Remote Living > Housing
Passive solar shop build
bigrockcandymountain:
I thought I would share some pictures of the shop I am building. It is 32 x 48 with 14' high sidewalls. My house has R60 walls and I wouldn't change a thing. So the shop will have R60 walls 17" thick and 4 large south facing windows.
I am leaning toward dense blown cellulose for the walls, but it is really not easy to make happen here. The house is rock wool batts but the price has doubled on those so they aren't too competitive.
Mary B:
wow! They did 8 inch thick walls on my new garage. Insulated slab. With no heat on it never drops below 28 in there all winter. and is very easy to get back up to 60 with a small propane heater.
bigrockcandymountain:
That is good to hear. I am hoping to keep this around 10c 50f all winter with no active heat system or very little. It goes down to -40 the odd time here, but not for long. Usually nights are -20c in the middle of winter.
I figure I would rather spend the money that would go to a heat system on insulation. It should work out about even, but quite a bit more work.
SparWeb:
Have you seen Gary's solar thermal collectors on https://builditsolar.com ?
It's one of his "homepage" projects even though the site seems to have thousands of DIY projects on it.
He's studied it in great detail so you can even size it for a certain amount of heat you will need.
bigrockcandymountain:
Spar I'm glad you posted a link to that website. They have a heat loss calculator that I use all the time. I'll check out the collector design sometime but probably won't really need anything that complicated.
Another great tool is https://susdesign.com/windowheatgain/
It calculates the heat gain of south facing windows based on your location etc.
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