fish.
You could show grass growing through holes in the driveway and talk about the ground absorbs water and how pavement prevents that and how that could be solved by having porous pavement or holes in the pavement since the pavement is only there to support the weight of the car (you see this in California all the time).
If you have areas of the roof that are flat or are patios, put grass and trees there and talk about how a living roof moderates the micro-climate around the house and keeps everything cool.
You may want to have part of your house earth sheltered perhaps with a berm or nested into a hill on the north side and talk about thermal mass and underground homes.
You could have living walls inside integrated into the ventilation system to keep the air clean, remove CO2 and produce oxygen. These are walls sculpted out of lava rock with plenty of places for plants to grow and water cascading down like a waterfall and a small pond at the base, the air is vented to the backside of the wall and blows gently through the porous lavarock, particulates are taken out by the water, and the plants absorb CO2 and produces oxygen.
You could have freestanding vertical living walls outside to help purify the air around the house and to moderate the micro-climate.
If you have a courtyard, you put in a wind tower to direct wind down to the courtyard to keep it cool like they did in the ancient middle east.
You could have a heat chimney like the ancient Romans did where a chimney painted black on the side facing the sun would heat air within the chimney stack by solar power and the rising hot air would pull air out of the house, another inlet pipe would run underground from a vent in the yard over into the house and the air pulled through that vent would be cooled by the thermal mass of the ground, of course gratings and screens will be needed to keep the critters out and if you really wanted it to be authentic, it could be big enough to crawl through so that you had an escape route out to a hidden part of the yard.
Again if you have a courtyard, you could keep an open cistern in it as a pond collecting rain water with some water plants to keep the water clean and fresh, it would moderate the temperature in the courtyard and be a source of drinking water. If you really want to be fancy you could circulate the water with that of the natural swimming pond/pool to take advantage of the larger regeneration are to keep the water clean.
You could have a cistern buried in the yard, the top would be like a patio and you could capture rain water in it to water the yard and perhaps use as non-potable water perhaps as gray water. You could have a separate cistern for gray water.
Solar hot water heater is a no brainer as it's inexpensive and pays for itself very quickly. If you're in an area with a winter, it could be part of an active solar home heating system. If you have a water brine gas fired absorption chiller for air conditioning, you could use the solar hot water as a preheat for the regeneration stage thereby requiring less gas for your AC. Such an air-conditioner system would use 85% less electricity than a conventional one even without the preheat.
You could put in rain gardens around the home so that runoff that you don't capture for the cisterns would be detained long enough to be absorbed into the ground instead of being surface runoff.
If you have enough land, include an herb garden, an outdoor kitchen perhaps with a solar oven, you can run a gas range from a downdraft wood gasifier with propane or natural gas backup for the impatient, a vegetable garden and a fruit orchard.
Power an outdoor grill and an outdoor firepit from the downdraft gasifer. Downdraft gasifiers are a good way to dispose of garbage though I would use mostly yard debris and wood especially if running a cooking range and grill from it
Olivia Chow's Green House Tour
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