What is a Passive Solar Building Design?

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

In short, a passive solar building design, is a building that takes advantage of the climate it is in, to provide cooling during the winter and heating during the summer – without the use of electrical or mechanical devices such as an active solar design.

There are a wide array of ways we can achieve this effect, most of which works best when used together, ranging from proper thermal insulation, solar shading and window placement. The goal of this article is to give you an overview over the most effective solutions.

Window Placement

You want to position your windows to take in as much sunlight as possible during the winter, but if you live in an area that requires cooling in the summer, you want to make sure that there’s not a lot of sunlight going in at these times. This can be achieved through the fact that the sun is in a trajectory in different seasons.

Since the sun would be higher on the sky during summer times, you could install shades above the window, which starts cutting the sun out of the windows on a certain angle. This way, maximum heat gain from windows can be achieved during the winter, and as the different seasons progresses, maximum is gradually turned into minimum and finally peaks in the middle of the summer.

Windows are of course much less efficient at insulation than a wall would be. Therefore, locating the rooms where small sized windows are appropriate at the north side of the house, where the sunlight is minimal. (This would be the case if you live above the equator such as North America, but opposite if you live below.)

Using Natural Light

You want to put all the rooms where you do most activities during the day on the south side of the house. Remember this was the place where you kept all your big windows? This is partly because you want to take advantage of the light that the sun provides, and reduce your energy consumption from artificial electrical lighting.

In other words, you want to put your staircase, closets, bathrooms and other rooms where you probably won’t spend a lot of time in, on the north side of the building. This is what we call non-active living spaces.

Now we’ve looked at ways we can passively use the energy from the sun to heat our homes. Another side of the coin is to keep this heat efficiently inside, in other words, increasing energy efficiency. This is a very important step in a house design and should not be overlooked. Important things to consider here is insulation. Read more about this on .