Sun Angles for Passive Solar - Houses, Shops, Barns, and Greenhouses - Anywhere on Earth
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- Опубліковано 9 бер 2023
- Passive Solar design utilizes the lower winter sun angle for heating, and protects from the higher summer sun overheating a building. Properly built, can reduce heating and cooling needs up to 100%. If you're building a new building anyways, there is no additional costs to situate the building properly with certain design principals.
Dean has built passive solar houses, passive solar chicken coop, and his Deep Winter Passive Solar Greenhouse. In Saskatchewan Canada.
Latitude & Longitude & Sun Angle Calculator: www.sunearthtools.com/dp/tool...
Scientific Calculator:
www.mathsisfun.com/scientific...
#solar #solarenergy #passivesolar
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Our website is www.arkopia.ca We are the inventors of the Best Selling Smoothie on amazon: Arkopia Freeze Dried Smoothies. We are also a small, multifaceted farm located in Saskatchewan, Canada where we are striving to provide our hyper-local community with food (and flowers), direct to customers off our farm.
The 6 appartment building I live in, in Switzerland, is perfectly built. In the sommer, the windows dont get sun and in the winter they do, plus we are facing South perfectly. It was built 54 years ago. The latest style in new buidings, are square blocks with flat roofs and thick insulation. There electric bills are higher then our old one. Besides, there paint job looks pretty bad after just a few years. New is not always better!
That’s amazing. We don’t have a single building like your old one in Canada that I am aware of. 😂
Apparently, the new designers are out in touch with nature or just don't care. Square blocks with flat roofs are easier, faster and cheaper to build than slanted roof and window placements based on sun angels. I am glad you brought it up. When people say Switzerland, there is a certain expectation of high-quality time-tested workmanship. Looks like it goes down too. Very disappointed.
On a broader topic, seems like the person has had education in physics. Unfortunately classical mechanics puts people off, I'm trying to get it explained better, mentioned to the UK and Ireland Institute of Physics. Either better and clearer experiment will convince people of what they're teaching, or it's so grossly oversimplified it's really nonsense. I can't say either way.
4 ft overhang is also great if you want windows open when it's raining!
I'm amazed that in 2023 new buildings are not all designed like this!
so cool. Couldn't find this struff anywhere more clearer than here with simple math and pure passion. the way you said about planning the whole city thing. you should make more videos on that. thank you for your effort.
Watched four of your videos so far and its bang on. I live in Regina, Sask and am experiencing the exact weather you have and its really refreshing to listen to you explain the physics of sun angles, biomass, insulation, etc, with all the necessary engineering should be made into mandatory building code by LAW. It`s really a no brainer when it comes to reducing the need for power and gas. The is the best design for people to live off the grid and live in a earth ship. The bigger the better the results will be. I will pass this on to people so they can benefit from your great ideas; Thanks Dean. Very well explained.
Appreciate it 🙏✌️
Phenomenal explanation and visual, Im a visual learner so this is the easiest for me to understand THANK YOU. Looking forward to more whiteboard explanations, easy to make and crystal clear to understand!!
A wealth of information as always, and yes I sucked at math in school. But it doesn't mean I can't apply all of this good intel into building. You're teaching an old dog new tricks, look at you!
Ronzo
Haha. Right on. I love math. It never lies. 😂✌️
This is amazing, it should be brought into building code. Thanks for sharing!!
Excellent video! It should be 'required viewing' for builders and architects, most of whom who don't seem to get it. My wife and I designed and built our own off-grid super-insulated home here in central British Columbia some dozen years ago. We drew up scale drawings on graph paper to better understand sun angles and settle on roof overhangs and window placement. It's not rocket science, once you know what you're doing. We have double-stud construction, R36 floors, R48 walls and R68 ceilings, triple-glazed windows, 3 1/2 ft overhangs. Nothing is top-of-the-line but the best we could afford at the time. Performance is very good, although of course we could do better today, knowing then what we know now. Even in the dead of winter we never keep the wood cookstove running through the night. We simply relight it in the morning, while all our friends and neighbours take turns with their spouses getting up to feed their fires.
Loved the summer & winter written marks on building @5:00minutes mark approx.
Math has always been my nemesis - especially trigonometry - but you tie it to freedom and I’m about ready to become best friends with it. 😂
Love your videos and everything you’re doing! Thank you for sharing your passion with the rest of us nerds! ☺️
Lol...."If you can find somebody that's oblivious to this info, you can sell your house"!!! The "PT Barnum" approach....love it! Thanks for the tutorial.
