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Heating (and Cooling) Passively When It’s Too Late to Design Your Home For It

November 24, 2017

HEATING (AND COOLING) PASSIVELY WHEN IT’S TOO LATE TO DESIGN YOUR HOME FOR IT

One of the more difficult things about taking on a permaculture lifestyle when we already have an established residence is that, because the practice is based on efficient design, many times we having seemingly come to the game too late. Once a brick-and-mortar house is built and our savings are invested, it’s no small task to start renovating it to have a built in grey water system or south-facing aspect. But, that’s not to say nothing can be done.

With December rapidly approaching and temperatures falling here in the States, passive heating is more and more on my mind. I’m acutely aware of how poorly thought through, in terms of energy efficiency, many homes are. Having only recently returned, experiencing my first winter in a while, it’s painfully obvious, in fact, that rarely has any thought at all gone into passive heating. With power—natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear—readily available and reasonably affordable, houses simply haven’t been designed with this kind of efficient in mind for a long time. Economics has played a larger role than practicality.

That said, there are now a growing number of people wanting to live both more cost efficiently and more sustainably, but they are invested in homes not designed for that. For them, it’s important to find their own ways to contribute to and participate in positive lifestyle changes without immediately giving up everything they’ve worked for. They need to retrofit and make the most of what is already in place. Luckily, passive heating, to some degree, is still an option.

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Keeping warm with minimal heating: small-scale solutions

November 20, 2015

Keeping warm with minimal heating: small-scale solutions

This is the third post of a four-post series on how to keep reasonably comfortable in a minimally-heated residence. It’s based on my and my husband Mike’s personal experience with a residence heated to 60-63F (16-17C) when we are awake, 50F (10C) when we are sleeping, in a place where winter lows can get as cold as 0F (-18C) and where the heating season lasts for close to 6 months. Some of you have colder winters, some warmer, thus some of what I say may not apply to your situation. But I think most of you who aren’t already successfully living in a minimally-heated residence will find something useful in at least one of these posts.

The first two posts considered ways to keep our body’s internal heat in and near our body for as long as possible. In this post we’ll widen our gaze out to our residence. I’ll discuss relatively low-cost, small-scale solutions (some very cheap, others less so).

Now that we are looking more at your residence, a divide opens up between what a renter can do and what an owner can do. While renters will find some of these solutions cheap and easy enough and with a short enough payback time that it makes sense to implement them, others may be out of reach. However, what you can do may be more than you think depending on the details of your relationship with your landlord. If you do not expect to be where you are for long, only the cheapest, fastest-payback options make sense. I’ll note those as we go along.

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Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, not Places

February 14, 2015

Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, not Places

These days, we provide thermal comfort in winter by heating the entire volume of air in a room or building. In earlier times, our forebear’s concept of heating was more localized: heating people, not places.

They used radiant heat sources that warmed only certain parts of a room, creating micro-climates of comfort. These people countered the large temperature differences with insulating furniture, such as hooded chairs and folding screens, and they made use of additional, personal heating sources that warmed specific body parts.

It would make a lot of sense to restore this old way of warming, especially since modern technology has made it so much more practical, safe and efficient.

 

Most modern heating systems are primarily based on the heating of air. This seems an obvious choice, but there are far worthier alternatives. There are three types of (sensible) heat transfer: convection (the heating of air), conduction (heating through physical contact), and radiation (heating through electromagnetic waves).

The old way of warming was based upon radiation and conduction, which are more energy-efficient than convection. While convection implies the warming of each cubic centimetre of air in a space in order to keep people comfortable, radiation and conduction can directly transfer heat to people, making energy use independent of the size of a room or building.

 

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