ZED Architecture and Technology Summary

Zero Energy DesignTM Architecture and Technology Summary
by Larry Hartweg

The following is a quick summary of many ZED technologies that we have comprehensively integrated into our unique holistic architecture-and-design systems engineering, for 27 years. This short overview is intended to “wet your scientific appetite” and motivate you to invest the time required to read on, and better understand the energy-problem-solving potential of our proven ZED solutions.

It has taken us decades to accumulate, develop and refine this valuable ZED knowledge. Much of it is “counterintuitive” to people who are unfamiliar with energy science. We attempt to summarize our successful design patterns in a concise form that is easy for intelligent people (who know how to read in depth) to understand and appreciate.

ZED wishes to fully acknowledge the significant research and public domain contributions published by the world-renowned University of Central Florida, Florida Solar Energy Center. Since 1975, they have provided valuable input that is an integral part of ZED. We have always considered their basic foundation, and added our experiences and creative innovations on top of the best design and construction practices offered by the many energy experts we have encountered over the years. FSEC now has about 60 researchers, many working on a $5 million NASA hydrogen program grant.

When I developed my 5,000 sq.ft. Zero Energy Home in 1979, I was a Senior Research Scientist at a large energy research lab with 700 research scientists – many with leading-edge expertise in thermal mechanics, and the essential skills that I needed to perfect ZED in a minimum amount of elapsed time.

As a second-generation energy research scientist, I have always solicited and appreciated input from multitudes with widely varying intuitive, anecdotal, irrational, and scientific opinions. ZED has listened closely to the considerable constructive criticism we have received, and made decades of iterative refinements along the way. What we offer here is our proven assimilation of the “best and brightest” thinking we have discovered, tested, and improved upon along on our journey toward resolving the ever-increasing great American energy crisis.

ZED cannot be digested in a 60 second sound bite by non-learning TV addicts with a short attention span. In writing this material, we obviously hope and assume that YOU will take the time required to merge our experience with your own critical decision making processes, and become healthy, wealthy and wise from the time you invest exploring ZED possibilities, and our practical solutions developed over the decades. (smile) The longer you study a challenging problem with an open mind, the more chance you’ll have of working out all of the subtle issues you encounter over time.

Albert Einstein said that if we cannot explain something to a six-year-old child we really do not understand it at all. His enlightened statement is very stimulating. We will do the best we can to help you become aware of what is now a formal set of ZED principles and practices – How and Why. If you care about energy conservation or living an abundant life in harmony with nature, then please take the time required to read and absorb this valuable information.

This quick outline does NOT explain everything you need to know to make it all happen. We are merely providing a snapshot of a 50,000-foot-high view of some of the categories of expertise required to solve our nation’s current complex energy problems. There is a lot of physics and math behind what has become “intuitive” ZED to us in hindsight.

We will elaborate on the history, science, systems engineering, tradeoffs, economics, esthetics, logistics, materials, products, practical construction techniques, and community planning issues on later web pages, and in our books, plans, specifications, Construction Checklists, and on our sister website: Natural Energy Applied Research (with photo presentations, graphics, and tutorials). We are adding new detailed specifics every week right now.

We also offer classes and turnkey project consulting for architects, designers, developers, builders, tradesmen, executives, investors, teacher / professors, students, hands-on interns, politicians, and potential Zero Energy Home buyers. Our 25 years of practical ZED demonstrations have shown that the remaining issues in front of us are educational and political, more than technical.

A Nutshell Summary Of Things To Avoid in a Zero Energy Home

Never Do In Any Climate – No compromise, IF you want a low-cost Zero Energy Home

Never Use Roof Angled Glass (Skylights) – They create a Solar Furnace in the summer. In the winter, warm air rises and heat is rapidly lost through the cold conductive glass. Roof angled glass is always bad everywhere in every season. Even on sunny winter days, roof angled glass provides LESS solar gain than vertical south facing glass (in the northern hemisphere).

Never Use A Fireplace or A Clothes Dryer In Air-Conditioned Living Quarters – They suck out your expensive clean conditioned air, which must be replaced by unconditioned dirty air. ZED locates the laundry room in the un-air-conditioned thermal buffer zone. Folding and ironing can be done in air conditioned rooms.

Never Design A Complex Exterior with a high ratio of surface area to interior space – Excessive surface area causes unnecessary undesirable heat transfer summer and winter. A simple rectangle costs less, performs better, and has less surface area and less turbulent airflow. Simple architectural features can be added to a rectangle to improve street appeal.

Never Use 2 x 4 Wooden Exterior Walls On 16” Centers – 2 x 6’s on 24” centers use less wood, cost less, and allow more insulation. Use simplified 2-stud corner details, wall intersections, etc. Other non-wood alternatives have many advantages over wood framing. There are many modern good reasons to not use wood to frame a home.

Never Ignore Pests, Toxins and Allergens – Dust, dust mites, termites, ants, rodents, spiders, mold, mildew, pollen and microorganisms – Design to prevent – Avoid pesticides, etc. that are environmental hazards and toxic to humans and pets.

Never Use Log Home Exterior Walls – Wood has much less insulating effect per inch than other superior less-expensive materials, and logs waste a large quantity of a dwindling natural resource. Killing trees is bad for the environment and increases Global Warming.

Never Design A Long Distance Between Hot Water Source and Faucet – Wastes time, water, and energy to heat the replacement water. Use plumbing clusters (and possible re circulation just before hot water usage).

Never Design A Frequently-Used Single Exterior Door - ZED often uses a 2-door “airlock” in the thermal buffer zone. One door is shut before the next is opened, reducing the large volume of air infiltration on windy days.

Never Use Much Glass on a single-shell portion of the house – It is like a thermal hole in your walls. The ZED double shell design allows much more glass, daylight and views, with less undesirable heat transfer. Two small Delta T’s are better than one large Delta T.

Never Use Incandescent Lighting – Century-old Thomas Edison incandescent lighting is the least efficient way to provide light. It is the most common, least expensive to install initially, BUT incandescent lighting uses far more electricity, and is the most expensive to operate and maintain. Fluorescent lighting is much more efficient, but most of them have undesirable color temperature. RGB ultrabright LED’s are more expensive, but they are by far the most efficient, with the lowest total cost of ownership, and they allow full spectrum color control.

Never Run Electrical Wiring or Plumbing In Any Exterior Wall – They create poor insulation and air infiltration holes in the building thermal envelope. They can be run in the interior walls that are perpendicular to the exterior walls, or in air-sealed floor outlets, etc. All perforations in the building envelope (including interior wall / ceiling / attic / plumbing / electrical / lighting) must be carefully sealed and inspected. The goal is to eliminate unplanned air infiltration.

Never Ignore The High Value Of Double Shell Thermal Buffer Zones with natural convection airflow to equalize temperature differentials north/south and upstairs/downstairs.

Never Design An Open Staircase Or Loft Area in the air-conditioned portion of a building – Warm air rises like a hot air balloon. The upstairs will ALWAYS be either too hot, OR the downstairs will be too cool (or both). A staircase should have a door at the bottom (preferred) or at the top. The staircase may have optional glass looking into a great room for visual appeal. Glass elevators are nice in more-expensive homes. An open staircase or balcony works well in a double shell thermal buffer zone (sunroom) where a ZED convection airflow loop is engineered to automatically equalize upper and lower temperature differentials.

Never Deliver A New House For Occupancy Without First Using A Calibrated Fan To Measure, Locate, and Repair Any Undesirable Air Infiltration Leaks.

Never Fail To Allow Room For Future South Facing Solar Panels – Photovoltaic solar electric, domestic hot water, and swimming pool water heater. (May be hidden from view on all sides.) Someday soon, you may want to plug your electric car into your PV roof. (smile)

Never Overlook Any Of The Critical Human Comfort Issues – Temperature PLUS humidity (enthalpy), oxygen and CO2. Intelligent Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) sensors and controls are desirable on larger homes and commercial buildings. Inexpensive intelligent programmable zoned HVAC with multiple sensors and controls can be used to help balance comfort factor differentials north/south, east/west, morning/afternoon, upper/lower, inside/outside, etc. - improving comfort while greatly reducing energy requirements.

Never Do In A Climate That Requires Significant Air Conditioning

Never Use Unshaded West Facing Glass – It is a Solar Furnace on hot afternoons (over 3000 BTU / sq.ft. of unwanted heat added to western rooms)

Never Use Unshaded High Thermal Mass (e.g., concrete) On The West Side – Absorbs afternoon sunlight and then radiates heat into the house long after the sun sets. High thermal mass must be heavily insulated on the OUTSIDE to reduce/prevent undesirable heat transfer. West wall radiant barriers with an air gap are important.

Never (intentionally or unintentionally) draw in unconditioned replacement air that is hotter or more humid than interior air, without some type of heat exchanger / dehumidification solution (heat pipe, etc.)

Never Use A Dark Colored Roof – You should use a highly-reflective white “cool roof” (or roof planting “green roof”). White metal roof is better than asphalt (with a black substrate).

Never Ignore The Importance Of Radiation In Downward Heat Flow – Must have a radiant barrier under your roof deck. A well-designed ZED attic should not be much hotter than the peak outside air temperature.