Super easy 😂 Banks, appraisers, and builders don’t even know. Just put in granite countertops and even easier to sell a house. 😂
@@ArkopiaUA-cam Too many years of relatively cheap heat....times are changing fast. Even firewood is getting pricey...and on the West coast too! Cheers.
I love his shirt, it seems like so much of the talk around climate change is finding expensive solutions someone can syphon money from.
You can use passive Solar even if you don't care about climate change and are just cheap.
Dean, sometimes I forget I'm math guy too and wonder why some folks don't do this. Appreciate you putting this out so more folks get benefit from Mother Earth!
Love the tee-shirt. I feel like Ralph looking at your math.
Great explanation! I'm designing our passive solar house, and this is going to be really helpful!
I'm survivor in a rent home. I like buy land and start again a new life for the 3rd time! Hi Dean 👋
dude, taht t-shirt is awesome
I’ve designed a fair few of them. Maybe should start selling those and some merch, like a good little UA-camr. 😂
Our house has 4’ overhang on the south. The huge living room window is only single pane. I don’t really think we lose that much heat, compared to the gorgeous warmth 9ish to 1ish each winter day. I was really surprised how comfortable it is with the single pane. And my plants seriously love it. I’m reconsidering replacing the window. It’s 7’x10’ 5 section bay replacement cost is at least $5k 😮
Once again. Thank you kindly. I downloaded an app and got all my answers written down in a few minutes lol. But I will go sharpen up my trigonometry....
One of the things that I love about your thumbnail images (and it's something I often times do on my own channel too) is that you have a tendency to find the weird freeze frames of yourself and use them to keep it fun and light.
🙏👍 Gotta put the humor in with that Trigonometry. 😂
Thank you, you helped me to be a bit more comfortable with numbers, math, and moving forward in this direction.
For the winter you can have mirrors under the window. Then probably need light black curtains about a foot from the window to reduce glare. Having a mirror table outside might be a little like the pond effect you get in Japan.
Great information
Watching from Toronto area
Love this vid! My home in Arizona was built before air conditioning was a thing and it follows all these design principles. Even though the south side of my house is nearly 100% glass it's easy to heat in the winter and cool in the summer because of the proper overhangs.
Makes sense because we are extremely cold here. Too much glazing wouldn’t work here, but would likely work there good. 👍✌️
So many THANKS, for your time and help
No matter where we live, the placing and amount of glazing is a compromise. Computer modeling has shown that, ideally, we'd all live in windowless boxes. Looked at on an annual basis, even the best windows lose more energy than they gain. Remember the 1970s and the experimental solar homes with entire walls of glass? We caretook one, and it became an oven by day and shivering cold by night. Today, no-one designs homes like that. It took years to begin to understand that more glazing isn't better.
Our home faces south and has four triple-glazed windows and a glass door on that side (minimal glazing on the north side, to reduce losses). The windows sit under a 3 1/2 ft overhang, and that's pretty generous. BUT......the sills are just eighteen inches above floor level, as my wife wanted to see the view below from our ridge-top site. That extra glass loses heat in the winter and, more importantly, causes occasional overheating in the hottest, sunniest part of the summer. This is no surprise; we knew we were compromising performance for those views. But now we need to look at external blinds or eave extensions or something to keep out the direct sun in the very hottest weather. The smart thing to do would have been raise those sills to thirty-six inches or so (whatever a sun angle analysis suggests). But building design is all about compromise. My wife is happy and feels the lowered performance was worth it.@@ArkopiaUA-cam
Very helpful, thank you
I attached a trellis to south side of my house and put on a shade cloth on trellis in summer but in winter with sun heats my house great.
Great info, thank you for sharing the detail. But 4 foot overhangs are huge!
Depending on the pitch of your roof you choose, a big overhang gives you more room for insulation in the attic right above the exterior wall. ✌️
Total engineering badass! Thank you Dean!
This is so amazing ❤
The issue isn't which direction is the "front". Houses need to be longer on the E-W axis.
Personally I don't want the busiest rooms facing north, I want them facing south to benefit first from solar warming. Besides, north walls should have minimal glazing to lessen solar gain/loss
awesome dean. thanks.
Thank you!
