Passive solar home design
In this project, our goal is to create a regular solar home that is off the grid. The house should be able to generate electricity or power, in this case, the sun is supplying us light and heat, this house should also have its own solar water heater to supply the house with water. These are the basics and necessities to building a passive solar home. In this presentation, you will learn all the important and key tips into building a safe solar home design.
Solar water heater
Our first part of this project is to design a solar efficient water heater to supply the house with hot water. We used the required materials to build this project. We used copper tubing, tinfoil, black paper to capture heat, cardboard box, a bottled water, and ceramic wrap. We assembled the water heater together and filled up a 16 fl oz bottle of water and left it in the sun for about 30 min. We measured the water's initial temperature at the start of the 30 minutes, the temperature was 71* F. At the end of 30 minutes, the temperature of the water has risen 5* F, the final temperature was 76* F. We were very proud and desided to continue to improve this design to greater heights.
daylight house design
The next part of this project was the daylight solar house design. Our objective is to design a house to receive the maximum amount of light for all seasons and for morning and noon. First we had to find the angles of the sun during the winter and the summer. Once we have found the information necessary, we started to design and construct the house. We used clerestories windows which are windows placed up towards the roof to let in winter daylight, we also used many big picture windows to allow maximum light into the house.
This lab we did was to try to help and train us to understand the concepts in building a solar efficient house with the maximum amount of light. With this big piece of information gathered, we can now move on to the next part of our project, The Passive Solar home itself.
This lab we did was to try to help and train us to understand the concepts in building a solar efficient house with the maximum amount of light. With this big piece of information gathered, we can now move on to the next part of our project, The Passive Solar home itself.
passive solar home
This part of the project is the root, all the other labs is stepping stones into helping us construct a complete solar efficient house that will be built right here on the school campus. The first step in building this is the purpose, what will this house be used for? Is this house really worth building? We have the answers to your questions; San Marin is a great school but it lacks one thing, a 1 on 1 study room free of distractions to help and tutor students for the best. When this house is built it will be used for tutoring students so they will learn what they need to do well. We have selected a perfect site with no obstacles or trees so this house gets the maximum amount of sunlight and heat energy. Here below is a picture of the site we have chosen to build this project.
Now that we the sight selected, now we have to focus on what angles the sun projects during the winter and summer. This is very essential when building any type of house because you might want sunlight hopefully and you don't want any unwanted big obstacles such as buildings or trees blocking the sunlight but you also don't want to be exposed to too much sun so that is where our overhang on our roof comes in to play. We designed that specially so we would get 95% of winter light and not so much summer light because the summer light is way too much. To do this, we downloaded a chart from the web displaying the angles of the sun throughout the year, here is the chart:
Now that we have the site selected and the angles of the sun, it is now time to start constructing and designing the house for our project. We decided that our house should have Clerestory windows at the top to have maximum amount of sunlight let into the house during the daytime. We hope that you take a very close look at the blueprints we have made for the design of this house. These blueprints have been approved by contractors to make the house eligible by the state of California to be built.
(Sorry about the photos flipped to the side)
So these are the official designs to our house, this project took about 7 weeks to complete. This was very hard work and our group is honored that our housed got picked to be built. Electricity is starting to take over the world but we can stop it if we can all convert to solar energy and get away from the electromagnetic field that is bombarding us today.
Link to our justification piece: As a class we wanted to create a page that shows you all the pros and cons of solar energy like life it self, it is very hard to adapt to a world without electricity. This slideshow will show you all the keys and tips on solar efficient housing and energy. We have to prove that solar energy is in reality a smarter way to go than electricity.
So these are the official designs to our house, this project took about 7 weeks to complete. This was very hard work and our group is honored that our housed got picked to be built. Electricity is starting to take over the world but we can stop it if we can all convert to solar energy and get away from the electromagnetic field that is bombarding us today.
