Solar Angles
The American home has an average of about 65 light bulbs. Together, these light bulbs use approximately 3,000 watts. Each light bulb costs about 75 cents an hour to run. That may not seem like a lot, but it can really add up. With proper sun lighting, it is much easier to limit the use of electricity in your house. When building a house, sunlight is always taken into account. For instance, the sun will never be in the north. It will always be on the south side of your house. Because of this, it is beneficial to put windows on the south side of your house, to allow as much sunlight in as you can.
There are many different techniques for letting sun get into your house. One of them is called a solar tube. A solar tube is a tubular shape that goes on your roof. It is reflective on the inside so that light can get all the way through. When the sunlight comes down on it , it passes through the tube into the room that the tube is over. Another thing you can use to get sunlight in your house is something called a light shelve. A light shelve is a panel sticking out on the inside wall. That panel is reflective, so when sunlight hits it through the window, it shoots the light up towards the roof, and with a light roof color, it will reflect that light back down into the room. Light shelves are most commonly used in libraries. This is because people want the library light and welcoming, so that you are able to see what you are reading, but they don't want the books to receive direct sunlight. If they receive direct sunlight for a long period of time, they can easily get damaged, and the print will fade, making it much harder to read. Having said this, light shelves do work equally well in homes or any other building. They don't have to be used in only libraries. Another commonly used technique for letting sunlight in is using skylights. Skylights are similar to solar tubes in that they both directly transfer sunlight from the roof to the room. However, there are few things that separate skylights from solar tubes. One difference is that skylights are bigger than solar tubes. They allow for a wider range of sunlight. Another difference is that skylights are able to be angled. This is an advantage, because in the summer, the sun is at a much different angle than in the winter. The ability to adjust the angle of the skylight makes for a much more efficient use. The last difference is that the light coming through a skylight isn't fed through an area before getting to the room. With a solar tube, it passes through a cylinder first. A skylight is more like a clear spot on the roof. The last technique is using a clearstory window. Clearstory windows are basically skylights on the wall. They are placed on the upper wall, and there is usually a number of them grouped together. They look like light shelves without the shelf. You will commonly find clearstory windows in churches. Those are the ones you see that have some sort of biblical figure on them. However they are much different in a house. In a house, they are small and rectangular. In a church, they are huge, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Our goal was to design a house such that we used as little electricity as we possibly could. Our original design had a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, a family room, a workout room, a wine cellar, and office, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a kid's playroom. It was a 25 by 40 foot house. Our final design had a family room, a dining room, a kitchen, an office, three bedrooms, and three bathrooms. Added to it was a skylight, four light shelves, four clearstory windows, and seven solar tubes. Our first design had 14 rooms with a total of 25 lightbulbs. Assuming we used each bulb for approximately 8 hours a day, our energy consumption would be 12 kilowatts per day. After sketching out our final design, using some of the techniques we learned about, we found out that we saved ourselves 9 kilowatts. This means that we would now be consuming only 25% of our original energy consumption. This just goes to show how helpful daylighting techniques can be. Our group worked OK on this project together. There were a few things that we could have done better. For instance, there were too many times where somebody had no idea what was going on. A lot of questions had to be asked, and not everybody was working at the same time. Another thing that went wrong was that we couldn't really decide on a design. Half way through the building process, we would decide that we wanted to change something, and it put us way behind. We ended up finishing in the nick of time. One thing I could have done better is I could have stepped in and got everyone on track. Remind people about our task, and get everybody focused. That is something that I will work on for the next portion of our project. |