Thanks!
Great share! We’re building a new place into the side of a hill, same Latitude as you, and I was trying to figure out the overhang so we don’t melt in the summer and yet can still enjoy the sunshine and warmth in the winter. I knew there was a math equation but it’s been 30 years since I’ve used any of it! Cheers 🍻
I am so excited for this video!
Dean, we need to know how you went from coordinates to the solstice angles. I looked at that sun calculator, but there is a lot of detail, and based on times of the day and graphs etc. It is confusing to get the proper fields entered to find those angles properly.
@@DeeSixHomestead set your location on the map, then set the date for the solstice day and click “execute” (I think). Then the angle is at solar noon (the high point on the graph). It’s a complicated thing at first glance, but play around with it and it’s amazing.
Happy winter solstice! Just here admiring the shadow line at the top of my windows 😎
This is really cool Dean. Thanks for this, I have been doing it with Blender in a 3d modelling environment for a while now. I find for me the 3d environment is awesome because I am very visual, but also really cool to see the math behind what goes into it.
THANK YOU!!!
That was AMAZING! I’ve never thought to build according to the sun and location during the seasons. Thanks for ‘herding out on us’ haha
Thank you so much for the video. This is great.
Thank you for this info ! .. love your shirt!
winter solstice is 29.82°, summer 69.68° still planning stages of the greenhouse, but dont need near the insulation you have.
Your thumbnail on this one is awesome. Content awesome as usual!!
great video, easy to follow
Another excellent video. Great teaching.
Thank you Dean for your awesome videos. Great ideas that you explain so well, I can see myself applying them 🤗. Keep up the good work 👍
You were great on Nate's channel yesterday. Keep up the good work
Thank you, and welcome if you’re new to our channel. 🙏👍
To that city planner idea, if things go well, and we get our country back from idiots, get a hold of PDJT, HE vowed to make newer, smarter cities. I think you are what a better America needs, and Canada for that matter.
If I’m around for the rebuild stage after the collapse and long periods of bad times, I’m in. 😂
Doing a build. First retro was 74. Doubled the insulation of a 1961 build. Last 8 months doing a new build - using passive house techniques. I did the heat and cooling btu calcs and 1300 sq ft - comes into 5000 btu. I use Librecad to draw - sketch up. cheers
Love the shirt 🍻
my father did the perfect possition building true/../.. but made verandas that cut sun because back in 2003 there were no vertical solar panels back then!!!
That is a great t-shirt! If the government keeps raising prices (carbon tax etc.) how do people pay for net zero homes and electric cars? The obvious answer is they don't get net zero homes and electric cars.
Whatever the government says, the opposite happens. Taxing plant food hurts the environment, like you mention. 👍
With paper and pen, and a protractor, you can draw the side view of your house or green house, and lay out the sun angles to determine how to construct the roof etc.
We are 75 deg in peak summer 35 deg in middle of winter. The arc changes a fair bit with the lower angle add a lot of cloud and rain we don't see a lot of sun in winter
Info I need! Thanks
efficient use of the sun used to be common knowledge in construction, but has "disappeared" out the practise nowadays.
Would you mind explaining how to make a pergola properly over a window to block the sun? Thank you for the awesome information in your videos!
Sorry, I thought this was about SNOW Angels! But this is probably a little more interesting!
Howdy From Meadow Lake. Thank you for laying out what you have learned in such a compelling format. We are building this spring and your video is going to inform the project. I love your double double idea . Do you know of anyone who did this with larger windows? Are you familiar with LiteZone products from Edmonton??
Great to hear. I did double double patio doors and those work great too. Biggest window so far was just a 42x48. Works great. 👍. Don’t know what LiteZone is.
Your green house is beautiful! 😎 We did a lot of guessing for our passive design home design, and it worked out great. With our 4 ft overhang we have about 1 ft of shade on the south side during the summer, and full sun in the windows in the winter. We put in as many windows as looked right. Passive heating, exterior insulation, and thermal mass is awesome! Its so nice having stable even temperatures day and night. We have glazing only on our east and west windows as well as on our big sliding glass door. In the summer, we use an evaporative cooler for an hour or two in the morning and evening, and close the windows during the day. Our house is heated completely by the sun in the winter. 🌞🏜️
Have you looked at doing Thermal Insulated Moving Shutters? Talking about outside mounting, and either pivot like a door, or doors, or maybe slide like a barn door to snuggly cover the windows from the outside at night?
