Sister Paula Gonzalez, a self-styled freelance futurist, gathered 35 friends to complete an incredible passive solar home: the House of the Sun.

In late August 1982, the first volunteer meeting of this "Saturday Project" gathered to hear about my plan to transform the old framed farm building into a sustainable house in the future. In three years, about 35 people participated in one way or another, long or short. (Jerry Ropp, our de facto foreman, has not missed a Saturday since we first met.)

All the materials of the house you see in the picture are either [1] recycled, [2] purchased with recycled money-especially the yard and clothing sales, and some metal recycling-or [3] donated. I currently do not have detailed cost data (because I am not only a bookkeeper, but also an orderer, general contractor, soup maker and apprentice plumber, tiler, carpenter, plasterboard finisher, etc.), but I do know that we have raised About 12,000 US dollars or 13,000 US dollars, but there is still 500 US dollars in the bank. This means that in anyone’s dollars, the 1,500 square foot, super-insulated, passive solar house where Sister Mary Bouxer and I now live — I call it La Casa del Sol, the "House of the Sun" — It costs less than $10 per square foot to build. More importantly, all our electric homes used less than 500 kWh of electricity (and some construction waste from wood stoves) in February this year.

Sisters of Charity in Mount St. Joseph, Ohio

These are just some selected excerpts from a letter we received from Sister Paula Gonzalez in response to our low-cost housing construction competition (see page 90 of this issue of Mother Earth News). Sister Paula’s description left a deep impression on us, but this entry also posed a problem. How do we compare the cost of a fully recyclable house built entirely by voluntary labor with the cost of other houses built in a remote traditional way? This will be a classic case of trying to compare apples with oranges.

For this and other reasons-just as beginners, we want to know what a sister doctor is. The cell biologist professor is building a passive solar house-we decided that the house of the sun should have a feature article. The more we hear and see, the more fascinating the story of this passive solar house.

The Sisters of Charity in St. Joseph’s Hill near Cincinnati was founded by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. She aptly described the spirit of the House of the Sun. She said: “Living simply, other people also You can live simply". Sister Paula, the founder of La Casa, believes that most of the current conflicts in the world can be attributed to some people trying to maintain (or realize) a way of life that our planet cannot (nor) support—at least not everyone’s 4.7 billion . She asked, “If we are not fighting for the continuation of the'beautiful past' of the oil age (up to the nuclear war), but start to use our infinite creativity and imagination to design a'better new era', we will What happened?'?" La Casa is where words stop and actions take over.

La Casa del Sol can be roughly called a renovation because it combines the frame at one end of an agricultural building. Its 1,500 square feet far exceeds the front of the rudimentary structure (the former St. Joseph’s Mountain College chicken coop), and even the original concrete floor has been (hand) chipped away to make room for the sub-floor solar storage system.

The function diagram should give you an idea of ​​how the house works (see the solar house diagram in the image library). Most of the solar energy is captured by approximately 250 square feet of four-layer insulating glass in the solar space. Some of this heat is stored directly in the sunlight space and the concrete floor of the large room (the two rooms are connected by French doors) and will soon be covered by the quarry. At the same time, the air heated in the sun space rises and enters the large room and loft area through the beam vents.

Another 96 square feet of Quadpane glass in the loft skylight helps with solar energy input. From the attic, some heated air is sucked into the rock storage floor by a fan: a heat storage system consisting of washed pea gravel and concrete blocks on both sides, used as a pressurized room, as shown in the detail of the rock storage part. The rest continues its convection path, through the passage above the bathroom and utility room area, into the east-west corridor, and through the beam vent above the bedroom door. The path back to the solar space is through the air floor, which is additionally propelled by another fan. The heat stored in the floor rises to the living space above.

How effective is all this? It is really good in autumn and spring. But from December to March, the Cincinnati area can only have five sunny days a month. During the winter months, the House of the Sun relies heavily on its highly insulated exterior to keep the small amount of heat gained from the sun.

