Australian Passive Solar Home

I am often asked about the ideas that underpin our passive solar house.

Especially since it is currently performing well in our hot Australian summer, people say things like, “Where did you get the idea for the internal water tanks?” (They act as quick-response thermal mass.)

Or people say, “Where did you get the idea for the opening ceiling hatches?” (They allow night ventilation flow to cool the thermal mass.)

Or “How did you think of the southern reflector panel?” (It gives better winter sunshine heating. Or it will when it’s built.)

And so on.

Well, the answers to those questions are very easy – I got every idea from the published literature!

There is not one single aspect of our solar house design that is innovative, new, cutting-edge, unconventional, state-of-the-art, revolutionary, avant-garde, novel, trail-blazing – and so on.

It’s all been done before.

It is a bog-stock traditional passive solar home, made from off-the-shelf materials, built by normal trades, and costing a normal amount. Everything from the windows to the doors to the timber wall and roof frames to the cladding to the wrap to the insulation to the plasterboard – everything – came from local building suppliers at normal cost.

All that occurred is that a lot of careful design effort was spent by me in optimising aspect, shape, window areas, thermal mass, insulation and shading using the wonderful (and free) Australian Government NatHERS software.

There is literally no secret, no special sauce.

And no need, in nearly all southern Australian locations, for all the expensive energy efficient home BS that you see time and time again being spread by people who someone wonderfully described to me the other day as ‘dingbats’…