Hi.

I am new to the forum. Love the helpful information here. My wife and I have been spending the past few years planning to build an off grid farm. We left our old traditional life to live in a camper. And we have been doing that for the past couple years. With three kids its' been quite an experience. For the past year we have been living on undeveloped land that we bought to make things happen. We reside in a zone free area. Predominately Amish driven. The soil here is mostly sand and rock with a bit of clay. We have lots of stones. Our creek runs all year, full of wildlife, and is clear as glass. Our property is in a valley. Basically, the public road runs around a mountain. Our driveway circles around, downward to the property. Halfway down is a large gravel pad that we had put in last year. So behind us, we have a nice cedar covered hillside where I placed a large 550 gallon water tank to use for rain catch and gravity fed. But once we realized that the creek water has been tested as clean, we began using it as our primary source. Although, we buy drinking water.

Our plan for the house revolves around our lifestyle, intentions, and our budget. There certainly is no one size fits all plan. I have been researching many different methods of construction. My background is mostly in traditional wood construction. But still limited. We plan to do as much of the work as we can ourselves. We decided to build a pole barn house because of its simplicity and lack of expense. It is a popular method in this area. And with a gambrel roof, a single story home can still have an upstairs. I originally toyed with the idea of building a concrete home. But it would require more money and time to get it shelled in. A pole barn can simply be shelled in at the start. And everything else can be built around that. Live in it and continue working on it. But that doesn't take care of the passive solar plan.

So, I came up with the idea of combining different ideas and methods. Build the 24x36 pole barn. And dig and pour 2ft deep footers between posts. Insulating the outside with R20 foam. And eventually erecting dry stack concrete block wall inside. One 8ft section at a time in between posts. Right after pouring a concrete slab with 2" insulation underneath. My intentions are to continuously add mass in the walls and floor and to superinsulate the whole house.

Additionally, the house will have a long South facing wall to play with. No entry on that side. The sun hits the area great in the winter time. And I was thinking about bringing the eave down enough to build a wall of glass (windows) in front of the regular south wall. The principles normally used for the trombe wall. But mainly for the stacking effect. Placing the vents along the entire wall at both the bottom and top for convection. As well as to vent the air outside the top of the windows for help create ventilation in the house. So its basically the trombe wall method without using direct gain on the mass walls. Just collecting heat using the glass. I am pondering the idea of whether or not placing a trombe wall in the center 12ft section would improve the design or not. Also. Supposedly our prevailing winds in this area are Southerly. So I would like to know how that plays into a south facing solar set up. Or if it means opening south facing windows at night to allow breeze to enter as heat dissipates higher in the ceiling (vaulted) and out through upper venting.

We normally heat with wood and have plenty of it here. But I would like to change that. I will be putting in the stove just in case. But self sufficiency and caring about the Earth have becoming a growing importance to my wife and I. We would like to do our part in setting a better example for others to follow. Especially our own families who still rely solely upon money and don't care a bit about the natural world. If I had not already mentioned, and if its important to know. I plan to put in 4 bedrooms (2 up and 2 down) on one end of the house, with a balcony overlooking the rest of the house. As it will be completely open with no other walls. Some say vaulted homes are harder to heat. But I would like to think this can work to our advantage if designed right. Thanks for any comments and suggestions.

Sorry if it seems like I am double posting. But my previous post really lacked information from me.

the issue i see with a trombe wall in a tall room application is that vertically heated surfaces tend to develop/enhance a vertical flow along them and transfer a lot of the heat to the air at the top of the large space where you are not at, leaving the floor cooler where you are at... To equalize this situation you need to run an energy sucking ventilation system to pump this heat back down where it is wanted. the same would apply to a woodstove creating a localized chimney effect and again depositing the heat at the ceiling. For a large volume tall room, you might be better served by allowing the sun to heat a horizontal floor mass which doesn't so easilly transfer it's heat to the air. You could add tubing to the slab to add heat as needed when the sun isn't enough, perhaps from a propane boiler or outside wood boiler, keeping wood in the heating options lineup, just not as the prime source. The good thing about hydronic radiant is it can be distributed across the floor by a fairly low wattage circ pump...

Good Luck

We don’t recommend Trombe walls either. You will be far better off by just properly designing the roof overhang and properly locating/sizing your solar fenestration (e.g., the windows in wall which faces true south) for your location/climate and interior thermal mass. We have a suite of free passive solar design software on our website to enable proper DIY passive solar design. As Ronmar suggested, combining passive solar with hydronic radiant provides additional capability and options. We also have free hydronic radiant design software on our website as well.

I'm in the process of removing an active solar system, installed in the 70's, which probably hasn't worked well in years. All of the collector components except the solar glass which is fine, failed years ago. This was also the Trombe wall era; little different take on the whole thing. The point is that these were experiments and they all worked - to a point. We've learned from that - Passive House is the result of studying those houses. Or you can build a retro house with old technology - and combine it with newer methods.

Thanks for all the great advice. I can definitely see now why the trombe wall is a bad idea. I wondered if the heat would just run straight up along the wall. Although I had planned on putting up concrete mass between the posts for the INTERIOR only. Thinking it might help keep temperatures inside more stable. Do you think it would still make sense to use the South wall to make a glass exterior wall to collect the heat for the sake of convection and/or summer ventilation? Natural methods are important to me. Although I will be using active solar panels to some extent, I want things to be mostly mechanical, lasting a long time. Batteries don't last forever. And in a SHTF scenario, they aren't all that practical to rely upon too much. The name of the game is self sufficiency as much as possible. Additionally, thanks for reminding me about the heat rising up, needing to be fanned back down. I'd also like to implement some type of solar roof system to collect outside heat, as well as capture rising inside heat (if any) in the summer to increase the drawing in of air at the bottom. Air circulation if of my biggest priority. We do pretty well at bearing the winters here. We can bundle up if need be. But in the summer, it gets dreadfully hot. And there's nothing we can do but go outside and get under a tree to try and cool off. Night time is always a good time to grabbing the cool.

You need to tell us where you are building to give us some idea of heating and cooling needs. I have a passive home in PA that struggles with clouds in winter and humidity in summer, which is to say that off grid passive solar here would require considerable tolerance on the comfort front. Better you should be building in a sunny dry western climate. Thermal mass can improve summer comfort considerably absent humidity. Add what you are describing can be made to work if the sun shines faithfully in the winter. A narrow glass porch on the south side could serve as a solar collector, heating the house by fans on thermostats. If you build a block house inside the steel building, complete with insulated interior roof, consider venting the space between so that opening roof vents in the summer would allow solar gain to convect through the roof. Builditsolar.com is a better source for diy. Good luck. I admire your pluck.