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In passive solar building design, windows, walls, and floors are made to collect, store, reflect, and distribute solar energy, in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. This is called passive solar design because, unlike active solar heating systems, it does not involve the use of mechanical and electrical devices.
A double envelope house is a passive solar house design which collects solar energy in a solarium and passively allows the warm air to circulate around the house between two sets of walls, a double building envelope. This design is from 1975 by Lee Porter Butler in the United States.
Solar energy is clean and renewable. Solar architecture is designing buildings to use the sun's heat and light to maximum advantage and minimum disadvantage, and especially refers to harnessing solar power. It is related to the fields of optics, thermics, electronics and materials science. Both active and passive strategies are involved.
A Trombe wall is a passive solar building design strategy that adopts the concept of indirect-gain, where sunlight first strikes a solar energy collection surface in contact with a thermal mass of air. The sunlight absorbed by the mass is converted to thermal energy (heat) and then transferred into the living space.
Earth sheltering is often combined with solar heating systems. Most commonly, the utilization of passive solar design techniques is used in earth shelters. In most of the Northern Hemisphere, a south-facing structure with the north, east, and west sides covered with earth is the most effective application for passive solar systems. A large ...
The term passive house has had at least two meanings in the literature. Its earlier meaning, used since the 1970s, was for a low-energy building designed to exploit passive solar technologies and establish a comfortable indoor temperature with a low-energy requirement for heating or cooling.
MIT's 1939 Solar House #1. Although earlier experimental solar houses were constructed using a mixture of active and passive solar techniques, some of the first European engineered passive solar houses of the modern era were built in Germany after World War I, when the Allies occupied the Ruhr area, including most of Germany's coal mines. [5]
Passive solar building design and energy-efficient landscaping support the low-energy house in conservation and can integrate it into a neighborhood and environment. Following passive solar building techniques , where buildings are compact in shape to reduce surface area and principal windows oriented towards the equator (south in the Northern ...