I like a castle with the address of “County Road.”
I wonder whether the title of “Count” comes with it?
That’s what makes the road so County. 
The Count of County Road… now, there’s a country song just waiting to be written!
No central heat? In Canada?
it’s possible to build a passive-solar house that needs no furnace even in Canada. My friends have one in a significantly-colder area of Ontario. But by all the gods, it would never look like that.
You’re telling me. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve had a fiefdom.
No way.
I took a course in undergraduate school.
We designed a solar heating system for a home in a given city, ran the cost of oil heat against the loan to buy the solar heating equipment.
I drew Fargo, North Dakota.
Average Winter design temperature, 20F.
I doubled the usual size and lost money, went to the usual size, lost money.
I designed it to support half the heating requirements, supplementing oil heat and finally showed a profit.
We bought a gift for our Realtor because she definitely went above and beyond for us.
The first time we looked at the house, I had taken an awesome picture; the one I ended up putting on our address labels. I ordered a tile-topped keepsake box from cafepress.com and I had that picture with a thank you note printed on the tile. It came out very nicely. I also got her a pendant from etsy.com. The pendant was an old skeleton key wrapped with wire and metal flowers.
Unfortunately I wasn’t there to give it to her at the closing because I had to be in NY that day.
We didn’t have anyone to give a referral to unfortunately (and still don’t). I put the thank you note on the tile so that she could keep it on her desk so customers could see how happy she made us.
What an utterly fantastic idea! I’m filing that one away for future use.
Yes way. My friends have been living in such a house for 15 years. 
Sounds like you were attempting to retrofit an active solar heating system onto a house of traditional construction. This is not the way to go.
My friends’ house is heavily-insulated and has windows facing only south to the sun. It also has hundreds of tons of thermal mass inside the insulation, in the form of thick rammed-earth walls. The insulation separates the thermal mass from the cold of winter and the heat of summer. The walls rest on the earth, and never drop below earth temperatiure at depth, which drops to around 12C (54F) at depth. The sun only needs to heat the walls another 12 Celsius degrees to get to the standard room temperature of 22C (72F) specified in the Ontario Building Code.
And the short summers do not provide enough heat to raise the walls above 22C. The windows are arranged so that the sunlight shines all the way into each room during the winter for maximum heat capture in the walls. During the summer, the sun is higher in the sky, and only shines into the front of the room, so that the walls remain cool than our summer daytime temperature, which can reach 30C (86F).
Plus, the summer sun shines on the plants. Did I mention the plants? They’re placed next to the windows, and they grow year-round. Grapes. Jasmine. Oranges. Lettuce. Carrots. Dill. Chives. Fresh greens year-round.
Keep in mind that this in in Bancroft, Ontario, where the winters regularly reach -35C (-31F), and the area has a winter 2.5% design temperature of -27C/-16F and a (Celsius) heating degree-day value of 4900 below 18C.
The house is the solar collector. There’s no need for pumps or anything like that; the heat is already where we want it to be, so we don’t need to move it. My friends have a wood stove, and that’s the only other source of heat.
To give an example, I slept in the unfinished house on a winter night when it dropped to -35C. The unfinished house had NO insulation in the walls; it was just massive walls, a roof, and windows. The temperature inside never dropped below 6C (42F), and I was fine sleeping under a huge pile of blankets. When properly sealed, ventilated, and insulated, the house is a lot warmer.
It works.
Edit: there are some types of construction that can be retrofitted to use this method of heat storage. Old stone farmhouses such as can be found scattered across Ontario will do well. So will the uninsulated concrete-slab apartment-buildings built by the hundred across Toronto during the 1960s. What you need are buildings with solid massive walls and little insuation inside them. Unfortunately, frame houses won’t work. And brick veneer? It’s almost precisely the opposite of what is needed.
Cool.
Is air moved about by a fan to equalize temperature? How does one control the heat flow into the house?
Yes, ventilation is needed. There are operable windows as part of the south wall, and operable skylights at the other ends of the rooms. Plus, since there’s no forced-air furnace system, a separate ventilation system involving a heat-recovery ventilator can be used to provided the needed one air change per hour in the main habitation rooms.
But the ventilation is not the main method of distributing the heat. The heat is instead stored in a distributed fashion in the walls and floor, and these warm the air adjacent to them.
Part of the management of incoming heat occurs natually due to the varying altitude of the sun in the sky. The windows are optimized to admit winter sunlight, and hence tend to reflect quite a bit of summer sunlight, since they are at a different angle.
But also consider the magnitude of heat storage in the walls compared to the rate of inflow and outflow of heat.