The typical wall part (see the solar house picture in the image library) is composed of real 2 inches x 4 inches wood planks and 2 inches x 4 inches wood, which contains a total of 5-1/2 inches of expanded polystyrene ( EPS) and another 3-1/2 inch glass fiber — the total R value is approximately 32. The ceiling uses a 2 x 8 frame, filled with 7-1/4 inches of EPS, and the total R value of the EPS used between the 1/2-inch gypsum board and the rafters is at least 32. The underground part of the building has 2 inches of extruded polystyrene on the outside, a layer of EPS on the inside, and a 2 x 4 wall with 3-1/2 inches of fiberglass inside. The air floor is insulated with 1-1/2 inch EPS. The entire building is lined with a 6 mil polyethylene vapor/air barrier. When combined with careful caulking and airlock inlets with insulated doors and magnetic gaskets, the air exchange rate should be reduced to less than 1/2 per hour.

Recognizing that protection is more important than pure solar input, Sister Paula designated Quadpane glass for solar space and skylights. Although the two-layer glass and two-layer Dow Sungain film transmit 25% less solar energy than traditional double-glazed windows, they lose less than half of the heat—a worthy trade-off. All other windows in the house are double-glazed and insulated at night, and even the Quadpane skylight glass is equipped with quilted curtains.

One night after a cloudy day in March 1985, when the mercury temperature dropped to the lowest record in history of minus 21 degrees Fahrenheit (a wind chill temperature of minus 64 degrees Fahrenheit), La Casa’s insulation was very effective and very tight. The indoor temperature is stable at 50 degrees Fahrenheit and there is no spare heat.

On the same night, the temperature in the solar space dropped to 38 degrees Fahrenheit, and the geraniums continued to bloom happily. However, normally, when the weather is too cold, Sister Paula and Sister Mary will turn on the radiant electric heater in the bedroom. Once they use catalytic burners to clean up exhaust gas from wood stoves, they hope to eliminate small electric heaters at all.

Although La Casa del Sol only receives about 20% of its heat from the sun in January, the solar function has additional aesthetic and energy-saving advantages. The house has good lighting, which reduces the need for electric lighting. Even on a cloudy day, the glass of the solar space allows plenty of light to enter the large room, and the skylight provides sunlight to the back hall. A particularly ingenious feature of the building is the design of the bathroom skylight. Compared with the problem-prone (and expensive) roof glass, the two-room bathroom area has a non-structural ceiling adjacent to the air passage between the attic and the back hall. Light can pass through the slats on the back wall of the attic and shine on the diffuser glass (made from recycled shower door frames) on the bathroom ceiling.

Many functions keep water use (and the energy required for heating) to a minimum. All faucets are equipped with water-saving heads, the heater has a timer that can circulate for three 30 minutes a day, and there is a kettle inside the toilet to reduce the amount of flushing. Needless to say, almost all of these electrical appliances and fixtures have been recycled.

The sisters’ food comes from the garden behind the house and is recycled again. Sister Paula discovered that a large amount of completely edible food was wasted, just for aesthetic reasons, and cooperated with the major agricultural product suppliers in the Cincinnati area. Part of the lunch on the day the mother’s staff visited was a crisp green salad made entirely from the produce from the sister’s garden and the lettuce from Cincinnati.

This house is indeed a model performer. Approximately 2.5 Btu per square foot per degree per day is used for auxiliary heating. The energy it uses is half of the first-class new traditional building, and it is one-quarter to one-eighth of the standard. Between-but its origin is at least as important: La Casa was built for ridiculously small amounts of money, all of which was generated by our wasted (though generous in this case) surplus generated by society . The construction was done by volunteers, most of whom were unskilled, but were instructed by Jerry Ropp and Sister Paula. They rightly referred to the residence as the result of the efforts of the La Casa community.

La Casa del Sol is only the first step; it shows that ecologically sensitive life is possible and even enjoyable. One of Sister Paula’s plans was to transform the rest of the barn into housing units for other charity nuns. There are other energy-saving features-two passive solar hot water panels are being planned, an air-to-air heat exchanger is on the list, wind or photovoltaic panels are possible, and fuel blending poplar is planned-this will help The inhabitants of La Casa have a much easier life on earth.

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