My house I left enough room beside each window for something like that. Never got around to it as all my windows are very high performance and don’t give any issues. I should have done a roll up blanket on my greenhouse south though, and will be doubling up my shop overhead doors one of these years. 👍
This is fantastic. Do mirrors help to increase heat - or is that a terrible idea (not enough gain / too expensive / too much work / etc). Thank you & keep up your good works.
Either reflect or absorb the sun. Many cool ideas out there. 👍
it called an "alpine roof/eave" basically how i built my house 30 years ago or how houses were built in the alpine region of Europe for centuries . . but to be honest for winter solar heating purpose in Canada it will only reduce it by about 30% during most for the winter @53 lat due the drop in sun intensity and hardiness zone of 2 to 3 . basically from mid Dec to mid Feb ( depending on the amount of sun) realistically you can expect only between 10 to 30% reduction in this time period for heating costs due to the sun decreased intensity and or cloudiness .. but from mid Feb to mid Dec you can expect the sun to do about 60% of your heating needs with a 30 day transition period that varies with the amount clear days you have to the spring equinox or fall equinox. then once the days are 12hrs or longer almost no external heating needs is generally required after that point . and over all when averaged it over the entire heating season you might have 60% drop in heating requirements. as say with my house the energy requirement is about $100 per year for heating and I use 100% electricity to heat my house. sure theoretically I had an 80 to 90% drop in energy requirement over conventional heating .. that because I have my solar heating which reduced it ~60% over the entire heating season and then I have my heat pump which reduced it again by 60% ( 80 to 90% total energy reduction ). if you are burning a fuel or using electricity conventionally the most you can expect is 60% drop in usage in a hardiness zone of 2 to 3. a passive solar heated house can only be realistically be achieves in hardiness Zone 5 or higher or in a much lower latitude of around 40 degrees ( as cost benefit becomes prohibitive)
some old horse, came a hopping, through our alley
Thanks for all this info Dean. Hope your channel really takes off. We're in Alberta and I've been researching passive houses and air exchange. How do you ventilate yours? And do you have a basement or did you build on slab?
4 ft crawl space and a tiny little air exchanger. 👍
@@ArkopiaUA-cam Thanks!
south facing wall should be for maximum exposure during w.solistice @53' latitude north @12:00: 90'-14'=76'. @45' some of the light gets reflected and you don't want that in the middle of the winter.
Polycarbonate refracts, not reflects, light. You are correct; for perfect winter-only glazing. We use in summer also, but we are most worried about shading functions. ✌️
@@ArkopiaUA-camyour statement implies that poly absorbs all the light that is hitting the surface of the sheet, 100% and refracts that same amount in the interior of the greenhouse? sorry but that is incorrect. I read the technical papers. Poly is also reflective acc.to them and in optics, ask GPT, material composition and incidence angle are critical aspects.
I have in construction a walipini built in concrete, 6,5 ft deep (22x21ft) that will be ready early this year, in March hopefully, whee I live @44 lat.north, double sided poly, with rocket mass heater along east and west buried 1.6ft. I am very exited about this project. Love your vids! You are a good source of inspiration! Thank you!
Unfortunately in England there are no regulations about banning conifers and evergreens shading buildings in winter.
So if I hear what you're saying in this video and in past videos in areas like mine in North Idaho where there aren't as many sunny days if I use sloped glazing I won't be able to use the greenhouse in the winter due to heat loss and if I use vertical glazing the greenhouse won't work well in the summer because the sunlight won't reach very far back in the greenhouse. Is that correct? I am interested in a consultation but I would to get my basic plan laid out first and then we can cover over the details.
If you don’t have many sunny days in the winter then maybe it’s better to consider the less glazing and artificial lighting. Maybe a winter area in the back of the building with a vertical wall and a summer greenhouse attached to the front of that vertical wall? Hate for you to use my design where you barely have any winter sun.
You got an angle on that.
could puttting a greenhouse infront off your house help with cooling? becaus it warms up and could pull air true an undergound tube to coul ure home. And also the right insulation is key i think. pur and pir insulation have no thermall mass. so the let radiant heat treu verry easely. So useing celluose insulation is better for the summer. and its a natrural product.
