kahle
02-21-2006, 06:40 PM
I don't know if anyone has mentioned this on this board before but there are solar house design classes being offered around Seattle by a fellow named Chris Herman that are interesting to attend. Besides telling you how to design a solar house he has been helpful in lobbying for tax incentives for solar installations.
See http://www.dsireusa.org/ for more info but the jist is that if you buy a photovoltaic system and/or a solar water heating system in 2006 or 2007 you can get a federal tax credit for 30% of the purchase cost up to $2000 per installation per year. There are also state incentives that will allow you to skip sales tax and other things that can drop your payoff period to around two years.
The only thing I found about Mr. Herman's presentation is that like most techies, he has a prejudice against log homes that is in complete contradiction to the data he presents.
For instance, he started his lecture talking about how the modern home has 20,000 chemicals in it that it didn't have 20 years ago. And that this is a bad thing. Then later he tells me that logs are a waste of fiber and that they should be cut up or ground up and glued together to make cool structural beams. What does he think they make that glue out of, honey?
If you follow his charts, you can see that logs have a unique quality among building materials, a relatively high R-Value coupled with a Dynamic Heat Storage capacity that makes the tromb walls that he likes so much unnecessary.
I would recomend his class for those thinking about designing a house. He has lots of interesting ideas about calculating overhangs to shade windows in the summer and not the winter, using clerestories instead of skylights etc.
See http://www.dsireusa.org/ for more info but the jist is that if you buy a photovoltaic system and/or a solar water heating system in 2006 or 2007 you can get a federal tax credit for 30% of the purchase cost up to $2000 per installation per year. There are also state incentives that will allow you to skip sales tax and other things that can drop your payoff period to around two years.
The only thing I found about Mr. Herman's presentation is that like most techies, he has a prejudice against log homes that is in complete contradiction to the data he presents.
For instance, he started his lecture talking about how the modern home has 20,000 chemicals in it that it didn't have 20 years ago. And that this is a bad thing. Then later he tells me that logs are a waste of fiber and that they should be cut up or ground up and glued together to make cool structural beams. What does he think they make that glue out of, honey?
If you follow his charts, you can see that logs have a unique quality among building materials, a relatively high R-Value coupled with a Dynamic Heat Storage capacity that makes the tromb walls that he likes so much unnecessary.
I would recomend his class for those thinking about designing a house. He has lots of interesting ideas about calculating overhangs to shade windows in the summer and not the winter, using clerestories instead of skylights etc.