Never Ignore The Importance Of Window Overhangs and Shading Devices – Must understand the seasonal path of the sun for your specific location.

Never Operate A Ceiling Fan In A Room When No One Is Present – Ceiling fans can improve evaporative cooling of perspiration and make the skin about 3 degrees cooler, BUT ceiling fans disturb the laminar insulating air layers at the ceiling and around windows and make the room hotter in the summer (like the “wind chill” factor operating in reverse). Ceiling fan usage can thus INCREASE the operating time of your air conditioner system for a given thermostat temperature setting.

Never Do In A Climate That Requires Significant Heating

Never Use Poorly Insulated, Unprotected North Facing Glass – Use double shell design, salt box style, insulated interior window shutters, etc.

Never Ignore The Potential Of Passive Solar Heating – Lots of vertical south facing glass in a non-air-conditioned double-shell thermal buffer zone (sunspace, sunroom, solarium, tropical greenhouse, conservatory, etc.). Do NOT use a lot of glass on any wall of any single shell building. Location-specific south glass overhang design is critical for climates with significant heating and cooling requirements.

Never Ignore The Use Of Self-Regulating Natural Convection To Equalize The Temperature In North And South Rooms – Double shell design, etc.

Highest Priority ZED Topics First

The average American household now spends nearly $2,000 a year on home energy bills, and that amount number is rapidly increasing every year. Perhaps yours is already much more, and certainly more than it was last year. This has the largest impact on the people who are least able to afford it, and understand the underlying issues that will continue to make it worse in the future.

In most American homes, the largest impact on monthly energy bills is “changing the temperature of things.”

During climatic temperature extremes, the heating and air conditioning bill is by far the most important. Heating and cooling often exceed all other energy expenses put together. One obvious solution is “move to Hawaii and live in a loin cloth under a palm tree on a beach, or half way up a volcano.” (smile)

1. If you choose to live where heating and/or cooling is important, we will first show you how to eliminate heating and cooling energy bills altogether, in the coldest AND hottest American climatic zones. During summer and winter temperature extremes, the utility bills required to heat and cool a conventional home can exceed the sum total of all other utility bills put together. We will explain how to totally terminate heating and cooling bills, in a well-designed Zero Energy Home almost everywhere. The International Space Station doesn’t pay monthly electric bills – Why should you?

2. The second most expensive temperature changer is often the poorly designed American kitchen electric refrigerator, which uses power most of the time all year long. We’ll discuss a simple solution to totally eliminate monthly refrigerator electrical energy expense, with a solar-powered, non-electric, time-proven, off-the-shelf, hundred-year-old, cost-effective technology. Does this sound interesting to you? It should be. Very few people understand it.

3. The third expensive temperature changer is domestic hot water. We’ll discuss simple reliable solutions from the 1970’s and modern times to eliminate domestic hot water energy expense, and also how to have a year-round swimming pool with 92-degree water when snow is on the ground nearby. I had solar water heating in my own residence in 1979. New solar water heating products have been recently developed, and they are getting incrementally better every year.

Do you enjoy a lengthy hot shower massage in the winter? Would you like a warm, comfortable, zero energy indoor swimming pool, swim spa, or hot tub, for year round use starting TODAY? No worries! It is easy and cost effective to do right now, and has been for decades.

A major expense in operating energy-wasting American appliances like clothes washers and dishwashers is the cost of the hot water. If we let powerful sunlight heat our water, those expenses go away. Solar hot water heating is one of the EASIEST ENERGY SAVING THINGS that almost any American home can do, most of the year (with only a few exceptions).

4. The fourth expensive temperature changer in a modern energy-wasting American home is the clothes dryer. An inefficient tumble clothes dryer can take an hour of expensive high-current electricity or gas to remove the water from only one load of clothes, and damage them in the process. In the winter, the money paid to heat the air for drying clothes is then exhausted outside. How dumb is that?

Great grandma knew how to use solar energy to dry clothes, long before the first utility company was ever created. Still, these crazy American’s demand their lazy-boy convenience. They don’t like to hang their laundry in full public view, and then wait hours for it to dry. Soooo, we’ll talk about a fast INDOOR solar-powered clothes dryer that does NOT need a clothesline and pins, or hours to gently remove water from wet clothes.

5. Electric-and-gas cooking ranges and ovens are another source of high-rate energy consumption. The readily available off-the-shelf solution here is very simple, and much healthier for you anyway.

After eliminating all of the expensive temperature changers in a Zero Energy Home, then efficient pumps, fans, lighting, electronics and appliances can be discussed, with an explanation of how to make many of them cost LESS than the same equipment does today, to completely eliminate the need for the business-as-usual escalating cost of electricity from your local electric company (even if you do have electric power readily available).

With the total elimination of the need for utility companies, you can build your dream home almost anywhere you like (which may or may not interest your lifestyle desires). All you need is access to water, and ZED can even give you the free solar energy you need to pump and purify healthy drinking water for your home.

If you prefer to live in a populated community, you may be the only enviable one on your block who does NOT have to pay ever-increasing utility bills. Or, you may choose one of the innovative new Zero Energy Home planned communities that are starting to emerge.

Without customary utility bills, you will then have more money to invest, or to spend on other nice things. What would you do with an extra $2,000 net dollars each year? It could even be much more, depending on your tax situation, home size, energy cost inflation rate, etc.

If we can do all of this in an attractive, comfortable, easy-to-own-and-operate home, would you be interested in becoming an intelligent, trend-breaking Zero Energy Home innovator? Would you enjoy it and proudly tell your friends about it?

Does it all sound “Too Good To Be True”? Do you know anyone else who can do it all in a comprehensively integrated, esthetically pleasing, cost effective package, for LESS than you are already spending per month for your home today? How about someone who has been doing it for 25 years already? Read on, and soon you will. (Friendly Florida smiles to you, our new ZED friends.)

Location-Specific Environment Requirement – Place-Based Design

All of ZED begins with a detailed understanding of the location-specific environment including: degree-day heating and cooling requirements, solar gain potential, latitude, elevation (sea level to mountains), seasonal weather / winds / cloud cover patterns, weather trends (e.g., Florida summer: Clear mornings with cloudy afternoons and frequent afternoon showers), site-specific desirable natural views, transportation requirements, available public utilities (if any), predictable growth trends (rising costs, future development, growth potential for the family / community / business), budget, funding source goals / objectives, building codes, political challenges, material supply, and any other pertinent planning details.

Your location’s seasonal heating and cooling requirements are of particular importance, since they have a major influence on the overall solution architecture that we will recommend.

American homes VARY WIDELY in their location-specific energy requirements, and solar energy potential. One ZED solution does NOT fit all, by any means. In general, the farther from the equator, the more heating requirement and the less available solar energy, but this is not always true. Climate is also impacted by altitude, mountains / valleys, prevailing winds, humidity / evaporation / cloud cover, albedo (surface reflection: white, black, green, etc.), heat index, wind chill, thermal mass, large bodies of water, oceans / lakes, cool trees versus hot concrete / asphalt, urban heat sources, nearby large buildings, smog and seasons.

One quantifiable scientific measure of location-specific design difference is the number of “Degree Days of Heating and Cooling Requirement” for a particular location. It has been gathered for decades by the national weather service, and is well published for about 300 diverse American locations – one of the close to you. The following is a partial list of only a small part of what is readily available. No reasonable home can be properly designed without this (and much more) information.

Solar = Annual Average Solar Radiation Potential
(Insulation - Average Total BTU/sq.ft./day)

In Miami, there is essentially no need for heat, but cooling and humidity control are very important Zero Energy DesignTM issues. Orlando is North of Miami, where Orange County Florida citrus crops can freeze in the harshest winters. Orlando has a small need for winter solar heating, but summer cooling is 4.4 times more important in Orlando than is heating a home in the winter. In stark contrast, in Chicago heating is 6.6 times more important, as a ZED factor, than is the less significant Chicago degree-day cooling requirement. Many Chicago homes have no air conditioner, since there are only a few uncomfortable days each summer.

These climatological numbers are VERY important for location-specific ZED decisions. As we said: One Zero Energy Home design does NOT fit all. Miami houses SHOULD look and perform much differently than Chicago houses, which have a very different environment requirement. Stock house plans simply to NOT apply to all locations.

It is interesting that the maximum and minimum AVERAGE annual solar gain potential for ALL of the above cities does not vary by a large percentage (1053 to 1864 BTU/sq.ft./day). Whereas, the heating and cooling degree days do (0 to 9270 heating and 108 to 4981 cooling).

Many different solar energy technologies can be used to intelligently reduce or eliminate the need for an external non-renewable energy source, especially for heating and cooling a home (the largest single energy expense for almost everyone).

Energy conservation is our first ZED objective. It requires an expert understanding of each Zero Energy Home’s environment requirements, and owners’ goals, objectives, budget and realistic expectations.

