I will post pictures soon. Mean time I'll elaborate. A passive solar house faces south. All but two small windows, one on the west and one on the east for ventilation face south. The house has at least a 30" overhang and in the south side it's 40". That blocks the summer sun completely out and allows most of the wintersun in. I say most because I goofed a little and the overhang is about 4" too long. Should be 36. The other main ingredients to passive solar are "high thermal mass" walls, floors, and anything that the winter sun is likely to hit. Through last winters experience I'm also adding a mini trombe "wall" made of one gallon water jugs painted black and set in front of those south windows. I found that the floor doesn't really act as a mass that helps heat since the earth sucks out the heat. The last ingredient is super insulation which in my case is straw bale infill walls. I had to go non natural in the attic so there is R30 fiberglass up there. I might actually add to that. The walls are probably R25-30 depending on who you believe and probably how good the air pockets are in the straw you buy. Bottom line is that this summer the highest the temperature has gotten inside the house is 85 and that is 103 outside for days prior to that high mark. One 103 day won't do it and actually it's the night time lows that are more important, if no low lower than in the 80's the house doesn't get a chance to cool off. I might get a window AC but I'd need at least 600 watts of solar probably just to run that. In winter I do need a little wall propane heater, no big deal. I do envision on my planned future smaller version to not need as much heating since part of my problem is the oversize nature of the 800sq ft. mostly too much north south dimension so the north side is too far away from the sun heat source. Gonna fix that problem on next one. I also made the mistake of believing a glazing site that gave a formula that wasn't total glass on the south side. That's BS you can go total glass on the south side. It also talks about the right kind of glass and yes you can get anal about all of this but I'm on a budget so I got window "doors" out of CL these happen to be super thick refridgerator doors like the ones at a convenience store where the beer is behind. On the next house I'm going to just use old sliding glass doors. You can see I just mudded them in after fastening them to the studs. I'll try to link to my youtube site. If I can't you can search for circular roof, I'm on the first page I think. Then click my name and it should take you to the house videos as well. Some of that I've improved upon in terms of method etc. So if you see the circular roof idea, with that I can make about a 200 or less sq. ft. mini house. or you could make two of them and put a hall connecting them. Anyway, that eliminates one of the higher expenses, trusses. Then I'm going to do a fiberglass roof like a boat sort of, you can google fiberglass roofs, and that should fix the other main expense of the roof. If you aren't into a round house you can just do a regular roof and if you do I'd reccommend a hip style and set your walls back 30" and 36" on the south. Or even better figure out how to have a 5ft. porch go all the way around the east , west and north side. I have a parking overhang on my north side which really helps keep the north from getting too cold and it's a good place to be in summer. Better yet, do as I'm going to do now, leave this area in the hottest months and coldest months. But again, this plan is for when I can't drive anymore so I have to think about enduring the worst. You can PM me if you want more details. This was probably more than anyone wanted to know.
