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Section Seven
DIRT CHEAP PASSIVE HEATING AND COOLING IDEAS
Let’s touch on some different ideas for inexpensive ways to build.
Stoves can be home made.
The cob people bake outside in a cob oven.
It’s a blob, kind of a teardrop shaped.
They fancy them up and put animal designs in them but
basically it’s a thermal mass.
You build a fire in it and heat it up.
It’s got a slate bottom, a steal bottom on the inside.
When it’s heated up you rake or scrape all the coals out of
there and then bake in there just from the radiant mass.
So that gave me the idea, why not build an oven/stove right
into the wall so there is a possibility.
Again almost zero cost.
And then why not put a heat exchanger system into it?
Run a system of pipes whether it is 6-inch gas pipe or just
whatever piping you have lying around.
Put those in place first and then build the cob around that
with your stove in the middle of it.
So you now have a stove, an oven, a thermal mass as well as a
heat exchanger unit blowing hot air out.
You could build it so that it sucks in air from the outside
of the building and or sucks air in from the inside of the building
at the bottom of the cob oven.
You could even build in a water heat exchanging system so you
heat water up. Copper
piping can be wrapped around the stove itself or around the flue
pipe. So there is a lot
of different ways to go there as far as inexpensive heating systems,
so again it doesn’t have to cost hardly anything.
Windows for these inexpensive homes can be done also. Years ago, I worked with a company called Prime Energy and we did storm window systems. We made acrylic storm windows using Velcro as a fastening system. But we also used a 16 mil vinyl. It’s crystal clear. If you stretch it tight, you virtually can’t tell that it’s not glass. This has been 17 years ago that I was doing that and we’re still using some of those as storm windows so this stuff is really good. It comes on a roll. You could do a double pane window with a 1x4 or a 1x3 frame of wood. Stretch two of these sheets of 16 mil vinyl over that and staple it in. Tape on some foam taping with weather stripping taping so it will fit tightly into the frame and the frame could be built exactly to accommodate that. Again, this is an inexpensive way to have a very thermally efficient system. Actually, it would be more thermally efficient than glass because glass conducts heat and cold. Plastic does not. So you would have a dead air space here, not a vacuum space but a dead air space. So these can be comfortable homes.
LIGHT AIR AND VIEW
Mike Oehler stresses light, air and view.
You want to have light so you can see.
You don’t want to just have light from the front of the house
so that at the back of the house there’s a totally different
environment. It’s gloomy
and that will wear on you psychologically, mentally and emotionally.
You may not even notice, it but it will.
He wants you to have light, air and view in all rooms.
You can have some screen material; otherwise you’re going to
have some bugs.
Screening comes on rolls also.
USING VEGETATION TO PROVIDE COOL FRESH AIR
Real quickly, he builds what he calls an uphill patio.
This is a terrace system built into the uphill side of the
hill so that you have light, air and view coming from the backside
of the house as well as a backdoor.
He doesn’t believe in having only one door to the house or
one entryway, one direction.
But, you can have light, air and a view.
So with these screens and windows you can have a very
beautiful, pretty view that is psychologically pleasing with
greenery growing.
Another very interesting factor would be during the summertime.
With it being an earth bermed home, you’re going to have a
60-degree start up temperature.
If you have greenery growing out of the front door on the
down hill side, and greenery growing on the up hill side, but
primarily on the downhill side if there is any kind of vegetation
out there and you have the screen door open or an opening at the
bottom of the screen door, heat rises and so with the least amount
of cool and fresh air coming through the greenery the heat in the
house will tend to rise and go out the higher point of the house
which would be the loft or the back assuming that this is built into
a hillside. At the back,
top, or wherever, you’ll have a screened window that you can open.
The heat will rise and go out that window and suck in cooler
air from the bottom. 60
degrees is certainly livable and comfortable.
ADDED HEATING IN WINTER/COOLING IN SUMMER
Another system can be done very easily, and I’ll go into two
different facets of it here.
On the south facing side, very inexpensively again, posts can
be put into the ground and there doesn’t need to be but two of them.
You could have framework built out of either PVC or bamboo or
saplings but, basically a porch area so that in the wintertime you
have UV grade polyethylene - greenhouse plastic over this.
What is this going to do?
It’s going to extend your growing season either end of your
growing season. You can
start saplings, tomato plants, and seedlings.
You’re going to get about a 2-month jump before the normal
growing season. Mike
Oehler, in northern Idaho takes some plants year round in
underground greenhouses that he built.
Well into December, he’ll be growing plants and your tough
plants like broccoli and kale can go through the winter.
So certainly this is a feasible idea.
Again, this is very inexpensive; the greenhouse plastic for
one home might be $50.
In the summertime, maybe you don’t want to have a greenhouse since
it’s not necessary. You
can take that roll it up, store it and put on UV screen netting to
keep the bugs out and provide shade to cool your house.
You can get on a roll of solar screen that will shield up to
90 percent of the heat and sunlight.
So in the summertime put that up and again you’ve reduced the
temperature beating on the house by quite a bit and so the framework
that you used for the greenhouse in the winter can be used for your
shading system in the summertime or vines could be grown over it.
If there are trees in the south they’re going to protect you,
since they will have leaves in the summer, which will protect you
from heat and in the winter the leaves will fall off and you’ll have
your solar pick up on your panel on the greenhouse plastic.
PORTABLE HOME BUILDING PLANT
So then I had the idea that OK, you’re foam tape comes on a roll and
the screen comes on the roll and your solar plastic comes on a roll
and your normal polyethylene comes on a roll, so, hey, we’re on a
roll here. Why not have
something like a goose necked trailer that all this stuff could be
stocked in as well as prefab parts, the stove or just the door.
For a cob oven all you would need really would be a plate of
steel or even slate rock for the base and all you would need is a
door for it and the other accessories like a damper and stove pipe
and whatnot. But, a lot
of the things, a stovepipe comes nested inside.
You can get like 12 pieces and it takes up the same amount of
space as one piece.
Windows could be prefabricated and maybe just stapled together on
site. A lot of these
materials, being on a roll and then of course the timber, the earth,
the clay and the straw would be picked up on site locally.
As far as the doors, Rob Roy builds his own doors.
He’ll build a 2x4 frame and then inside and outside cover
that over with barn board or something maybe pallet boards.
The interior could be filled with foam or something to
insulate. Maybe put a
window in it if you want.
This is specifically for the earth swallow home.
It’s the cheapest, fastest, simplest, and easiest to build.
In a lot of cases people can scavenge.
For instance, many big cities, like Kansas City have a bulky
item pickup day, where people put things out that they don’t want
anymore. You can get
bathtubs, toilets, doors, windows, and even a kitchen sink.
Check construction dumpsters.
There is material everywhere that is being thrown away.
MOTHER EARTH HEAT GRABBERS
Other things could factor in.
Old issues of Mother Earth News, the various magazines,
Countryside, Backwoods Home, Back home Magazine deal with things
like sun grabbers or heat grabbers.
A passive solar system where you have a rippling in a
framework painted black, it excites the air, glass plate over it of
course. So it sucks air
cold in from the bottom and pumps it out the top.
If a person wanted, that could be done very inexpensively.
This is the idea of having other types of heating.
Basically this would cover the needs with the solarium on the
house. In this area that
we’re looking at there’s plenty of wood so heating is not going to
be a problem, and as I said before, cooling, I don’t foresee being
that big of a problem.
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