Do you real­ize that one of the wis­est deci­sions one can make is to add a solar struc­ture / sun­room to your home.. I cant begin to tell how many folks I talk to on a daily basis, that want a place where they can grow their herbs, their toma­toes, even the small­est place, would be suf­fi­cient for most fam­i­lies. Some­place where the ele­ments of nature wont destroy your har­vest, or where our lov­able friends of nature like deer and other pesky crit­ters can help them­selves to daily treats from your gar­den.. Many times with out permission.! 

Many of these nui­sances can be tol­er­ated but it sure is frus­trat­ing espe­cially after doing all that work so that you can enjoy a decent har­vest .… That has been the story on our home­stead.. never fails!,  fences don’t work because deer can jump.. and if you hap­pen to live in open range ter­ri­tory like we do.  We then have to deal with cows that don’t belong to us.. I never real­ized this but cows love green leafy veg­gies almost as much as we do.

Any­ways here are a few solar struc­tures that we have con­structed for many of our local res­i­dents through­out time.. per­haps they may give you ideas and if they do,  give me a call or just … con­tact Ralph 

Solar Struc­tures

Solar col­lec­tors of this type are ben­e­fi­cial to your homes heat­ing capa­bil­ity. Turn­ing solar heat into com­fort­able and usable heat source just makes good sense. Its no won­der more fam­i­lies today are look­ing into cre­at­ing a solar space for their home..the beauty here lies in the fact that no mat­ter what all these energy tycoons can dream up to charge us more money year after year the suns energy will always be free.. There will always be an ini­tial out­lay of invest­ment. A solar struc­ture, how­ever, will always be a reward­ing invest­ment . Pri­mar­ily for the fol­low­ing 3 reasons..The return on invest­ment is very sta­ble and will increase over time, they are very pop­u­lar among indi­vid­u­als who are look­ing for homes that have these types of ameni­ties.. and finally the use of solar energy brings tax cred­its that will affect your bot­tom line. Not to men­tion the very many uses you’ll enjoy year after year.

Renew­able energy is energy which comes from nat­ural resources such as sun­light, wind, rain, tides, and geot­her­mal heat, which are renew­able (nat­u­rally replen­ished). In 2006, about 8% of global final energy con­sump­tion came from re-newables, with 13% com­ing from tra­di­tional bio­mass, which is mainly used for heat­ing, and 3% from hydro­elec­tric­ity. New re-newables (small hydro, mod­ern bio­mass, wind, solar, geot­her­mal, and bio-fuels) accounted for another 2.4% and are grow­ing very rapidly.

Pas­sive Solar tech­nolo­gies are a means of using sun­light for use­ful energy with­out use of active mechan­i­cal sys­tems (as con­trasted to active solar). Such tech­nolo­gies con­vert sun­light into usable heat (water, air, ther­mal mass), cause air-movement for ven­ti­lat­ing, or future use, with lit­tle use of other energy sources. A com­mon exam­ple is a solar­ium on the equator-side of a build­ing. Pas­sive cool­ing is the use of the same design prin­ci­ples to reduce sum­mer cool­ing requirements.

Another good resource to assist you in your research for your future solar struc­ture project  http://www.solaraspects.com 

If con­structed with good under­stand­ing of the ther­mo­dy­nam­ics involved, a sun­space can offer a range of ben­e­fits. It can be a very com­fort­able and desir­able sea­sonal liv­ing space, while mak­ing an impres­sive con­tri­bu­tion to the heat­ing of the build­ing and also sup­ply­ing pre-heated air for inter­nal ven­ti­la­tion. More­over, it can cre­ate a buffer zone between liv­ing space and out­door space that can be uti­lized for plant growth, while pro­vid­ing shad­ing for the house in the sum­mer time, and pro­vid­ing cool­ing in the sum­mer time through con­trolled ventilation…You can read more about the ben­e­fits of a solar struc­ture from this site.   solar-house 

Another name you may not be famil­iar with and it is a widely used build­ing con­cept among many homes through out many countries..is a trombe wall .… still another solar structure.

A Trombe wall is a sun-facing wall patented in 1881 by its inven­tor, Edward Morse, and pop­u­lar­ized in 1964 by French engi­neer Félix Trombe and archi­tect Jacques Michel. It is a mas­sive wall sep­a­rated from the out­doors by glaz­ing and an air space, which absorbs solar energy and releases it selec­tively towards the inte­rior at night.

Even sin­gle pane glass worked for this process because glass is trans­par­ent to vis­i­ble light but less so to infra-red radi­a­tion (heat). Mod­ern vari­a­tions include insu­lat­ing glass to retain more of the stored solar heat and high and low, some­times oper­a­ble, vents to allow con­vec­tive heat trans­fer to the indoors.

Mod­ern Trombe walls have vents added to the top and bot­tom of the air gap between the glaz­ing and the ther­mal mass. Heated air flows via con­vec­tion into the build­ing inte­rior. The vents have one-way flaps which pre­vent con­vec­tion at night, thereby mak­ing heat flow strongly direc­tional. This kind of design is an indi­rect pas­sive ther­mal col­lec­tor. By mov­ing the heat away from the col­lec­tion sur­face, it greatly reduces ther­mal losses at night and improves net heat gain. Gen­er­ally, the vents to the inte­rior are closed in sum­mer months when heat gain is not wanted.

Attached Solar Green­house structures 

Attached Solar col­lec­tor greenhouses