Design Elements For Residential Buildings in Temperate Climates
- Placement of room-types, internal doors & walls, & equipment in the house.
- Orienting the building to face the equator (or a few degrees to the East to capture the morning sun)
- Extending the building dimension along the east/west axis
- Adequately sizing windows to face the midday sun in the winter, and be shaded in the summer.
- Minimising windows on other sides, especially western windows
- Erecting correctly sized, latitude-specific roof overhangs, or shading elements (shrubbery, trees, trellises, fences, shutters, etc.)
- Using the appropriate amount and type of insulation including radiant barriers and bulk insulation to minimise seasonal excessive heat gain or loss
- Using thermal mass to store excess solar energy during the winter day (which is then re-radiated during the night)
The precise amount of equator-facing glass and thermal mass should be based on careful consideration of latitude, altitude, climatic conditions, and heating/cooling degree day requirements.
Factors that can degrade thermal performance:
- Deviation from ideal orientation and north/south/east/west aspect ratio
- Excessive glass area ('over-glazing') resulting in overheating (also resulting in glare and fading of soft furnishings) and heat loss when ambient air temperatures fall
- Installing glazing where solar gain during the day and thermal losses during the night cannot be controlled easily e.g. West-facing, angled glazing, skylights
- Thermal losses through non-insulated or unprotected glazing
- Lack of adequate shading during seasonal periods of high solar gain (especially on the West wall)
- Incorrect application of thermal mass to modulate daily temperature variations
- Open staircases leading to unequal distribution of warm air between upper and lower floors as warm air rises
- High building surface area to volume - Too many corners
- Inadequate weatherization leading to high air infiltration
- Lack of, or incorrectly installed, radiant barriers during the hot season. (See also cool roof and green roof)
- Insulation materials that are not matched to the main mode of heat transfer (e.g. undesirable convective/conductive/radiant heat transfer)
Read more about this topic: Passive Solar Building Design
Famous quotes containing the words design, elements, residential, buildings, temperate and/or climates:
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“[The Republicans] offer ... a detailed agenda for national renewal.... [On] reducing illegitimacy ... the state will use ... funds for programs to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies, to promote adoption, to establish and operate childrens group homes, to establish and operate residential group homes for unwed mothers, or for any purpose the state deems appropriate. None of the taxpayer funds may be used for abortion services or abortion counseling.”
—Newt Gingrich (b. 1943)
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanitys language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanitys disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.”
—Virginia Woolf (18821941)
“All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)