There is no logical reason to use a drop of fuel, or a watt of energy, to heat or cool any home or building attached to the Earth.
Just below the surface, within reach of the average basement, is an infinite reservoir of heat that never drops below 50° F.
There is no logical reason to use a drop of fuel, or a watt of energy, to heat or cool any home or building attached to the Earth.
Just below the surface, within reach of the average basement, is an infinite reservoir of heat that never drops below 50° F.
The night-day cycle is more than ample to raise that temperature into the comfort zone, with a simple shift in Time. The use of daytime heat at night, and nighttime cool by day, is made possible by Thermal Inertia, and the engineered Lag-in-Time is a property of the thickness and Specific Heat of the solid wood walls.
Michael Sykes’ “Enertia” building system traps solar energy to produce homes that heat and cool themselves.
The system contains spaces between the walls that are connected to a sunspace that stores solar and geothermal energy.
That sunspace contains cellulose, lignin and resin seeded with mineral crystals that release thermal energy over time to heat a home. During warmer months, the process is reversed and the structure instead absorbs heat from home appliances and people in the home.
An air flow and access channel, or Envelope, runs around the building, just inside the walls – creating a miniature biosphere. Here solar heated air circulates, pumping and boosting geothermal energy from beneath the house, storing it in the massive wood walls. Thermal inertia causes the house to “float” between the cycles of night and day, and even between the seasons.
“When I first became aware of the greenhouse effect, I was surprised to learn that the building and heating of homes was the biggest user of fossil fuels,” Sykes said in a statement.
Although the Enertia system uses new and advanced methods, the use of natural air movement has long been known to be a positive approach to energy conservation.
I designed a home for South Lake Tahoe using the convection envelope method in 1977. The plan angled the house on the lot in order to orient the longest part of the design toward the sun for full exposure. Heat-absorbing metal roof panels were elevated above the roof cladding to create a vast air duct – an air furnace. The rear, colder wall of the home was a hollow, two foot air duct to create a wall-size space for downward return air during winter. The flowing air from the rear wall fell over a crawlspace filled with tons of clean boulders to hold heat in their thermal mass. A system of automatic temperature sensitive greenhouse-style slats controlled air movement near the roofline and at the floor. In the hottest of summer, the heated air would vent upward and outward at the ridge, pulling colder ground air into the home from underneath the bottom flooring.
The house was built, but without these solarized innovations. It was too difficult to get a permit from the town and to convince the owners and their contractors to follow through with this unusual approach to reducing power bills.