Technology and life

Passive Solar Technology can bring down your electricity bill massively! A new thought for the architects who can help the people arrest their expenses on keeping their houses warm just by incorporating age old practices in their modern architecture plans! People in India used to do it centuries ago and you could too!

Check it out!

The pre-Columbian ancestors of today’s Indians used it. So did the ancient Romans, the medieval Arabs and many other preindustrial peoples around the world.

It’s still widely used in less-developed countries, and it is increasingly popular in well-developed countries as energy shortages loom.

“It” is passive solar technology, a building technique used to gather and store free heat from sunlight during the day to use for heating buildings at night. It has been in use since ancient times because it’s easy to design and to incorporate into new or existing buildings, inexpensive to install, durable and as reliable as the sun itself.

Passive solar technology came into use when early builders noticed that dense building materials, such as stone and brick, remained warm for hours after being heated by the sun. By facing a stone or brick wall toward the sun (south or southwest), the builders could capture and store the sun’s heat in the wall during the day. At night, the warm wall would help heat the building.

A heat-collecting wall (or floor) is called a “thermal mass,” and today we’ve added concrete and concrete block to the list of thermal-mass building materials. One important economic and environmental benefit of passive solar technology is that thermal-mass materials are also structural and surface materials, so a passive solar building needs little or no additional material to capture and store the sun’s heat. An ordinary concrete slab, for example, can serve as both the building’s floor and its thermal mass, though the slab might be thickened somewhat to increase its heat-storage capacity.

– San Francisco Chronicle