Link to our justification piece: As a class we wanted to create a page that shows you all the pros and cons of solar energy like life it self, it is very hard to adapt to a world without electricity. This slideshow will show you all the keys and tips on solar efficient housing and energy. We have to prove that solar energy is in reality a smarter way to go than electricity.
wind turbine lab
And last but not least our last lab of this project is the wind turbine lab. In this lab we had to find a way to generate electricity for the solar house, remember this house is off the grid so it cant use gas, electricity or anything it is completely 100% natural energy. We had to design two turbines, a HAWT and a VAWT; Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine and Vertical Axis Wind Turbine. So our group went and we designed 2 turbines with special blade design so the wind can easily push on the blade to make the turbine spin and generate electricity that would work perfectly and so we did, the VAWT generated 2.4 kwts of electricity and the HAWT generated 1.8 kwts of electricity. unfortunately I don't have any pictures to present but I can assure you the design we used passed the test!
Concepts :
-Radiation: an energy that is transmitted in the form of rays, waves, or particles
-Conduction: the transmission of heat or electricity or sound
-Convection: the transfer of energy through a fluid
-Insulation: a material that keeps heat and energy
-Specific heat: the heat required to raise temp. by one degree centigrade
-Heat vs. Temp.: when an object is heated, its substance temperature rises
-Laws of Thermodynamics: 0th law states the definition of temperature
1st law states that internal energy of a system changes as heat flows in or out
2nd law states the entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium always increases
3rd law states the entropy of any pure substance in thermodynamic equilibrium approaches zero as the temperature approaches zero
-Absorption/reflection: Absorption is when a material is absorbed and kept; reflection is when a substance is reflected away from a material
-Fluids/gases: a fluid is a substance that flows or freely moves; a gas is a vapor the is freely moving all around
-Conduction: the transmission of heat or electricity or sound
-Convection: the transfer of energy through a fluid
-Insulation: a material that keeps heat and energy
-Specific heat: the heat required to raise temp. by one degree centigrade
-Heat vs. Temp.: when an object is heated, its substance temperature rises
-Laws of Thermodynamics: 0th law states the definition of temperature
1st law states that internal energy of a system changes as heat flows in or out
2nd law states the entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium always increases
3rd law states the entropy of any pure substance in thermodynamic equilibrium approaches zero as the temperature approaches zero
-Absorption/reflection: Absorption is when a material is absorbed and kept; reflection is when a substance is reflected away from a material
-Fluids/gases: a fluid is a substance that flows or freely moves; a gas is a vapor the is freely moving all around
Reflection
So to finally conclude this project after explaining all we did, I personally like this project the most because it taught us a lot of information and we all had fun pretending like we were contractors and engineers but hopefully we all will become engineers one day in the future. I learned so much information I never knew I would ever learn in my lifetime but fortunately the best teacher Mr. Williams made it all possible because now we get to see our design being built on our school campus for my next 4 years at San Marin High.
Our teacher placed us into separate groups. we learned to work together and we were motivated by our excitement to develop this project. Although we were getting ahead of our selves, we learned to regroup and become a united and strong team, working together. We all worked very hard to accomplish our goal while designing the final product. The goal was to have our design we developed be built on the school campus, that would be an honor to all of us to have our solar power house be the chosen one. We worked very hard and consequently our group was chosen along with another group and now contractors are working on combining our groups idea and another groups idea together. We are all aspiring engineers learning to respect each other. This to me was one of my most exciting learning experiences. I really enjoyed working with the group I was placed in because together we learned a lot. We also appreciate all of your support for our class of aspiring engineers.
Thank you for your support!
Our teacher placed us into separate groups. we learned to work together and we were motivated by our excitement to develop this project. Although we were getting ahead of our selves, we learned to regroup and become a united and strong team, working together. We all worked very hard to accomplish our goal while designing the final product. The goal was to have our design we developed be built on the school campus, that would be an honor to all of us to have our solar power house be the chosen one. We worked very hard and consequently our group was chosen along with another group and now contractors are working on combining our groups idea and another groups idea together. We are all aspiring engineers learning to respect each other. This to me was one of my most exciting learning experiences. I really enjoyed working with the group I was placed in because together we learned a lot. We also appreciate all of your support for our class of aspiring engineers.
Thank you for your support!