Heating Your Home Using Solar Energy

For many individuals, getting heat is just a matter of pressing a button or turning a dial, which is rather nice but often inconvenient. You can heat your residence, your local school or business in an affordable manner by installing solar power, which is rather easy to do. In the winter months, there are several ways to capture the rays of the sun. You have to have a solar source, such as a sunroom, which will not only attract the sun rays, but also needs to trap the heat.

Constructing a Sunroom

A sunroom is usually connected to the house and is made out of a lot of floor to ceiling glass panels. Sunrooms are usually constructed to face the morning sun, which enables them to receive a great deal of natural light. The sun shines in through the glass and heats the interior of the room. The heat stays in the room, as it cannot escape through the glass walls. This is an extremely efficient, natural form of heat, if the room’s construction is correctly performed.

Thermal mass, which keeps the heat once it has been absorbed, is another of several other types of solar heating. It operates by absorbing and retaining the heat until the sun sets and then begins to disperse it. One more natural solar heating and ventilation system is the trombe wall, which keeps the heat by using air channels. The heat becomes confined between the thermal mass which is facing the sun and a glass object. The wall radiates the heat, which is circulated through vents after being stored in this wall. Yet another system using a wall facing the sun to absorb the sun’s heat, and then heating up air with this energy as it goes into a ventilation system, is the transpired collector.

Ventilation System

It is possible to utilize a solar cooling system to ventilate a building. This clever method has a steam engine powered by solar with an attached cooling device. This absorbs the heat from the steam and transforms it to ice. A different kind of solar ventilation system, created from a thermal mass that has been hollowed out, is the solar chimney. Air in the chimney is warmed up and as it rises it is distributed to where it is needed. From the foregoing it is apparent that many ways exist by which houses, schools and businesses can be heated up. These are just some of the ways where you can use the sun’s heat in addition to natural materials. They do not utilize non-renewable resources and the heating is not artificial.

If you want to stop making use of non-renewable resources to warm your residence, the examples presented earlier should provide food for thought. They make use of the power of the sun. You might need to reside in an area where the sun shines on a consistent basis to fully make use of any of these systems. All of us must have a source of heat to be able to keep our houses warm.