I know what you mean about a natural draft in summer that you want. Just a high point on the south, greenhouse wouldn’t “cool”
Shouldn't the building be slightly to S.E. to be set to solar north and south. As you get more light in the morning in the winter then after the sun's apex.
Would this work on a pole barn building. We wantto have have a libing quarter and the other half a man cave garage. It woild be a 40 x 80 or a 50 x 80 bldg. With 14 fr walls. Would this work for somethinv lime this??
Of course. Run the building long east to west, eve on south end. Do some pergola sun shading, and/or greenhouse in part of it.
We still want the full sun in summer or it would cost us more in heating 🤣
Over hang just stops our houses leaking. Unless it's a really high R value passive house then it comes into play 👍
I’m NOT good at trig or math. Is there. Way to figure this the year before by just marking where shade hits or something? I’m sure really old timers knew this and there’s a way to figure it out, maybe not as exact, but still get most of it? Like the old sun dials they used? IDK. Just wondering.
You could use a protractor and graph paper to get it pretty close. I mark the sun on my buildings with a pencil also. ✌️
What about a geothermal greenhouse (earth battery)?
I refer to mine as "passive geothermal", as I don't believe the "climate batteries" work anywhere close to as good as people say. I did a group of videos called "greenhouse master class" to explain in detail.
What is the square footage of you house?
784 square ft
now that i watched this, I see our initial plans are crap- so much for that expert. If we have our degrees, 70 and 22, im kind of lost as to how big things should be, ie original plan was 24 w 30 l, but only 10 ft tall, so if i do the function right, i get 13ft, at 22deg, which means the front would have to be 21ft for sun to hit a 8ft rear wall?
30 deep? Tan(22) = x / 30ft. = 9.7ft. If your south wall is 10ft, the sun wouldn’t barely touch the back wall (10-9.7 = 0.3ft up back wall)
@@ArkopiaUA-cam thanks, at least I know im doing it right, we are 24 ft wide, I just need to increase the height of the south wall, by almost 2x, had not planned on it being that tall, but it looks like if we don't go 19-20 ft tall, then we would barely have enough winter sun for passive solar barrel heat.
Thanks fo the help! they have been great, answering questions on what I should not do with other methods/peoples ideas that left me questioning how they heated (they dont) Chicago burbs look out! Looks like we are going big, (maybe digging down to reduce overall height.. back to the drawing board, and zoning, and permits.. lol
Could reduce the depth of it as well, 20ft is high. More south facing, less deep. 👍
@@ArkopiaUA-cam i think you mentioned this on one of your other videos, but can't we just make the roof angle be the same of the winter solstice angle so allow for the deeper width?
I don’t understand the question. There are many ways to do it. I like the winter sun hitting a large part of the back wall. 👍
"Only primitives and barbarians lack knowledge of houses turned to face the winter sun"- Aeschylus
Nice. A society of primitives then. 😂
how big of a truss heel do you have?
Did you have the trusses mirrored, so you have 48' over hangs on both the front and back? obviously wouldn't need them in the north but just curious. How big are you east and west over hangs?
Did you use 2x6 or 2x8 wall studs? Thanks-im building and planning to have the drafter change a few things after this.
One last thing- if my south windows are not all the same height above the floor, I should use the lowest window for the calculation right?
North, east, west doesn’t matter for sun or efficiency. More north overhang gives you more room for proper blow in insulation of course though. My house is small so I just did 2x6 with 1.5 inch rigid outside, for a total r value of 30 walls. ✌️
Thanks. So my builder is asking about the heel height on the truss? Im at 44 lat. Im coming up with 29.7" (I rounded to 30") overhang but to engineer the truss properly what do I tell him for the heel height?@@ArkopiaUA-cam
Nice to get 28 inches of blow in insulation for an R80 right above the wall (heel height) ✌️
@@ArkopiaUA-camLets say you did not have a couch on your wall, so instead of 36" you had the bottom of the window only 12" off the floor. I am getting a higher angle then your max sun angle in your area? So it would be shaded anyways and it doesn't seem to pay to go that low on a window anymore. Am I thinking of this correctly or screwing up the math? Thank you
This calculation gets quite comical standing north of the 67th.
Winter solstices: below the horizon.
Summer solstices: almost straight up.
That roof overhang looks disproportionate
Stop eating meat for your tummy ...
I'm going to be building my cabin I'm just going to face it south for my solar panels, but now I'm also looking at the passive solar. Thank you.