Energy Use

Designing a house to have low energy use is a three step process: keeping the heat where you want it (in when it's cold, out when it's hot), being efficient about what energy you do use, and offsetting that energy use when possible with the available heating or cooling the weather provides.

The following topics are background principles behind all heating systems design.  While it isn't necessary to fully understand them, deeper understanding will make other topics make more sense:

• Definitions and units - some terminology
• Heat transmission - how heat moves
• Thermal Comfort - what makes you feel warm (or cool)
• Fuels - a practical & environmental comparison
• Calculating Heat loss - efficiency of the envelope
• Air infiltration & ventilation - effect of air leaks & fresh air
• Temperature gradient/condensing potential

Knowing heating principles, when can now proceed to building design:

• Insulation materials - a practical & environmental comparison
• Windows - comparing window technologies
• Heating Systems, Thermostats - types of heating systems; air conditioning
• Envelope Design - ways to build super insulated homes

We can now substitute some of the required energy with whatever heat from the sun and cooling from night air your site provides.  This section also covers avoiding overheating in the summer.

• Solar Energy Basics - ways to use solar energy
• Passive Solar Design - collecting heat with windows
• Active Solar Design - collecting heat and moving it with pumps
• Photovoltaic (solar) Electric - basics of PV
• Passive Cooling - blocking the sun & using cool air

The final step is to look at all the other uses of energy in the building, including their effect on heating and cooling:

• Lighting - comparison of lighting technologies
• Hot Water - efficient hot water
• Electrical Appliances - saving electric & the effect on heating & cooling

Now that you know everything you need to know about energy use, we deal with the question of what are reasonable targets for energy use, by looking at few popular ideas on deep energy reduction:

• Very Low Energy/Zero Energy/Zero Carbon Design
• Building energy use in context of total energy use
• future: energy modeling for zero energy design