Solar Passive House: A Walk to a Real-Life Sustainable House
Published on : Saturday 23-05-2020
Solar Passive House is solar-based technology primarily taking advantage of the construction site, climate, and materials to diminish in-house energy use. These houses are well-designed to prevent or condense the heating and cooling loads to maintaining and incorporation of energy-efficiency technological strategies to meet reduced loads in the overall scenario with solar energy. In other words, it is an approach of incorporating the sun’s energy and using nearby climate to a continuous supply of natural cooling and heating. Besides, the formation is quite cumbersome due to uneven need of heating and cooling loads, to prevent this condition there is the proper use of shaded south-facing glass to avert overheating and increased cooling loads in the spring and fall.
“Insulation, thermal mass, window placement, ventilation, angle and direction of rays, surface colors, and geographical location are the most important aspects of solar passive house design”
Engineering Connection
The rapid shift in prevalence for passive solar design to minimize energy costs and realism of climate change. The commercial and residential sectors are looking to civil engineers to make it happen. Also, the civil engineering study integrated with the modern designing and incorporate more passive solar design techniques through the knowledge of heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in existing and newly-constructed buildings to lower costs and energy use, further reduce carbon emissions and overall maintenance cost to maintain appropriate indoor environments for people.
Current Housing Industry Loopholes
Considering the current market conditions, there is a wide availability of appliances to monitor and manage hot or cold temperatures in the buildings, which usually accounts for high cost and large consumption of in-house energy. In the US, the average family spends almost USD 1,900 a year on energy in total, with half of that cost is spent on energy consumption from heating and cooling appliances. Also, these attribute to the emission of greenhouse gases due to the consumption of energy from these appliances. In the current market, most of the temperature control appliances use fossil fuel energy and further release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
“Solar Passive House is a promising path to meet the target for zero energy buildings. The US Department of Energy and Passive House Institute US (PHIUS) collaborated to endorse the PHIUS+ Certification program for the Zero Energy Ready Home program. It is estimated that the PHIUS certified projects have foreseen exponentially since its founding, with over 240 projects in 2016” - Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI)
Engineers often inclined and focus on solar passive house design to re-invent the conventional methods of heating and cooling and further save the energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions at no comfort loss. Considering, if you have spent time in adsorbing sun’s energy, you will see an incredible ability to heat things. The concept of solar passive house is the new revolution in the housing industry. Thus, it expected to increase the number of Solar Passive House in the global to minimize the consumption of fossil fuel-based energy sources.