Taking advantage of your lot’s features
When you plan to build a solar house, you want to find the right lot first, and
then get busy on the blueprints. You don’t want to commit to a particular
house design, and then insist on finding a lot that will bear it out. Each lot will
support a different style of house with a layout that maximizes views, breezes,
landscaping, and so on. So your house design should be a function of the lot.
You can take advantage of many of the existing features of your lot as you
design your house. When you consider the terrain and landscaping, think
about how those features change through the different seasons. How do the
land, trees, and any other nearby structures influence the wind, precipitation,
sun, and so on? Design on a 12-month basis, not just on the current season.
Hillsides work very well for providing insulation via earth berms and half
basements. If you choose a hillside facing south, you can get two floors’
worth of good sun exposure while enjoying northern insulation.
Deciduous trees work well on western and southern exposures. A house usu-
ally feels much nicer with direct sunshine in the morning, so try to keep the
eastern shading to a minimum if that’s your goal.
Getting the basic principles right
Small is beautiful. A smaller house uses less building materials, is cheaper to
maintain, requires less HVAC capacity, uses less energy, and so on. You can
make a small house every bit as spacious as a large house if you
✓ Avoid long, wide hallways
✓ Combine utility functions like laundry and storage
✓ Put in less bathroom space (make the bathrooms tall, as opposed to
wide, and you’ll get a spacious effect)
✓ Forget both a living room and family room and combine them into one
central great room
Time to Start Pounding Nails
Hiring a contractor and going through the construction process are pretty
much the same for solar homes as they are for conventional homes. You
don’t need a contractor who has built solar homes before; the passive
aspects of the solar design are part of the blueprints, and any contractor
should be able to do the job properly.
As far as installing the solar equipment itself, a good plumber should be able
to install the solar water heating equipment. If the plumber you’ve contracted
with can’t do it, ask him to subcontract the installation to a solar installer.
The entire solar water heating system should be installed as part of the fin-
ished house.
The PV system is another story, however. The problem is that you just don’t
know how much capacity the system will need. You won’t know how much
energy your house requires until you’ve lived in it for a year or so. The
energy requirements depend on your personal habits and how the house is
affected by weather patterns. If your system is intertie, which it definitely
should be if you have the option, you won’t get anything from the utility com-
pany if you provide it with the extra power that you don’t use (see Chapter 17
for more details). Therefore, the best bet is to wait a year or so before you
install your PV system.
The problem with waiting to install the PV system is that you probably want to
finance it as part of your new house. If you wait a year and decide to put in a
$25,000 system, you’ll need to come up with the cash then. You may be able to
get a home equity loan, but the terms won’t be as favorable as if you wrapped
the PV financing into the original home loan. So if you want to take care of all
the financing at once, estimate your energy needs, and install a system that’s
smaller than you think you’ll need. You can buy an oversized inverter for the
smaller system so that when you’re ready to expand it, you only need to put
in a few more solar panels to zero out your power bill. And you may find that
the smaller system keeps your power bill in the lower tiers, so you don’t have
much of an economic incentive to install that extra capacity (see Chapter 17
for more details).
When you design the house and start construction, make the roof pitch and
construction optimum for PV panels. And design the PV system layout so the
installation will be quick and easy when the time finally comes. Leave room
near the fuse box for an inverter and switches.Getting the information you need
If you’re going to buy an existing conventional home and install your own
solar, you need to carefully and accurately evaluate the home’s suitability for
solar. Here’s a checklist:
✓ Get a professional energy audit, if possible. The seller may let you do
one, but it’s a tough request to grant before you’ve made an offer on her
house. It’s one thing to walk through a house; it’s quite another to climb
around in basements and attics poking tools into things. Would you
want somebody doing that to your house before you knew if he was seri-
ous? Inspections are normally done after an offer is made and accepted.
✓ Evaluate existing energy equipment for potential improvements. Is the
HVAC old? Perhaps you can demand a new one be installed. How about
wood stoves or gas stoves? Are they working properly, or do they need
to be replaced? If they’re not in the house, can they be installed? Should
they be installed? Attic vents? First of all, do they exist? Secondly, do
they make sense. The latter question is tough to answer; ask the energy
auditor to take a look and make some recommendations.
✓ Make a list of all the solar investments that will work in your new
home. Then estimate the costs for doing each project, based on the
construction and layout of the house. This is relatively easy to plan for
active solar, like PV and hot water. But it’s going to be tougher to decide
what will work for passive, and you’ll probably find that moving walls
and cutting into ceilings isn’t really worth the cost, given the potential
savings on your power bills. Passive solar is much easier to design and
build into a home than it is to modify an existing home for.
✓ Evaluate the outside of the house as well. Do the trees shade the way
they should? Are they deciduous? If not, what will it take to rectify the
situation? Can you add a sun porch, or a trellis, that will change the
nature of the layout? How about adding overhangs over windows (see
Chapter 8)?
✓ Read Chapter 21 on building a solar home from scratch. It details all
the things you want to do when you design an ideal, new solar home.
When you’re looking at a prospective home, compare its features with
the ideals expressed in Chapter 21. And who knows; you may become
convinced that your best bet is to build your own custom solar home.