Some solar gain is available almost everywhere in the U.S., but it is not the same amount every day. The 47-degree annual swing of the Earth’s rotational axis relative to the sun means major differences in seasonal solar gain potential. Sacramento has clear dry summer days with lots of solar energy available for a photovoltaic system on 92+ F days, whereas Orlando summers have cloudy afternoons with a lot of thunderstorms. In January in Sacramento, the average solar gain potential is reduced to only 48%, due to an average of 19 cloudy days and 6 partly cloudy days. With an average maximum daily high temperature of only 53.8 F in January, Sacramento requires special passive solar heating design and winter night SUPERINSULATION over south facing glass.

The dry American Southwest (e.g., Albuquerque) has more solar gain potential than areas where cloudy days are more common. Florida is closer to the equator, but Florida also has more cloudy summer days than drier climatic zones. Solar energy can be used to heat or cool your home, but the less solar gain potential that is available in your area, the more important energy conservation issues and SUPERINSULATION become.

Imagine what has to be done for ZED space station system engineering. Activities have to be planned around available energy supply, which cannot be exceeded. Electrical power is arguably the most critical resource for the International Space Station (ISS). The very air in the ISS is created by splitting water molecules using electricity. Spare oxygen is stored in electrically pressurized tanks. Electric power wins the "most important" space station debate in a heartbeat.

Photovoltaic solar cell electricity keeps the ISS and its crew members alive. It powers the air and water systems, keeps the lights on, pumps liquids for recycling, warms meals, cools equipment, and runs avionics and other mission critical computers. PV electricity even lets ISS crew members talk to schoolchildren by two-way Ham radio (sunny conversations). Indeed, electricity does it all for humanity's permanent home in orbit around the Earth.

Supplying reliable electricity to an outer space home 218 miles above our planet is no small challenge. The crew can’t drop a power cord down and plug it into a city grid, while circling the Earth every 92 minutes. Transporting fuel up from the surface would be far too expensive, because of the high cost of launching rockets. Every pound in orbit is precious. We can’t afford to carry SCUBA tanks full of air for the astronauts to breathe.

and arguably the most important. They span 27,000 sq.ft.
– More than half the area of an American football field

In Earth orbit, the most practical source of power for the ISS is sunlight. Fortunately, solar power is more than plentiful. The Sun radiates 4 x 10²³ kilowatts (kW). If we could collect it all, the Sun's power output would be enough to supply the demands of 31,000 BILLION planet Earths consuming energy inefficiently at our new millennium rates.

The ISS spends 36 of its 92-minute Earth orbit in the shade of the Earth. It is constantly going from daylight to dark and back again. Batteries store large amounts of electrical energy for use while the ISS receives no sunlight. The thermal stresses on the sometimes-sunny side of the ISS are significant – far more than your home will ever experience.

What about solar energy for a permanent Moon colony? A Moon colony needs to be able to sustain itself for YEARS without resupply. NASA has a CD-ROM training program for school children in grades 9 – 12 called BioBlast that teaches students the concepts of a sustainable way of living (WITHOUT petroleum tank trucks or an electric power company). It involves solar energy for growing your own food, and everything else necessary for life. Perhaps your children have described BioBlast to you.

Our Moon does not rotate the same way the Earth does. One side of the Moon never faces the Earth. With no atmosphere, the Moon’s location-specific temperature variations are far more severe than on Earth. Where should a Moon colony be located? How can it sustain itself and support humans comfortably for years without resupply? Plentiful, renewable energy is essential regardless of other solution details. Energy is a “life critical” design issue for a Moon or Mars colony, which are federally-funded real goals for our modern space program.

All of these problems are solvable with ZED Systems Engineering, and modern scientific principles. There will be many valuable technology advances that spin off of our Moon colony great adventure, which MUST eventually find their way into our homes and our ultimate sustainable lifestyles. The exploration of the Moon and Mars is absolutely necessary for humans just to survive on Earth. We simply to NOT have the resources available for our unprecedented grow rate to live as wastefully as America has done in the past.

A Zero Energy Home should comfortably accommodate all of the predictable extremes for a particular location (even if it is on the Moon). (smile)

No worries! We already know how it is done scientifically. The systems engineering principles are well documented (but seldom followed). We’ve been successfully developing (a trivial number of) energy efficient homes for many decades. We just need to apply what we learned long ago in outer space and on the ground here on the good old Mother Earth, and make ZED well-known, popular, pervasive, comfortable and cost effective.

One Story, or Two

Single-story versus multiple-story is a ZED issue of taste, energy, comfort, esthetics, and economics. Two-story houses have roughly half of the footing, roof and real estate footprint, but they need a staircase, or elevator expense. Putting residential stairs in a greenhouse is one of the lower-cost alternatives we have used many times. Sunroom square footage can cost much less than interior living quarters.

In a tall commercial office building, or a very-high-rise condo, most of the floor space can be taken up with elevator shafts. This has always been a silly “diseconomy of scale,” in my opinion. Executives should locate their company where real estate costs less, and let most of their office employees telecommute (rather than having dangerous, expensive skyscrapers that are 80% elevator shafts, and long commutes to affordable housing). Today’s high-speed, low cost digital communications and ZED make living and working almost anywhere a real possibility for many modern information society professions.

My former energy company employer’s 80 story Chicago lakefront marble tower with two-level odd/even floor elevators was notoriously expensive, uncomfortable (large glass windows, uneven heating / cooling), noisy (as it swayed endlessly in the windy city), AND, the lowest productivity office building in our large international company. Workers had to be paid much more, and they got much less done than anywhere else in the company. People arrived late and left early to catch trains and get away from the stressful office environment. The company was eventually sold to foreign competition, due to very poor American mismanagement of a once great corporate icon. Does sound this familiar to you? It is becoming more common every year, as American corporate and government politics dominate irrational thinking for the benefit of only a tiny number of executives.

The stupid executive decision to build the expensive 80-story skyscraper (long before 9/11/2001) was a near catastrophe. The Corporate Board wanted to build a more efficient headquarters building with less-stressed, less-expensive employees in beautiful Colorado Springs, but the CEO’s alluring wife threatened to divorce him if he made her leave the Chicago social life that she dominated. The CEO’s one vote eventually won out over the entire Board’s superior wisdom. Double GAK! Employees understood that the inefficient office building was a marble tower monument to the one woman who helped bring the institution down. I left the company a few years later for a much-better-managed growth organization (which was a great career move).

Lesson Learned: If your company can’t manage its own internal affairs, and their decision criteria are seriously flawed, then they will not survive long in today’s competitive global economy. Energy frugality and long-term sustainable ways of doing business intelligently in harmony with nature are critical issues for tomorrow’s wisely managed successful corporations.

Warm air rising in a two-story open interior staircase area can create thermal problems (but an open atrium staircase is NOT a problem in a solar greenhouse with a ZED natural convection air flow loop design). Warm air rises in open areas, making the upstairs interior uncomfortably hotter than downstairs, all year long, UNLESS natural convection also cools the upper area intelligently.

In the winter, an open space must be heated from the top down. Forced convection fans can bring warm air down, for a price, but turbulent air can feel too cool in the winter (due to an interior wind chill factor).

An open two-story interior living space area will always be uncomfortable, either upstairs (too hot) or downstairs (too cold). An open loft area is a particular problem for people who do not like excess heat. It may look architecturally interesting, but lofts are energy and temperature disasters.

Separate temperature zones and stairway doors are often required for two story homes, which can add even more expense and design complexity. Most staircases need (but do not have) a single door at the top pf the stairs.

Very few architects know how to design desirable natural convection airflow loops into the interior of a structure. It requires a lot of experience and some scientific knowledge about laminar versus turbulent airflow, and the density of air at different temperatures. We have been doing it very successfully in Zero Energy Homes for over 25 years with impressive results. We did not invent natural convection airflow design, (the concept is as ancient as the campfire), but we did cost-effectively perfect it.

A two-story North wall can lose a lot of heat through turbulent “wind chill” during a cold windy Northern night – hence the popular Salt Box design of colonial American days, with a two-story South side and only one story on the North. The Salt Box shape is still useful wherever the winter heating requirement is significant (but the Salt Box shape is not required in all Zero Energy Homes).

1980’s Low Cost / sq.ft. Duplex – Low North Wind Buffer, High South Solarium
Could have a shared solar-heated indoor swimming pool or other amenities

Creative artistic architects (with little, if any, energy training) leave thermal comfort up to the poorly trained air conditioning contractors, who then leave the long-term energy bill consequences up to naive homebuyers, who then suffer unnecessarily for as long as they live there. The twenty-year escalating energy cost of a conventional home that barely meets modern building codes can exceed $150,000. How short sighted is that!

It is commonly thought that reducing ever escalating energy bills requires residents to lower their comfort level standards. This is simply NOT SO, in a well-designed Zero Energy Home.

Extreme Cost-Effective Energy Conservation

To eliminate the need for conventional heating and air conditioning bills altogether, we must greatly reduce the need for space heating and cooling in the first place. This is an “opportunity rich” (long overdue) situation; since today’s traditional American homes are soooo very poorly designed and constructed as major energy wasters. Simple improvements can reduce heating and cooling costs by more than 60%. Judicious use of the best ZED whole-house systems engineering can eliminate heating and cooling bills in a wide variety of U.S. climatic zones.

