What is the technology of passive solar homes? The Industrial Age brought America out of the passive solar home technology. Frederick Bernard, the owner of Acorn Builders, a custom home designer, builder,...
Frederick Bernard, the owner of Acorn Builders, a custom home designer, builder, and remodeler, says, "Back in the days when the indigenous or Native Americans were the primary civilization in this country, they relied completely on the land and its available resources for food, shelter, and clothing. They learned through the ages and from the skills passed down through their generations how to use what was available. In northern New Mexico, the Apaches were nomadic tribes that traveled all the time. They built houses and had families, and when their children grew up, the children moved on to another place, built their own huts or hogans and created their own territories. So their communities were always moving, rather than building a community in one place like the Pueblo Indians.
"One thing the Native Americans always did," Bernard says, "was put the door of the house on the east side of the house. The reason was that most of the prevailing winds in that part of the country came either from the southwest or from the northwest. So their doors were never facing into the wind. This also enabled them to open that doorway, which was usually just an animal skin, and the sun would shine in and heat the floor of their hogan, and they would get free heat on sunny days. They built with clay because they found that building with stone meant that they had to collect and carry the stone, and that's hard. Then they'd have to glue it all together. Now, those stone buildings were a little more permanent, but they weren't built by the nomadic people.
"Those pueblos," Bernard says, "were built out of clay bricks, and logs were used as rafters. Those are both sustainable materials. As Europeans began to colonize North America, and as the United States moved into the Industrial Age, everything suddenly had to be 'streamlined.' We now had machinery that could cut logs and cut them into boards. We discovered Portland cement, which gave rise to the use of concrete around the turn of the 19th century. And we learned how to smelt steel and mass produce it.
"The turn of the tide," he says, "was in business. Rather than people taking care of their own individual lives, it became a community thing because communication had advanced, and knowledge could be shared more quickly. That brought us into the current Information Age, and now the Industrial Age is becoming 'old hat.' Even though we're still using the technology from the Industrial Age, we're tending to go back to old sources of knowledge to find ways not to use energy because it costs money to make energy.
"In other countries like Iraq and Iran," he says, "where it's very dry and very hot and there's some sort of wind blowing all the time, they didn't have trees to build with, so they built their entire houses, roofs and all, out of clay. They built towers that catch the wind. The wind blows through these elaborate channels that they made in the chimneys that were like labyrinths. The wind travels through all these channels in the clay and into the dwelling and back out of it again. The winds are then cooled to the cool temperatures of the clay bricks. And so the breezes coming into the house, rather than coming in through the windows at 115 degrees, come into the house at 70 or 80 degrees and actually cool the house without using any electrical power. And that's passive energy use.
"I'm working," he says, "to design some sort of technology like that to use here in our humid climates. I guess my major challenge is keeping things that grow, like animals, insects and microbes, out of the duct work."
