Solar Heating

Solar heating can be implemented if you are building your home from scratch or if you are just renovating it. You can transform it to a solar home by making some modifications. When your gas and electricity bills become hard to handle, switching to solar energy to heat your home can be a wise choice.  The heat coming from the sun spread equally when reaching the earth. To take advantage of the solar energy few steps are necessary.

When building your home, numerous choices are available for solar heating. The most important one is to build it facing true south. It is the direction where the sun rises. This way the house will get maximum sunshine during the day.

Installing double-glazed windows of good quality is important too. They will let the heat from the sun come through and will keep the rooms warm for a long period of time. At sunset the home will stay warm thanks to the sunlight that came in all day long. In order to keep the heat inside the house, doors must stay closed as much as possible. It is also important to have curtains (preferably insulated) on the windows during the night; they will also help keeping the heat inside. When building a house, another thing to keep in mind is to not plan for too many windows on the side facing sunset, you want to avoid the house to cool down too quickly.

Transforming your home to take advantage of natural solar heating is not very difficult. It is obvious that changing the direction of your house to face sunrise is impossible, but you can still make some modifications to trap the heat coming from the sun.  A good and well designed insulation will definitely help. Double glazed windows for example are a must. An original method to use solar energy for heating purposes is to build a sun room facing south to catch the sun from early morning. The sun will heat the glass structure and provide hot air inside the sun room. The warm air obtained can be pushed into the house by using fans. This can provide sufficient heating during the day.

As the sun doesn’t shine everyday, you will of course need a backup heating system running on gas or electricity, but you will significantly reduce the amount of time your electric or gas heater is running.
Using solar heating is not only a good way for saving money; it is also a natural method to heat your home which will also help in improving the environment.