Shape, Size, Appearance, and Orientation

As with traditional architecture, the exterior façade of a Zero Energy Home or Commercial Building can take many artistic architectural styles and esthetics, to meet the appearance goals of the prospective new homeowner, but in general, ZED tries to minimize exterior surface area to reduce unnecessary heat gain and loss year round.

The North Street Side of the above home appears to have interesting
features, but if you look closely, the living space is nearly rectangular.
The South side can have a large area of passive solar collection glass,
and active solar panels for hot water, photovoltaic electricity, etc.
Motorized window quilts can help minimize heat transfer through the glass.
Pleasant landscaping shades the East and West sides of the structure.
Outside walls and roof are insulated from the summer sun’s radiant energy
with reflective radiant barriers plus an air gap. The hip roof, with hurricane
clips offers powerful resistance to windstorms. Custom-made sturdy
removable window covers can protect glass in category 4+ hurricanes.
We would prefer a bright white roof, but this light color is a reasonable
compromise. We can work with your preferences, within your budget.

More artistic architectural cut-and-jag surface area may be attractive (to some who care nothing about energy), but it certainly costs more to build, and excess exterior surface area can also increase turbulent air flow (winter wind chill and summer heat transfer), and expose more square feet of the building to annual temperature extremes than would be necessary with more intelligent ZED surface area minimization.

The simple summer and winter energy loss calculations are based on exterior surface area square footage, times the temperature difference between the outside and inside of each wall, divided by the thermal resistance factor for the wall (R factor plus other considerations for radiant heat, etc.). Obviously, if you reduce the exterior surface area, you reduce the heating and cooling energy requirement.

High ceilings are used in most modern homes. They give a more open, airy appearance to the interior of a more-popular home. However, the total cost of higher ceilings includes more than just the extra long wall studs and sheet rock. When comparing a house with all 10 foot ceilings, compared to the same floor plan with all 8-foot ceilings, you have to multiply the exterior perimeter of the house times 2-feet of additional exterior wall height to arrive at the additional exterior square footage, which must then be multiplied times interior-exterior temperature differences, and then divided by the wall’s average R-factor, to arrive at the additional BTU’s of heating and cooling the 10-foot house will cost, compared with the more-efficient 8-foot high house. This is not to say that you can’t use 10-foot ceilings. It just says that they increase the energy requirements for the home, which must be taken care of with good Zero Energy DesignTM somehow.

Street Appeal

To conclude our quick overview discussion about the shape guidelines for a Zero Energy Home, we must consider the South side of the roof. The North side can have visually appealing cuts and jags (uneven rooflines for artistic appeal, as above), but the South side of the roof should be fairly straight East-to-West so that no portion of the roof (or anything else) shades the South side of the roof – morning or evening, summer or winter. If a portion of a solar collector is shaded, it reduces the effectiveness and net value of the solar collection system (and may in some cases lower the effectiveness of the entire energy system on a Zero Energy Home).

A straight South side roofline may be the easiest to design if the South side is the back of the house, not visible from the street. If the South side of the house is the primary view from the street, great architectural care must be taken to hide or integrate solar panels into the roof (hot water, photovoltaic, etc.) We have some tricks we have developed over the years to make this happen in an esthetically pleasing way, depending on the architectural style of the home and its roofline.

It should be noted that solar collection panels do not have to be on the roof. There are many ways to hide them elsewhere and make them less visible. In pure passive solar designs, there are no active solar panels at all. But, each situation and each homebuyer requires personalize attention and design tradeoffs.

If buyers insist on no active solar equipment, it can be done (and has been done many times) with the best possible reduction in net energy requirements. Over a hundred years ago, there were many “off-the-grid” houses when there was no grid to connect to. They had no modern solar equipment (which did not exist 100 years ago), and yet many intelligent pilgrims and pioneers lived healthy happy comfortable lives, long ago. Modern passive solar heating and cooling can do MUCH better than was done then, or is being done now in modern conventional homes that barely meet the legal minimum building codes.

The side of the house with the main entrance is the most important for esthetic visual street appeal and resale value. It is usually best when the street is on the North or South side of the home (NOT WEST). If you want privacy for your South-facing greenhouse (sunroom, solarium, conservatory) activities, then it would be best if the street is on the North side. North side street-facing windows can have insulated window treatments, to provide privacy and minimize heat loss on cold windy winter nights.

Building orientation is important for solar community land developers AND for lot buyers who want a Zero Energy Home that is not in a ZED planned community. Luckily, so few people recognize the added value of such lots that you usually do not have to pay a premium for them yet (but soon you will, and land developers will be forced to respond to increased demand, bringing well-planned ZED lot prices back down again).

Depending on local heating and cooling requirements, the overall exterior ZED shape tends to be rectangular – longer in the East/West dimension than in the North/South. This maximizes winter solar gain, and minimizes summer West wall exposure.

Esthetics and energy are sometimes mutually exclusive, UNLESS the best of ZED is applied well, which we always try to do cost effectively.

Reducing Undesirable Heat Flow Summer and Winter with SUPERINSULATION

ZED spends more time engineering energy conservation and multiple types of CONDUCTION / CONVECTION / RADIATION insulation into the basic structure than any other architecture and design process used by others (who have much less experience).

We go way beyond simple conductive R-value issues, and common problems with undesirable air infiltration. We integrate effective radiant barriers (especially in the roof and West wall), zero-energy natural convection flow loops that don’t need fans or thermostats, humidity and evaporation analysis, etc. One of our most-effective insulating techniques has a conductive R-value of essentially zero (which almost no residential architects fully comprehend).

Radiant Barriers

In the International Space Station (ISS), SUPERINSULATION is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to human life. Without SUPERINSULATION, the sunny side of the space station would be roughly +250 degrees Fahrenheit, and the shaded side would be –250 degrees below zero.

To prevent heat flow through the ISS exterior, NASA does NOT use fiberglass insulation like your conventional home probably does. NASA uses a multiple layer SUPERINSULATION system of inexpensive alternating aluminized Mylar and Dacron to reduce conductive heat transfer through the radiant barriers. Similar radiant barrier insulation is used to minimize heat transfer to/from cryogenic tanks and plumbing of liquid gases like hydrogen and oxygen Space Shuttle fuel and other nations’ launch vehicles.

ZED uses functionally similar polished aluminum foil SUPERINSULATION science to block radiant heat transfer in hot summer climatic zones. Radiant barriers are NOT new – NASA has been using them for half a century. When NASA began planning the first astronaut space walks in the late 1950’s, NASA realized that they would have to surround humans with SEVEN FEET OF CONVENTIONAL HOUSE INSULATION to protect them from the temperature extremes of outer space. Imagine a 14-foot diameter space suit – ridiculous right? It is just as unreasonable for YOU to use ineffective fiberglass insulation (which is essentially transparent to radiant heat transfer) in your ceiling without a radiant barrier insulation system. Glass is essentially transparent to light. If you spin hot glass to make fibers, it is still transparent to radiant heat flow. Put on some gloves and a facemask. Take some (unhealthy) fiberglass insulation. Hold it between your face and the sun. The sunlight comes right through the translucent glass fibers. The same thing happens in your fiberglass ceiling insulation.

Radiant barriers in the roof do not eliminate the need for ceiling insulation (which reduces CONDUCTIVE and CONVECTIVE heat transfer), but radiant barriers are synergistic (1 + 1 = 3), and they do make other forms of insulation much more effective than without a radiant barrier in place. CONDUCTION, CONVECTION, and RADIATION must all be dealt with effectively in a Zero Energy Home. RADIATION is by far the most important of the three mechanisms of heat transfer, especially in the summer.

SUPERINSULATION is a holistic systems engineering problem that we have decades of scientific CONDUCTION, CONVECTION, and RADIATION data to base our cost-effective practical pragmatic ZED recommendations on. You should be able to heat a SUPERINSULATED Zero Energy Home with a candle, and cool it with an ice cube. (smile)

Cost effective energy conservation is the FIRST critical step toward off-the-grid energy independence and the eventual elimination of all energy bills year round. It is MUCH MORE PROFITABLE TO SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE THE NEED FOR AIR CONDITIONING, than to provide an expensive local power generation system to run the high capacity air conditioner on a poorly insulated inefficient conventional house.

Radiant barriers with adjacent air gaps are added (preferably on the outside of vertical walls), and on the bottom side of roof decks, where they will not gather dust and become less effective over time. Minimizing total construction cost (materials plus labor) for this effort is of special interest. Many inferior radiant barrier systems are too expensive, too labor intensive, or just plain ineffective.

About the required air gap: Using aluminum foil as a radiant barrier is an interesting problem in thermal mechanics. Aluminum (a metal) is an excellent CONDUCTOR of electricity and of heat. But polished aluminum is also a good reflector of radiant energy. Polished aluminum is not a PERFECT reflector: 97% is reflected; only 3 % is absorbed. The image you see reflected from the surface of polished aluminum is not an exact match for the real image itself – it looks a bit gray – that is the 3% that is being absorbed.

Take a sheet of grocery store aluminum foil out side on a sunny day and hold it between your face and the sun. Most of the sun’s radiation will be blocked, but after a while, the foil will heat up. If you touch the foil to your nose, the highly CONDUCTIVE nature of the aluminum will rapidly transfer heat to your nose – Ouch! That is why we need an air gap next to at least one side of each radiant barrier.

