(MCNZH concrete floor being bathed by sun through a 9’x6’ window)
The most important design considerations for cold climate building are insulation, building envelope, and passive solar design. Given our lofty goals for the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH), we pushed hard to maximize our return on every one of these fronts.
The MCNZH collects 54% of its annual space heat through passive solar design – that’s 8747 kWh or 31.5 Gigajoules. It does so by:
- having huge south windows that are specially manufactured to maximize solar heat gain
- containing a large amount of thermal mass to absorb the solar heat when the sun shines
- having movable solar awnings that allow 100% of the sunlight to hit the windows during the heating season (the awnings are strictly speaking not a passive part of the solution).
I’ll discuss the first two bullets on this list, given that I’ve already described the movable awnings at length. read more... »