In our Land & Water pages we talk about making sure your property is suitable for the types of renewable energy sources that you want to use. If you haven’t check out that section, you might want to review that page. Enclosed here and in the Land & Water page is a link to the complete “focus on energy” article for site assessment.
Assess your property’s renewable energy potential
Space heating options are numerous. Passive solar is one of my personal favorites. We hope to make slight modifications to construction techniques that we are already familiar with and just make better use of the sun. Optimizing passive solar will be more complicated than just “orientation”, but we shouldn’t need to bust our construction budget to take advantage of the sun.
In floor hydronic heat systems are gaining popularity for many reasons. I know our next home will have some form of hydronic heat in it. How will we heat the water for that system? Plenty of options and lots of research yet to be done, but solar hot water heat is one option. For the people in rural settings, high efficient wood burning boilers is an option. Right now I have mixed feelings about burning wood or pellets for space heating or other applications. I’ve been raised to think that burning things was bad for the environment, but high efficient furnaces and using waste materials as fuel might change the equation. I need to do much more research to clarify my own thoughts on this subject.