Try this: spray paint one side of the aluminum foil flat black. Point the black side toward the sun. The metal will heat up rapidly, BUT heat will not be radiated rapidly from the shiny side of the aluminum. This is the second principle of a radiant barrier. The first is that polished aluminum is a good reflector of radiant energy. The second is that polished aluminum has “low emissivity.” That means that shiny aluminum does not radiate heat very well, no matter what is happening on the other side. Polished aluminum only emits about 3% of the heat inside it. Hotter aluminum emits more, but it is only about 3%.

Now paint the other side of the aluminum foil flat black. Hold it up to the sun. One side is a good absorber. The other side is a good emitter. Significant radiant energy will be transferred as soon as the aluminum begins to heat up. That is why Ben Franklin’s radiant energy stove had to be black. If it was chrome plated, it would eventually build up so much energy that it would explode, since it could not emit its heat fast enough.

If we sandwich an aluminum foil radiant barrier between two pieces of plywood with no air gap, it will be of almost no benefit at all, since it will efficiently CONDUCT its heat directly from the hotter piece of wood to the colder one. Air gaps on at least one shiny side are critical to any radiant barrier system to block CONDUCTIVE heat transfer. Gluing polished aluminum foil to one side of roof decking and mounting it shiny side down (next to attic air) is an excellent zero-labor-cost thing to do (after the aluminum foil is in place by the product manufacturer on high speed automated machines).

The first radiant barrier in a wall or roof provides the most benefit. Adding multiple radiant barriers is only cost effective when the temperature differential across the space is very large (as in outer space with no atmospheric protection from the sun’s intense radiation, or the bitter cold of a near perfect dark vacuum on the shaded side of an object). Radiant barriers can be stapled to the bottom side of roof rafters, which yields an air gap on both sides, but this is labor intensive and a stronger (more expensive) reinforced aluminum foil radiant barrier is required. Laying aluminum foil on top of existing ceiling insulation is a bad idea, because it will get dusty (like painting it black), and because it will trap humidity in the ceiling insulation and make it less effective. Small perforations in the reinforced aluminum foil do not help this problem enough.

There are many more expensive radiant barrier systems being marketed (bubble wrap with aluminum foil, insulating boards with aluminum foil, etc., but none are as labor free and cost effective for new construction (or roof replacement) as foil glued to the bottom of roof decking.

In some politically progressive warm climates, roof radiant barriers have been added to the building codes. In the past, some power companies subsidized retrofitting radiant barriers into existing homes, since they reduce the power companies’ need to add peak power generation capacity in the summer in areas with rapid new home growth.

But, where radiant barriers are not mandated by law in warm climates, it is the vast majority of mediocre American non-learning homebuilders that are the primary reason most Americans still do NOT have these valuable, inexpensive radiant barrier insulation systems designed into every single home. They only cost roughly ten cents per square foot, and they take ZERO extra labor to install in new construction. NEVER have a home built in a climatic zone that requires air conditioning without radiant barriers in the roof and West wall. On existing homes, they can be added to the attic area, but the labor cost can be high (since working in a conventional attic is an uncomfortable job.

If radiant barriers work well for NASA between +250 and –250 degrees, then cost effective ZED SUPERINSULATION should work even better on your new ZED home on earth (unless you are located inside a volcano - smile). Radiant barrier insulation has been around for half a century, but those who specify construction details, and most builders, still do not understand the economics or zero-labor-cost practices to exploit the synergistic practical pragmatics of radiant barrier insulation systems. Radiant barrier are an important piece of the complete ZED holistic systems engineering puzzle.

Two Small Delta T’s Are Much Better Than One Large Delta T

Some of the walls in a ZED home involve the important use of two thermal barriers with a thermal buffer zone between them (like a solar greenhouse and the SUPERINSULATED roof / attic / ceiling). When the buffer zone is maintained at a temperature BETWEEN the exterior temperature and the interior living quarters temperature, there are TWO SMALL DELTA T’s (temperature differentials) instead of one large one, which yields a MUCH lower heat transfer than single wall conventional construction. Lower delta T’s mean lower conductive, convective, and radiant heat flows – This is a VERY IMPORTANT ZED ENERGY CONSERVATION PRINCIPLE! (Often overlooked by most others)

When a single wall exists between the interior and exterior temperature extremes, special care is taken to minimize heat transfer by conduction, convection, and especially radiation (the most significant heat transfer mechanism). Quality control insures that cavity space insulation is neither too long (compression bends), nor too short (gaps), and that all exterior air gaps are filled, and insulation is NOT going to settle over time, creating future problems.

Undesirable air infiltration (common conventional construction air leaks) are of significant ZED concern. It is difficult to seal a home when it is first built, and over time air leaks gradually become worse. To see how bad it is in your current home, the U.S. Department of Energy recommends lighting an incense stick on a windy day and holding it next to your windows, doors, electrical outlets / switches, plumbing fixtures, and any other spot where there's a possible air path between the interior of your home and the exterior. If your windows “whistle” on windy days it is NOT a sweet sound - you have serious air leak problems that may be difficult to correct. Even interior wall electrical outlets (on the ceiling or vertical interior walls) can leak air to the attic, etc. Recessed ceiling lights are almost always air leak problems. There can be air leaks under the base plate of an exterior wall where it sits on uneven concrete.

If the smoke from the incense stick travels horizontally, you have located an air leak and you'll want to seal up any holes, weather-strip doors and insulate attic floors. When warm interior air leaks out into insulated exterior walls, moisture condenses, which greatly lowers the thermal resistance to heat transfer (lowers the “R-value”). Precut foam insulators can be used to seal behind decorative electrical plates for outlets and switches.

When your fireplace is not in use, remember to keep the damper tightly closed. A loose fitting damper can suck conditioned air from your home year round, which must then be replaced by unconditioned air leaking in through cracks, doors and windows all around you home.

In new construction ZED houses in cold northern climates, where the number of degree days of heating far exceed the cooling requirement, vapor barriers are used on the heated (interior) side of the wall to prevent moisture build up inside the wall cavity space of exterior walls and ceilings. (If humidity condenses and is trapped inside convective-cavity-wall insulation, it acts like a wet sponge and loses most of its conductive R-value, since water is a good thermal transfer medium). ZED homes normally do not allow plumbing or electrical wiring in any exterior wall.

In contrast to cold climates, in warm climates (where the number of degree days of cooling is much larger than the heating requirement), air infiltration barriers (and radiant barriers) are placed on the outside of walls, without interior vapor barriers, since the outside of the wall is the hotter side most of the year.

Air leaks and humidity traps are very bad for several reasons. They are commonplace in poorly supervised conventional home construction, but avoided by ZED quality control. I demand this in my own homes, and you should in yours, since it is frequently overlooked by many builders and tradesmen. Most do not have a clue about the heat transfer mechanisms, and even those who do are anxious to get paid and move on, with a minimum of time invested in each home.

To minimize common air infiltration sources, ZED does NOT allow perforations in exterior walls (for plumbing, electrical wiring, etc.), (or they are minimized and very carefully sealed before they are covered up). This sometimes requires clever placement of interior electrical wiring, fiber optics, and plumbing to avoid running any lines in the thermally sensitive exterior walls. Plumbing and wiring (switches and outlets) can often be run in walls that are perpendicular to the exterior walls. Floor outlets can replace exterior wall electrical outlets, etc. Exterior wall framing techniques at house corners and perpendicular wall intersections often make it difficult or impossible to properly fill the space with insulation. ZED specifications show innovative framing details to make sure this does not happen, and every cubic inch of exterior walls is filled with uncompressed insulation (or less thermally resistant wood).

When a wooden stud wall sits on a concrete foundation, there is often significant air infiltration between the bottom (sill or sole) plate of the wall and the uneven concrete surface. Frame carpenters can rapidly layout the walls on the slab and stand them up with no concern for air leakage between the wood and the uneven concrete. The lack of a good air seal between the bottom plate and the foundation can account for 10% to 50% of the undesirable air leaks, AND pest entry, into the home. This can be eliminated by carefully applying a generous amount of oil-based sealant before standing up the wall. Carpenters do not normally do this, so it requires quality control supervision at the critical moment when this process must be done. After the wall is in place, it is difficult to ensure that the infiltration seal was properly installed.

Another superior technique to obtain a good air-and-moisture seal is to roll out a layer of polyethylene foam “sill plate sealer.” It is slightly wider than the sill plate, and thus can be easily inspected to ensure that the carpenters installed it properly. The polyethylene sill plate sealer foam automatically fills (all but the largest) irregularities between the wood and concrete foundation.

It is critical to essentially eliminate uncontrolled air infiltration to reduce heating and air conditioning costs, prevent water and insect intrusion, and future structural damage (from sill plate rot) when inexpensive wooden stud walls are used, instead of concrete wall construction.

Concrete wall construction normally has much lower air infiltration than wooden stud walls, but it is more expensive. When concrete exterior wall are used, we recommend Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF’s), which add cost, but reduce labor cost to thoroughly insulate the concrete walls’ high thermal mass.

