Solar Passive

Just thought i'd tell you about why we choose this particular plan & block.

A solar passive house basically means it makes the most of the sun, garden & breezes along with choosing appropriate building materials. Basically we want a house that is (as far as possible) naturally warm in winter & cool in summer. It doesn't mean that we are hippies or have solar panels. :) It is the one basic principle that can have a big impact on your heating and cooling bills - believe me, my parents built a solar passive house and on a hot 30*C day in Australia it was naturally 10*C cooler inside and 15*C cooler in the basement.

We'd been looking into solar passive house designs for a while and decided we wanted to incorporate these ideas into our house plan where possible.

I won't go into big explanations here as i'm prob not good at explaining it. Basically you should have the long side of your house facing north so you get lots of warming winter sun & sunshine. It's best to have living areas on this side and not waste sunshine on your garage or wet areas.

We are actually placing our house closer to the southern fence (we have a fair bit of leeway with our block size) so that we can get in more of that sunshine & not be shaded by the neighbour's house.

The western side heats up quickly from the summer sun so it's best to have a short side of your house face that way. pref the garage to absorb extra heat. We have a bedroom facing west but it is shaded by the verandah and we can also cool it with flow-through breezes.

Another way we are keeping the heat down is by having a light coloured roof and brick. Think about how a black shirt heats up on a hot day - bbq anyone? We are also having a whirly bird to get all the hot air out of the roof cavity.

In summer we will open all the windows up at sundown and close them early next morning to let all the cool night air in. Keeping doors, windows and curtains closed during the day also helps keep the house nice and cool. In Winter we will close all the blinds & curtains at night and keep all the doors closed to help keep the warm in. We have standard insulation supplied by the builder.

Lastly we plan to plant some decidious trees so they shade the house in summer but let all the sunshine in in winter :)

So there you go, sorry if i bored you but it was an important part of our planning process.

We don't have solar panels or any 'weird' energy saving things in our plans. We will be on natural gas though so that means an instant gas hotwater system - no more running out of hot water, yay :)