Thanks to both Bentley at EcoSherpa, and linton at Hugg, for drawing attention to Enertia Building Systems. I pointed to a variety of ways to heat and cool your home over the years, but this is truly revolutionary: Enertia homes use only sunlight for heating and cooling. No furnace, air conditioner, heat pump or swamp cooler -- just an innovative design that harnesses geothermal energy and sunlight year round. According to Enertia's web site,
In the Enertia® Building System, solid Energy-Engineered(tm) wood walls replace siding, framing, insulation, and paneling. 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....Their page on the science behind the system expands upon the explanation in the video. While other materials can be used to build homes that need no heating or cooling (my great-uncle, for instance, built rammed-earth houses in the 70s), Enertia's houses combine their zero-energy heating and cooling properties with design that conforms to most people's idea of a house. I'm really impressed, and will have to read more... love to hear from those of you with more knowledge of materials, building construction and basic physics...
Categories: house, home, solar, heating, cooling, design, us