In ZED homes, we don’t normally allow any plumbing or electrical wiring in the exterior walls. This eliminates perforations in the bottom (and top) plates of exterior stud walls, and it greatly simplifies sealing the exterior home envelope against air infiltration.

Structural Insulated Panels

Sometimes, pre-engineered Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) are used to accelerate construction time, minimize framing labor, improve structural “racking strength” in windstorms, and to provide better-sealed better-insulating exterior walls (depending on type and thickness). The older style SIPs used structural Oriented Strand Board (OSB) on either side of foam insulation panels. The insulating foam SIP core is typically expanded polystyrene (EPS), or polyurethane foam. SIP's manufactured with molded expanded polystyrene (MEPS) are environmentally preferable, because the process does emit any ozone-depleting gases. It is estimated that an OSB SIP building might use 30% less wood than a conventionally stick framed house, but SIPS’s cost more than stick framing materials.

A new trend is to make SIPs with durable reinforced fiber cement board (instead of problematic OSB). These new SIPs are more expensive, but they do not need gypsum drywall (sheet rock) added to the inside, or siding added to the outside, saving on both material and construction labor. Synthetic stucco can be immediately applied to cement board SIP’s, and a light colored exterior finish to somewhat reduce radiant energy absorption. We hope that ZED principles will be better integrated with SIPs in the future. One challenging issue is the manufactured SIP lack of an effective radiant barrier + air gap.

If Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) are used in a Zero Energy Home, sill plate sealer is AT LEAST as important as with stick-framed exterior wooden stud walls. Sill plates in conventional wall construction will conform somewhat up and down to an uneven foundation. In contrast, SIP bottom plates are rigidly attached to their rectangular exterior sheathing material. Over the length of an exterior wall section, the concrete foundation may vary a half-inch or more. Gravity makes stick framed wall bottom plates conform to a wavy foundation, but the bottom edge of a SIP cannot conform. Therefore, sill plate sealers may NOT be thick enough to provide a good air seal at the base of SIP walls. The structural insulated panels themselves have much less air infiltration potential than standard stud walls do, but a special effort is required to seal the SIPs to the foundation irregularities, which may require durable filling of quarter-to-half-inch air-and-moisture infiltration gaps in some places. Careful inspection is required before carpet, tile, etc are applied to the inside. An extra bead of caulk on the inside of exterior walls is probably a good idea before adding base board trim. If stucco is applied to the outside of cement board SIP’s, it may fill small gaps but not large ones.

Air Seal Top and Bottom Plate Perforations

Perforations in the top plate of interior stud walls must be carefully sealed to minimize attic air (and humidity) infiltration into, and out of, the innermost living quarters. Many building codes require this, but it is often not done very well.

Care is taken when ceiling elevation changes (such as 8-foot to 10-foot ceiling transitions) to insulate the vertical wall section as well as the ceiling is insulated for conduction, convection and radiation. When there is no attic (as in vaulted cathedral ceilings), radiant barriers + air gaps (or multiple aluminized Mylar / Dacron layers), ventilation paths, SIPs or some other type of SUPERINSULATION are all designed in from the beginning, and verified with quality control BEFORE they are covered up with interior wall board.

Air ducts (if any) and ventilation convection-flow air paths are designed into conditioned interior spaces, so any air leaks that may occur during construction, or over time, are not lost to the outside. Air ducts are NEVER run in unconditioned attics, garages, etc. in a ZED home. In a two-story Zero Energy Home, the air ducts are almost always run between the first and second floor. In fact, the entire space can be properly sealed, insulated, and used like a large, low-resistance air plenum, with air registers easily located anywhere on the first story ceiling and second story floor. This can greatly reduce or eliminate the labor and materials for conventional air ducts. Care must be taken to insure that the floor trusses or floor joist cross blocks do not interfere with convective airflow in any direction, and that turbulent air flow constrictions are not created anywhere. (You don’t want your ZED home whistling “Dixie.” - smile)

Hot Water Clustering

Solar hot water tanks and hot water lines are carefully placed and insulated to minimize heat loss in the winter, and to avoid heating the house interior unnecessarily in the summer. The distance between hot water source(s) and the end points of hot water usage are minimized with three dimensional plumbing cluster design (shortest run and minimum plumbing possible – single or multiple stories).

Air Leak Instrumented Inspection

After everything has been done to seal the home against air infiltration leaks, post-construction air pressure and vacuum tests can identify systemic construction flaws that can be corrected in each individual house BEFORE it is occupied. This information can also be used as quality control education and training material for houses built, supervised and inspected by the same people in the future. Subcontractors need to understand the impact of poor quality workmanship, and the higher costs to repair their mistakes after the fact. This improves overall quality assurance for each home built, and especially for those constructed in the future. The goal is to correct construction errors before the sale is complete, and to avoid making similar errors in the future of an expanding Zero Energy Home construction business. We also want to design future construction systems that minimize the opportunity to make energy-losing construction mistakes.

Foundation Insulation and Shading

Have you ever noticed what happens just outside a Northern climate home when there is a light dusting of snow on the ground? The snow melts away from the house. This is because the concrete of your foundation is very thermally conductive, and so is the moist Earth. You are paying energy to heat your house, which is lost all winter long to melting snow and warming the outside Earth. To reduce this negative effect, we place at least one inch (more in some climates) of EXTRUDED waterproof foam insulation (NOT Styrofoam bead board which allows water between the beads, freezes and breaks up) on the outside of your home’s foundation thermal mass. The colder the climate in the winter, the more important foundation insulation becomes.

In warm climates like Southern Florida, insulating the foundation can also be important. When the outside air temperature becomes uncomfortable (especially above 90 degrees Fahrenheit). It can conduct heat into the home though the foundation. Tile floors (which are common in Florida) then conduct and radiate summer heat directly into the interior of the house. This becomes even truer if the hot afternoon sunlight shines directly on a Western masonry wall, sitting on a highly-conductive concrete slab foundation.

Therefore, in both Northern and Southern climates, ZED homes insulate the foundation to minimize heat loss in the winter, and heat gain in the summer through the otherwise highly conductive, high-thermal-mass concrete. In hot Southern climates, it is important to have shrubbery (or other shading devices) to minimize direct sunlight on the highly-conductive, high-thermal-mass masonry and concrete components of the home. (See Contractor’s Checklist for specific detailed recommendations)

When concrete walls are used, they should be insulated on the OUTSIDE, so they participate in the temperature stabilization thermal mass of the interior living quarters. Sometimes, insulated foam concrete forms are used to minimize labor and provide superior wall insulation, with no air leaks and minimum material and construction time. Concrete wall porosity, condensation, mold, mildew and other allergen prevention topics are issues that must be resolved, particularly when part of the home is Earth buffered (set into a hillside) – discussed later. Well-insulated concrete exterior walls are often much tighter (with far less air infiltration) than leaky walls made of wooden studs with insulation that is too short, or too long (compressed). Wooden stud walls are often constructed with too much, improperly placed wood that creates uninsulated infiltration air gaps.

Concrete roofs or Earth buffering with landscaping on TOP of the home are also possibilities. A variety of options exist for greenery on any home’s roof. Integrated, living, “green roofs” are an ancient concept from man’s desire to stay cool in the summer, and to live in harmony with nature. They are “growing in popularity” (smile) as an essential part of sustainable “green architecture.”

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon with lush roof gardens are among the earliest green roof records, built around 3,000 years ago. Earth-sheltered huts dating from the Viking era were found in Ireland and Scotland. Around 1000 A.D., sod-covered roofs were used in Iceland and Scandinavia. Early 19th century settlers in Canada and the Northern United States used living grass roofs. Frank Lloyd Wright promoted the benefits of roof gardens. In the 1930’s there were the Rockefeller Roof Gardens in New York, and the Derry and Tom's Garden in London (the modern Kensington Roof Gardens). Green roofs are now found around the world. They are a great match for ZED objectives of low energy consumption in harmony with nature.

Greenery on the roof provides natural evaporative cooling that is superior to simple shade. Selecting plants is a critical issue, with much to be learned from green roof project history. The elevated view while maintaining and enjoying a roof garden is often one of the best in (or on) your home. A solarium or South-glass conservatory can be on the South side of your house, or on top of a flat roof (like a “cupola”).

In hot climates, light exterior colors on Zero Energy Homes are preferred. Bright white pitched metal “galvalum” or white tile roofs are desirable “cool roofs” (if a green roof is not used), to block the high summer sun. Any light-colored roof is a bit better than dark roofs - White roofs are not always required.

Radiant barriers on the bottom side of roof decking provide impressive lowering of attic temperatures in the summer. Total heat flow through the roof can be reduced by 40% with a single radiant barrier plus an air gap (of at least 3/4"). Some type of green roof, or attic radiant shield, is mandatory in climates with a significant summer cooling requirement. At only a few cents per square foot, radiant barrier roofs also provide a small benefit in the winter, by reflecting heat loss back down toward warm ceilings.

Landscaping, trellises or shade screen are designed in to minimize western-wall-and-window solar radiation exposure. Window materials and interior window insulation are part of ZED holistic comprehensive integrated energy systems engineering. Functional exterior window shutters, or easily removable windstorm glass protection, is part of the ZED comprehensive home integrity design.