I’ll take a simplified case. The walls are 27" (0.686 m) thick. This thickness is partly rammed earth, and partly concrete; in real walls of the type my friends built, we have roughly 25% concrete to 75% earth. Now, the volumetric heat capacity of concrete is 2060 kJ/m[sup]3[/sup]·K. That of rammed earth is 1673 kJ/m[sup]3[/sup]·K. Link. Let’s assume the whole wall is rammed earth at the lower heat capacity.
One square metre of wall at this thickness is 0.686 m[sup]3[/sup].
We’ll assume that this chunk of the wall is somewhat cool, at 15C. We’ll also assume it’s the middle of the night in midwinter in Bancroft, with an outside temperature of -35C.
How much heat energy does it take to raise the wall segment from -35C to 15C? That’s a temperature range of 50 degrees Celsius, or 50 kelvins. The energy involved works out to 1 673 000 J/m[sup]3[/sup]·K * 50 K * 0.686 m[sup]3[/sup] = 57 383 900 J.
A furnace putting out 50 000 BTU/hour (52 750 000 J/hour, or 14.6 kW) of heat would require over an hour just to warm this small chunk of the wall from outside to inside temperature! Now imagine how long it would take to warm such a wall going all the way around a room.
It works the same way in reverse as well. Take the chunk of wall, and add insulation on the outside. We’ll take the minimum specified thermal resistance for the insulation, specified in the Ontario Building Code as 4.22 K·m[sup]2[/sup]/W (RSI 4.22, or R 24 in US units). We’ll also assume that the wall temperature decreases linearly as it loses heat. I don’t think this is strictly true–I believe it decreases on a curve with the rate proportional to the temperature difference, but my calculus is really rusty right now.
So. We start with one square metre of wall surface. Insulation with a thermal resistance of 4.22 K·m[sup]2[/sup]/W. A temperature difference of 50 K. What is the rate of heat loss in watts?
The R-value is equivalent to a heat transfer coefficient (U-value) of 0.237 W/K·m[sup]2[/sup]. Makes it easier to calculate. 50 K * 1 m[sup]2[/sup] * 0.237 W/K·m[sup]2[/sup] = 11.8 W.
But one watt is one joule per second. And there are over 57 million joules of heat maintaining the temperature of the chunk of wall at 15C, 50 degrees above the outside temperature of-35C!
So assuming that the temperature decreases linearly as the wall yields its heat to the cold Bancroft night through the insulation, it will take 57 383 900 J / (11.8 J/s) = 4 863 042 s or over 56 days for that chunk of wall to cool from 15C to -35C.
Think of the mass in the walls as storage batteries for heat. Once they are charged up, and isolated from the outside, they will not change temperature rapidly. Sudden hot day? The walls remain cooler. Sudden cold snap? The walls remain warmer.
Every day they get a trickle charge from the sun. Every day they lose a little heat to the outside. By calculating the heat input from the sun, subtracting the leakage to the cold (or adding input leakage from warm days), you can figure out how much heating input and insulation is needed to maintain a steady temperature based on your thermal mass and local climatic conditions.
My reference tables for Ontario have heating degree-day values listed for places all over the province, but they don’t even have the equivalent cooling degree-days, because our climate is so biased toward the cold. The average temperature is below room temperature, so net heating is required.
This also explains why it is important that such a house be closed in and insulated during the warm weather. You don’t want to have to warm the walls yourself!
And we can build mass-wall freezers that use exactly the same principles but keep their mass at -10C to freeze food.
Re a gift I’ve been in Commercial RE for 23 years. A gift certificate to one of the nicer restaurants would be (IMO) the way to go. It’s not as showy as flowers, but it has very high utility and would be more appreciated.
Goofy houses are interesting to look at, but are very hard to sell. I’m betting it goes for considerably less that that if it actually sells.
Not a huge selection of restaurants in this little town. Wine is looking like the call.
Hmm. I wonder what the monthly operating costs are?
This is something I think should be listed for a house. Heating costs, lighting, etc, in addition to taxes.
The problem there is that people will have wildly different ideas of what is “comfortable”. I use absolutely minimal AC and heat because I can use fans for the heat or simply bundle for the cold. Some people cannot tolerate either, and use 2 to 3 times as much electricity as I do for the same size house.
You could have few generic default cases (say, room temperature 22C and a gas furnace with natural gas at 20c/m[sup]3[/sup]) that would allow rough price calculations though.
Obviously we have different comfort levels, but my idea of a cozy sleeping room is not 10 degrees above freezing, unless there is a whole lot of snuggling going on.