Are any of you using solar energy as the primary, or at least a significant portion of, your heating and electricity needs?
I just wondering because I’m looking at buying some land in northern Minnesota that’s a l-o-o-o-ng was away from the nearest electricial junction and running in the lines would cost a fortune.
I’ve browsed the net a little, but few of the sites mention costs.
So what say you…is it a workable alternative? BTW…I’m just going to build a small 2br cabin, not a big ol’ lodge or nuthin.’
Electricity is problematic. Perhaps a gas-powered generator?
As for heating, you might try referencing a book called “The Straw Bale House” by Steen, Steen, and Bainbridge. Building with straw bales will give your cabin an R-factor of about 60. Put in a wood stove and you’ll be able to heat your cabin for next to nothing.
You could also use a passive solar thermal mass: a really big stone wall, basically, built indoors and positioned so as to catch all the sunlight from a south-facing set of windows. It won’t heat your entire house, but it’s a great heat source for a few hours after sundown for the room it’s in.
I’m sure there are other things the SDers will come up with.
Yes, but the sun is low in the sky, and, thus, it bathes the thermal mass as long as is possible. In the summertime, your roof shades the window, so the thermal mass gathers no heat (other than ambient–which helps to cool the room).
Matter of fact, I use passive solar for most of my heat… It gets me the first 250 or 300 Kelvins, and I just need to supply the last couple of dozen.
But seriously, another tip for passive heating is to plant deciduous trees/shrubs around your house. That way, they shade it in the summer, when the leaves are on, and let the light through in the winter.
If you do try straw-bale construction or some other nonconventional design, first check with folks who’ve had such houses for a few years… Many such designs are unconventional for a reason. With straw, for instance, it seems to me that rot might be significant. Just something to consider.
I think my framing material will be a little more mainstream: wood. I could see, though, stacking bales alongside the north and east walls for insulation. Straw bales on the inside would concern me. Flammable.
How about those hydraulic heat collectors on the roof and/or electricity generating solar cells…any more opinions?
Straw bales are actually less flammable than wood. There’s very little air in them, so no fuel for a fire. Plus, you seal them so that rot is not a problem.
I’ve been to about a dozen straw bale houses ever since I got interested in bales as an alternative building material. The owners seemed downright pleased, particularly when they got their power bills…
I have solar panels for sanitary water and know something about the subject. In fact, not too long ago I posted in this thread. Look at the last post. I won’t repeat it here because i don’t want to be called thread killer
Will your house site allow you to use solar? Most cabins I’ve seen are nicely nestled in the trees.Will this be a year round home or just a vacation home?
I read a magazine called “grassroots” which deals exclusively with permaculture and self-sustaining methods of living. You could try finding something like that to give you some ideas of what is suitable for your area.
From what I read, if you have a lot of capital to outlay, you can provide yourself with enough electricity with solar panels and really good storage batteries. Thats provided you don’t have any huge power drains on the system, like airconditioning etc. Chronos and jamshid seem to have the right idea, building your house to minimise your power requirements.
Another way to cut down on electricity use is to get gas. You could get one of those big cylinders of natural gas delivered and use that for cooking, hot water and heating.
BTW we were thinking of getting solar panels (without the batteries) and the company we spoke to looked at our power use and said we could have half our requirements supplied by solar power. Thats pretty good considering we have an airconditioner, electric hot water system and an electric bore water pump.
A relative was in construction some years back, and one company he worked for had something of a specialty sideline in solar & alternative energy use. A wooden or metal framed building built specially to allow installing 8 or 10 inches of foam was their recommended method of superinsulating. If you don’t have building code inspections, you can put something like this together pretty easily and cheaply and if it’s a low-dollar piece of work you likely don’t want real actual electrical wiring in it anyway. Lots of other stuff had come and gone (and has since then), but the general construction industry has adopted (1-inch) foam insulation for the reasons that it is easy to use, inexpensive and works well. - Solar power is better than nothing, but it takes a damn large amount of photovoltaic cells to operate a 1200 watt hairdryer - the question of the practicality of photo cells depends heavily on what you expect to be able to run off them. The most powerful option was windmills, but they are noisy (usually an unwanted quality) and don’t work nearly at full capacity nearly all the time in most locales outside of Kansas. You might just keep kerosene lamps for light at night, and take along a gas or diesel generator when you need electricity. They’re noisy and ugly, but they make a pretty good amount of power fairly cheaply and you can remove it when you leave to prevent theft.