Energy Efficient Windows

Glass has been used for thousands of years (since ancient Roman times) to allow daylight into buildings, while providing limited weather protection. The development of the mass production “float glass” process in the 1950s allowed economical flat glass. Nearly all of today’s architectural glass is produced by the high-volume float glass process. Some very large commercial buildings are now completely sheathed in glass “curtain walls.”

Glass is dense, and it is a relatively good “CONDUCTOR” of heat (into or out of a building). When the outside temperature is different than the inside temperature, inside air that touches exterior glass losses or gains heat rapidly. The larger the temperature differential, the faster the air touches the glass, the faster the undesirable heat transfer through the glass.

Glass is intentionally designed to be transparent (or translucent), and therefore, glass allows visible light “RADIATION” to pass immediately through it.

Air leaks around windows can cause significant “CONVECTIVE” heat transfer, summer and winter. The is added to the CONVECTION CURRENTS that are created when exterior air touches exterior glass at a significantly different temperature (heat level).

The windows in a conventional house are often the largest source of undesirable heat gain or loss in your entire home. They can account for one-third to two-thirds of all of your total heating and cooling requirements, depending on many different design-and-construction factors, such as: size, number, type, material, location, orientation, installation, age, R-value (resistance to CONDUCTIVE heat flow), window coverings, drapery operation, etc.

The heat flow through windows is a combination of direct CONDUCTION, CONVECTION, INFILTRATION, and RADIATION. You can spend a small amount of time and money and improve the thermal performance of most windows in existing buildings, or you can spend a lot of money entirely replacing all existing windows, and STILL have them account for a major portion of your heating and cooling requirement, if the uninformed designer of your conventional home put them in the wrong place for your climate.

From a purely thermal perspective, there is no such thing as an “outstanding window.” Some energy efficient windows are clearly much better than others, to be sure. BUT, all windows are thermal holes in the undesirable performance of any building’s weather protection heat transfer envelope. They create serious potential air, water, vapor, and radiant barrier perforations in the exterior of the building envelope.

The “R-value” of a window is only one of several important measurements about how rapidly heat is transferred through it. The larger the R-value, the higher the resistance to CONDUCTIVE heat flow.

Window RADIATIANT heat transfer is a VERY different issue than CONDUCTIVE R-value, which we will explain more fully below. RADIANT energy solar gain (if properly designed into a Zero Energy Home) can be very beneficial on a cold winter day. For the purpose of a South facing solarium, sunroom, greenhouse, the MINIMUM resistance to RADIANT solar gain is desirable (on cold, clear winter days only).

CONDUCTION, CONVECTION, and RADIATIANT heat transfer (through even the very best energy-efficient windows) can be extremely UNDESIRABLE during temperature extremes on cold winter nights AND hot summer days. To say that maximum R-value windows are always the best design decision is a bad oversimplification of a complex ZED issue. Year round holistic ZED systems engineering of windows and all other building energy components is critical to developing an off-the-grid Zero Energy Home.

Common windows are generally less than a CONDUCTIVE R-value of 2. Expensive energy efficient windows can have an R-value of 3 or a bit more for exotic expensive designs. Many older windows in existing inefficient American homes are less than R-value 1.

After World War II, the technology of extruding aluminum window frames developed and rapidly gained popularity. By the 1990's, aluminum-framed windows accounted for two thirds of the window market. Wood, vinyl and steel-framed windows comprise most of the remaining one third. The metal frames of many existing windows can be highly conductive and have a conductive R-value that is NEARLY ZERO. Recent attempts to create a “thermal break” in aluminum window frames have focused on polyurethane and nylon, for improved thermal performance. Disadvantages of thermal breaks include inability to continuously weld frames and reduced frame strength and stiffness. Insulating thermal breaks can shrink over time, create air leaks and weaken the window.

When new windows are installed, proper placement of infiltration insulation in the voids at the window perimeter, and maintaining continuity of the air barrier, can reduce drafts and CONVECTIVE energy loss around windows. But this process requires close supervision at critical times, BEFORE the installation is covered up and can no longer be inspected, (until after the envelope is complete, and it is much too late to inexpensively correct improper window perimeter insulation).

On a cold winter night, much condensation moisture forms on cold window glass, and especially on cold metal window frames. Over time, frequent condensation can encourage the growth of mold, bacteria, odors, and wood rot. The material used to construct window frames and their related seals can have a major impact on energy efficiency, comfort, weather resistance durability, and health.

The rate of RADIANT heat transfer depends on the temperature differential of two surfaces. Surfaces do NOT have to be in contact for significant RADIATION to take place. For example, solar RADIATION takes place through extremely long distances, through the vacuum of outer space.

Colder surfaces draw RADIANT heat away warmer surfaces. If your body is close to a cold window, YOU will RADIATE heat to the window, and become unevenly chilled, causing muscular asymmetry that can lead to painful pinched nerves, etc. This can happen while you are awake or asleep. It is most often felt in the back muscles, shoulders and neck.

In the summer, hot windows radiate heat to you, making you uncomfortably warm on one side, even in an air conditioned room. The effect of solar radiation is most obvious when sunlight comes directly through a window onto your skin. But, the same thing happens at a slower rate for warm glass on the shady side of a building, when the air contacting the outside of the glass is warmer than the interior air. Being close to exterior glass can be uncomfortable both summer and winter for a variety of reasons.

Air infiltration is a major problem around most windows, especially older ones, and poorly installed new ones. On windy days, some windows actually “whistle” with the high volume of pressurized outside air leaking through them. On the downwind side of a building, a powerful vacuum can suck comfortable conditioned air out of the building, which must be replaced by unconditioned exterior air (normally from the upwind side of the building).

Unconditioned outside air that leaks into your home on extreme temperature days requires a lot of expensive energy to heat or cool it to a comfortable interior temperature, thus accounting for a significant portion of your heating and cooling bills. Sealing gaps, cracks, old gaskets and seals around windows can lower your utility bills, but not eliminate them in a conventional home. Storm windows can help, but they are not a complete solution. Storm windows require weep holes at the base to drain condensation that can form between old and new window glass.

Incense stick smoke trails can help you locate any remaining unfilled air gaps that are making you house uncomfortable and robbing you unnecessarily of expensive heating and cooling energy.

Even new energy efficient windows that are properly installed and well sealed against air infiltration are still like gaping holes in the thermal envelope of your home. An expensive R 3+ window still has far less resistance to CONDUCTIVE heat flow than an ordinary poorly insulated exterior wall, which is probably at least R 10, without the visible light transparent RADIANT characteristics that windows have.

Any window that passes visible light, also allows RADIANT energy heat flow, which in many cases can be far greater than CONDUCTIVE, CONVECTIVE, and INFLITRATION heat transfer through windows put together. The very best energy efficient windows are still the source of a major portion of heating and cooling requirements in a conventional home. This fact cannot be avoided. The price you pay for natural daylight in your home can be extremely expensive (for the “free” sunlight that you receive). I think it is quite funny when people pay the high operating cost of windows, and then cover them up with multi-layered drapes that only allow diffused light to pass through, but you can’t even see the view (of the house next door, etc.) through them.

In a SUPERINSULATED Zero Energy Home, windows are a major design factor, which must be dealt with intelligently, using ZED holistic systems engineering principles, plus very careful construction-and-window-treatment supervision.

A lot of money can be wasted on high-tech exotic windows that are better than R 3, and still NOT obtain the desired result of a SUPERINSULATED Zero Energy Home. The elegant intelligence of ZED is that we have learned inexpensive tricks of the trade to achieve major reduction in undesirable windows heat transfer, without using super expensive exotic material windows, which may not be very cost effective in the long run.

Let’s consider intelligent window design hypothetically, and then proceed to ZED practical pragmatics.

Why do we have windows in the first place? From a purely engineering perspective, a home would be much better insulated if it had NO WINDOWS AT ALL, but very few people would appreciate a windowless home. I prefer a home where the entire South side has a high percentage of glass (where this is appropriate climatically).

1. Windows allow natural daylight into a room. Cheery daylight has been scientifically shown to improve mood, attitude, alertness and productivity. A lack of daylight has the opposite effect. In the winter, when the number of hours of daylight decrease, or when access to a window is denied for long periods of time, many people have noticeable mood swings and mild depression (some much more severe). This also happens to day sleepers with nighttime jobs. Have you ever seen a security guard asleep on the third shift (I have.). Good windows and cheerful daylight are clinically associated with happiness, productivity, and good health.

2. Windows provide a view of attractive natural seasonal and diurnal (24-hour) exterior changes, which give us a sense of time and space in our ever-changing world. Natural human biorhythms, the light-sensing pineal gland, optical cortex activity, etc. all evolved to be dependent on daily and seasonal varying cycles of daylight and darkness. Traditionally, in the office environment, people in senior positions have a “window office.” Big wigs have corner offices with even more windows. There is a sense of professional pride and respect that goes with having one or more windows. A better view is much more valuable. Tall energy inefficient buildings are created (with a huge amount of floor space wasted on elevator shafts) to create more window offices. In contrast to private window offices, when all employees have equal access to exterior windows, there is more of a cooperative team spirit, than when windows are part of a hierarchical chain of command “pecking order” subordination domination scheme. School children have been shown to perform much better in classrooms with abundant daylight and natural exterior views. Daydreaming about the lovely bird singing in the tree outside of one’s window actually improves human intellectual performance.

