Solar Space Heating

Solar Space Heating

How can we use solar space heating?  Passive solar homes use a room, or another part of the structure, as a solar thermal energy collector.  All homes use passive solar in one way or another through the windows, walls and floors.  How effective your home is may be another question.  A typical home is not designed to make the best use of solar energy, leaving the house to cold on one side while it is to hot on another.

One reason for this is that homes face the road, not the sun.  They were built with other priorities in mind, not making the best use of the sun.  If you are not able to rotate your house on it's foundation there are still ways to take advantage of the sun.

In order to make the best use of the sun we first need to understand it better.  Heat moves from warmer materials to cooler ones until there is no longer a temperature difference between the two.  Passive solar will make use of this principle and distribute heat by radiation, convection and conduction.

Radiant heat moves through the air from warmer objects to cooler ones.  The two kinds of radiant heat used in passive solar are solar radiation and infrared radiation.  When radiation hits an object it is either transmitted, reflected or absorbed, depending on the object.  Opaque objects absorb most of the radiation that hits them.  Infrared radiation happens when warmer objects get close to colder ones.

Other terms used with solar space heating are direct gain, indirect gain and isolated gain.  Direct gain uses energy directly from the sun.  Indirect gain uses thermal mass from the living space and isolated gain uses a separate living space to store thermal energy.