As a man who works with encouraging people to start thinking more green, I’m very pleased to see that building efficiency and energy conservation at home has steadily been getting more attention in the last decade or so. There are of course, a lot of different aspects to building efficiency, but this in this article I’m solely going to discuss window placement, and why this is one of the most critical steps in using passive solar energy to improve your home’s energy efficiency.

Passive Solar Energy

Through smart placement of windows, you can utilize the advantages of solar energy by obtaining free heat in the form of sunlight. This is what’s known as the greenhouse effect. Sunlight naturally has a shorter wavelength when it enters our transparent windows, and most of the solar energy gets “trapped” on the inside, because the wavelength has increased. This is 100% free heat.

Ironically, this is what we’re trying to avoid happening in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide and other nasty pollutants keeps heat from leaving, thus are making the Earth hotter and hotter.

Positioning large windows to face south (e.g. if you’re on the north side of the equator), will allow sunlight to enter your house effectively, generating substantial amounts of free heat, ultimately leading to lower energy bills. Unfortunately, this is not always wanted during the summer. Your house might be hot enough already, and heating it further with sunlight, would actually cost you more in terms of air ventilation and cooling.

There are a few solutions to deal with this solar power cost problem, but probably the simplest and most efficient one is the following:

During the summer, when you want to cool your building, the sun’s trajectory is much higher on the sky. You can calculate the the length and angle of a ledge or awning to perfectly provide you with shading from the sun during times when you would prefer cooling.

Natural Light

Then there’s the added benefit of using sunlight as a natural source of light, which is both better in quality and completely free. Large windows should be used in rooms where heating and a lot of sunlight are preferred. Good examples of this are living rooms and kitchen. I’m covering this in more detail in the next paragraph.

Placement of Rooms

It is common to divide your space into high activity rooms and low activity rooms. Living rooms and kitchens would be example of high activity rooms. While bedrooms, hallways, toilets and staircases would be of low activity. You don’t really need heat and lighting in these rooms as you would in the high activity rooms, would you? This is why all high-activity rooms should be placed in the south of the building, to take as much advantage of the free sunlight as possible.

I hope I convinced you to make some thorough choices if you are looking to construct a new house or other type of building, or upgrade an old one. For more information on energy conservation and efficiency click here.