There is lots of talk about making our homes more energy efficient and adding solar to existing structures. Well John Kosmer discovered that this was not the way to go and to prove it he built his own house using passive solar to prove it. Nice work john. We need good examples to look up to in this day and age. Too many folks are willing to talk but you have walked the walk.
For $2.50 a day he can heat his 4000 sq foot home. Yikes that rocks. It gets cold where he lives.
A Real Example of Solar Energy Savings
Not to put too fine of a point on it, on Dec. 1, 2007 it was 17 degrees outside at 8:00 AM in Fly Creek, NY. The auxiliary heat provided by our state-of-the-art propane Baxi Luna 3 boiler cycles on at 68.5 degrees and off at 68.7 degrees. In our home at that time the thermostat read 68.7 degrees, so the Baxi unit must have recently cycled off. It was partially sunny all day. By 1:30 PM (five and a half hours later) the thermostat read 74 degrees and the temperature outside was 19 degrees. By 5 PM it was 11 degrees outside and the thermostat read 68.5 degrees so the propane Baxi boiler turned on again.
In a day of partial sun when it was 19 degrees, we used no energy to heat our 4000 sq. ft. home for 9 hours. If it would have been sunny all day, the home would have heated up to 75 or 76 degrees and more heat would have been stored in the concrete slab thermal battery. The combined higher room temperature and warmer slab would have slowed down the fall in temperature in our home another 2 hours or so, thereby delaying the Baxi boiler from starting until about 7PM, enabling us to use no energy to heat our home for about 11 hours.