On the other hand, I understand that nuclear fuel is moved pretty fast and loose in the former Soviet republics these days. Know anything about reactor construction? - MC
From today’s newspaper: “When a (cdn$) $60,000 residential system is amortized over 25 years solar power costs the homeowner about 40 cents per kilo-watt hour” (compared to 7 cents for standard power).
“Soltek…Canada’s largest supplier of photovoltaic power systems, recently set up a $60,000 system for a ranch…the system relies on solar and wind power, a battery bank and a diesel generator. The generator will operate just two hours a day during peak demand. During the rest of the day, power will come from sun and wind energy. The rancher decided to use alternative energy…wanted to charge him $2000 per pole to conect his operation to the…energy grid. He lives 30 kilometers from the nearest power pole.”
All the “free” sources of energy are terribly expensive when compared to buying your energy from the power company. They only make sense when buying from the power company is not an option and you need the energy badly enough.
The solar panels on my house were installed when there were government subsidies for this type of thing but strictly speaking they don’t make sense.
Burt Rutan (famed engineer) built a house in the desert with a great passive heating/cooling system. As I recall, it was a big passive heat sink (read - giant stone wall), with a waterfall running over it, the water then being collected and distributed through the house. He designed the wall so that it would take 12 hours for the heat to transfer through from one side to the other. So in the morning when the desert heats up, the wall was nice and cool, cooling the house down. By the time the wall started to transfer heat to the house, it’s evening and the desert gets cold, and the wall heats the water, which is pumped through the house in a radiant heating system.
Are you going to build the house yourself?
If so is it going to be a log cabin?
The straw house mentioned earlier is a good idea but there are sone drawbacks. Such as the size of the bales. They must be the all the same size or you will have a logistic nightmare. The best way to keep them the same size is to keep the baler running in a large field. There are not many fields of oats or wheat in the north woods.
Yep, I’m designing it (with some help) and plan on building it myself (again, with help). It’s not a log cabin; it’s a regular cabin, but it’ll have some unique features.
You should probably just get a generator. You could probably find a used one cheap since a lot of people bought them for the Y2K ordeal (which was a non event) and have now been getting rid of them (rather than just letting them sit around). In some states there is a law that says the extra power that you generate and don’t use the power company has to buy from you at the same price they’d charge you in Kwh.
Rysdad, you didn’t mention where you are now or when you intend to inhabit the cabin.
If you rely on solar heat to keep the place comfy in February you’ll probably die, as you’ll only be receiving 6-8 hours of daylight, and that’s only if your cabin isn’t in the middle of trees and the sun is actually out. Using some sort of waterwheel would be useless as the water will be frozen. Wind power might be a possibility, but again it does depend on how thickly forested your property is.
As for wood heat, FWIW, my grampa has the best fireplace I’ve ever experienced. It’s built of brick, per normal, but is built in the middle of the house, rather than on an outside wall like fireplaces are built in new house these days. Besides the heat from the fire itself, the brick abosrbs the ambient heat and radiates it throughout the whole house.
“Northern Minnesota” are the keywords here. Unless you are a seriously experienced mountain man, forget it. You are gonna die. Consider practicing for a few years in Hawai’i. We have remote regions with solar (or no) power, and the people get along fine…because the temperature varies between the low 90s for three weeks in the middle of summer to the low 60s in the dead of winter. Other than that, all these mopes would be dead and stinking up the beaches.
I lived in an earth sheltered house in South Dakota. The north, east and west sides had about two feet of wall above ground–on any of these sides, it was simple to jump onto the roof, although I never had any reason to do so. My dogs did, though, just because they could. The south side was more conventional except that the south walls of the living room and master bedroom consisted of two six-foot double pane sliding glass doors. Easiest place to move into I ever saw. The floors were “heat reflecting tile” and that is all I know about them. The house was heated by a wood burning stove in the living room and generally speaking, it did a good job. The construction of the house was brick over “thick” cement walls–I have forgotten exactly how thick they were. During the winter, the north, east and west walls were soon pretty well insulated by snow and that helped retain heat.
The water for the house came from a cistern and there was an oil fired heater to keep the water pump from freezing.
Although the house was seven miles outside of town, it was supplied with electricity from the local utility company so I cannot address alternates.
The house was originally built as a test case–the intention of the owner was to prove the concept and then build and sell several more. Unfortunately, he suffered a severe physical accident and was unable to complete the project.
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would cheerfully live in a similar house again.
