The bedrooms are along the east side, a cooler part of the house where they also get morning sun.

Air is drawn from the living space through connecting lower vents to be exhausted through the sunroom upper vents (the upper vents from the sunroom to the living space and any operable windows must be closed and the thermal mass wall of the sunroom must be shaded). However, unlike masonry water requires carefully designed structural support, and thus it is more difficult to integrate into the design of the house.

Double glazing is adequate for most climates, although in locations with severe winter conditions, triple glazing is advisable to reduce heat loss and condensation on the glass. To realize the full benefits from your sunroom addition, you’ll need to incorporate the basic elements of passive solar design: orientation, glazing, …

You can have your rafters cut at a suitable length by nailing two pieces of wood together at the angle of the winter sun.

Would you stick to just the northern side or the entire perimeter?Yeah, I don’t recommend designing a building without looking at A Pattern Language first.With crenelation, I was meaning the exterior wall of the building. In general, the more distributed the thermal mass, the better. It accelarates natural wind speed due to pressure differences created by the wing wall.In a climate like New England where night time temperatures are generally lower than daytime ones, focus on bringing in cool nighttime air and then closing the house to hot outside air during the day. I usually recommend clear double glass for solar-oriented windows and “low-e” glazing on the other sides. Fortunately, this can be done without compromising on the gains derived from passive solar design.As opposed to active solar, which is used to generate an electrical current, passive solar is a means of utilizing heat from the sun.At 45° latitude (north or south) there are 957 Watt hours per square metre available for heating on a winter day.

Whichever option you choose, you’ll use less energy than you would in a typical home, because the passive solar design of the house will minimize your need for additional heating, cooling and lighting.Dick and Becky Myers wanted to do more than just add a few passive solar elements to their new home — they wanted to be energy independent. These basic responses to solar heat lead to design elements, material choices and placements that can provide heating and cooling effects in a home.Unlike active solar heating systems, passive systems are simple and do not involve substantial use of mechanical and electrical devices, such as pumps, fans, or electrical controls to move the solar energy.The goal of passive solar heating systems is to capture the sun’s heat within the building’s elements and to release that heat during periods when the sun is absent, while also maintaining a comfortable room temperature. The thermal mass also tempers the intensity of the heat during the day by absorbing energy. Such effects are easy to achieve in a 1.5 story house, which also happens to be the most efficient home to build in terms of building material.Finally, a large, sheltering roof that the home is built into is both functional and aesthetic.

My mother and father-in-law’s home is a traditional Japanese house over 150 years old, but does not fit your description.The images that Google produces when I search the term show houses that are suitable to the tropics, not cold regions. There are architectural patterns that will assist in designing a livable home, however.First, recognize that your home is both a place to meet people and a sanctuary to get away from the world – and it can be both simultaneously. For solar heating in winter, a good measure of solar exposure is to have at least four hours of direct solar gain on the winter solstice. Aperture/Collector:The large glass area through which sunlight enters the building. The house I designed for them is a three-bedroom, 1,850-square-foot home located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, a climate with hot summers and some snow in winter. Passive solar design refers to the use of the sun’s energy for the heating and cooling of living spaces by exposure to the sun. The sun’s energy can not only be used to heat the air in your home, it can provide hot water as well.You can also consider a courtyard with evaporative cooling water features to allow night cooling with wind protection. > Passive Solar Eaves Calculator This calculator will help you work out the required Eave depth for ideal Passive Solar benefit for a North facing (Southern hemisphere) or South facing (Northern hemisphere) window. Using clear glass on the south wall windows allows more of the sun’s energy to warm the house in winter, when the sun will be able to enter the house through the south-facing windows. The direct gain system utilizes 60-75% of the sun’s energy striking the windows. Saved from greenpassivesolar.com. The following is a writeup of a workshop given at the fall 2010 conference of The Permaculture Project – GTA.This guide is aimed at helping you to design an energy efficient, passive solar home in a temperate environment.