3. Operable windows used to be an important source of fresh air during certain seasons and times of day. But today, open windows allow the entry of undesirable dust, mold, pollen, and tiny insects that are commonly found in unconditioned outside air most of the year, so most windows stay closed most of the time (even though indoor air pollution can become quite bad). When the weather is nice outside, the pollen and mold allergen counts are usually the highest level of the year. Windows are not the best answer for fresh air intake. We will discuss Automated, Filtered, Controlled Fresh Air Intake below.

4. Windows provide an alternate means of egress – an emergency exit path in case of fire, etc. Most building codes REQUIRE two means of egress in bedrooms, usually consisting of the primary door, and a window of specified minimum size, even on the second floor of a home.

5. South facing vertical glass helps heat a room on clear cold winter days. (Below we will discuss the significant negative thermal characteristics of roof-angled glass, and glass on sides other than the South side of a building.)

Natural Daylight

Ever since the campfire, candles, gaslights, and Thomas Edison’s first electric light bulb, innovators have been trying to imitate the light from the sun in areas and at times when the sun is not shining. Photographers, videographers, and behavioral scientist have extensively studied human reactions to the “color temperature” of variations of artificial daylight.

Edison’s century-old incandescent light was warm and yellow, like the light from a candle or camp fire. More efficient early florescent light was too stark and bluish – human skin showed flaws and looked bad under the first florescent lights, but florescent light made workers more alert than did incandescent lighting. Recently, the first ultrabright LED (light emitting diode) white lights have had a similar stark bluish color temperature as did the early florescent lights.

Modern florescent lights have new internal phosphors that give the consumer multiple color temperature options, by selecting different tubes. LED now have red / green / blue (RGB) options that allow a light fixture to be adjusted to any color of the rainbow full visual spectrum, to set any mood, any ambience, any time desired. Flexible LED’s can be even more efficient than are florescent lights. They certainly allow more artistic architectural creativity. They are even used as huge outdoor television screens of thirty feet or more in size. Efficient LED’s have the added advantage that they are direct current (DC) devices, which is a perfect match for DC photovoltaic systems, without needing the energy loss of DC-to-AC power inverters.

Obsolete extremely-inefficient incandescent lights are no longer used in ZED homes. Incandescent alternatives cost a bit more initially, but they very quickly pay for themselves in reduced operating costs, and longer life spans, which greatly reduces the effort required to replace incandescent bulbs that literally burn themselves up at regular intervals.

The point is, we can now provide adjustable intensity-and-color artificial daylight for as many hours a day as desired, without needing windows.

South facing windows are a beneficial source of natural daylight. Intelligent (unconventional) ZED floor plans can allow natural daylight from a South facing solarium to fill every room in the home. Sensor-based, computer controlled RGB LED lighting systems can automatically sense sunset, and gradually change RGB power levels to provide stable room color temperature during the sunset-to-darkness daily transition, if desired. Conversely, we can create an artificial sunrise or sunset at any time of day, based on time, room occupancy, or anything that can be programmed into the flexible control system. South facing windows are a good thing. They can be controlled with motorized window treatments. But windows are not needed to provide a natural daylight-like visual appearance in a ZED home, any time of any day. This reduces or eliminates the argument for windows in undesirable locations like skylights or West facing, just for the purpose of providing natural daylight.

A solid windowless interior wall can have a beautiful swag drapery with a sheer that appears to cover a large exterior window, which is actually an artificial daylight source that is produced with clever use of computer controlled RGB LED’s on any schedule you like. The same thing can be done to create an artificial skylight wherever needed in the home or office. For a few hundred dollars ZED can provide most anything you can imagine, with requiring windows in the wrong location of your home.

Window Views of the World

Wealthy people pay a lot of good money for a building lot with a great view of forests, land / water boundaries, mountains, cityscapes, etc. Architects then have to work hard (and often fail) to design a home with windows in the right place to take advantage of the natural views. That is all well and good, but many people cannot afford a million dollar view, or even if they can, the energy expense of large windows on the wrong side of a house can be very large indeed.

Today, we have a simple solution that was not available a decade ago. Absolutely any desirable view can be artificially created anywhere in the home with a large HDTV flat panel (LCD, etc.) display, or an inexpensive 10-foot-wide video projection system that costs well under $1,000 ($500 by 2008).

The artificial window image can be anything that can be captured on video – prerecorded, live from anywhere on the Internet, or even computer generated interactive graphics – a technology that is rapidly expanding from realistic science fiction motion picture technology merged with high-performance video games.

Any desired image appear on any wall of any-or-all rooms in the home. The artificial window system can have a motion detector to instantly come on whenever someone enters the room. Modern LCD displays use very little energy, compared to old CRT television displays. It certainly is much less than the very large 24-hour heat gain / loss through conventional home windows.

Your artificial windows can optionally have a fine drapery around it to make it look like an exterior window. The drapery can be motorized, just like those on exterior windows, creating any atmosphere of any virtual reality that you would like, without paying a million dollars for a construction lot with a nice view.

Your video window wall can display sunrise / sunset from a beach with breeze blowing through the palm trees. We can place hidden fans, fragrances, and surround sound for a total realism effect. A room sized display can include a cracking fireplace, or a mountain top view of a ski slope, with our without snowfall, or a spectacular view from the orbiting international space station, circling the globe every 92 minutes – you pick whatever you want, whenever and wherever you want it. Project any number of panoramic imagines on any number of room walls, and even the ceiling, if you like.

Inefficient expensive windows looking out on expensive rare views are simply NOT needed in today’s world of video virtual reality. As large screen broadband communication technology price performance continues, and American converts to 100% digital HDTV, the possibilities are endless, in an imaginary future world that has not yet begun to be fully realized. With an inexpensive video camera, you artificial window will become a video conference system for regular international family visits at no incremental usage cost, or for geographically distributed teleconferencing. ZED can make it all happen, in a coordinated, fully integrated, holistic home design.

On the exterior of your home, we can add artificial window facades that give a ZED home conventional street appeal, without high energy losing real windows. The magic of modern artificial windows is far superior to conventional home windows. Something similar will probably be part of the new permanent colonies that we will soon construct on the Moon and Mars. Why not the very best in your new ZED home TODAY?

You can live the ZED Abundant Energy luxury life of a Moonie, or a Martian colonist right now. You can relive an expensive vacation all year long, or live in places you have never been, or that don’t even really exist anywhere but in your imagination. Artificial windows can turn any fantasies into believable realities inside your advanced ZED home. When you get tired of one artificial window view, change to another as often as you like.

Automated, Filtered, Controlled Fresh Air Intake

ZED houses are “SUPERINSULATED” (discussed above) with advanced engineering principles, to minimize heating and cooling requirements using ALL of the multiple (poorly understood by the majority) mechanisms of heat transfer. The best Zero Energy Homes are ALSO fresh-air-intake-controlled to take advantage of the many significant times (Spring and Fall days or nights) when exterior temperatures are mild and interior thermal mass needs to be preconditioned in anticipation of thermal lag predictions a few hours from now. When the replacement air is of a significantly different temperature than the comfortable air being forced out, a simple air-to-air heat exchanger can be used to precondition the controlled fresh intake air.

In contrast, conventional houses that lack automated controls for fresh air intake can retain excess daytime heat long after the sun sets and the outside temperature is more comfortable than the inside. Commercial buildings have automated fresh air intakes. Why not your Zero Energy Home? ZED cost-effectively solves this problem, making a Zero Energy Home more comfortable and pleasant 7/24, without conventional air conditioning energy consumption.

Second Means of Egress

Having eliminated the need for many of the bad windows in a ZED home, we now come down to the issue of emergency exits from bedrooms, etc. Are windows the best way to do this? Probably not. The high energy expense of windows as emergency exits is simply not justified in a ZED home. Inexpensive well-sealed emergency exit doors (or hatches) can be provided, which are normally only used in an emergency (which should never happen in the life of the house). They are not being constantly opened and closed, so their air infiltration seals should not deteriorate over time. They do not have any glass, so they are not a constant thermal hole in the exterior envelope of the home. They are merely one egress option to consider in a Zero Energy Home.

But what if we still want some real windows in places other than the South side of our home?

The worst place for glass is on the roof / ceiling (discussed in great detail below). In hot climates that require air conditioning, the second worst place for glass is the West side, where the sun shines brightest during the hottest part of the day.. The East side produces the same number of BTU’s of solar gain as the West, but it does it in the morning when it is more tolerable. In cold (Northern hemisphere) climates, Northern glass can lose a lot of heat by CONDUCTION / CONVECTION “wind chill” factor. It is particularly important that the window quality, installation, and window treatment do everything that is cost effective to reduce undesirable heat transfer loss and gain.

For precise window details, options, economics and specific recommendations, see our House Plan Specifications and our Construction Checklist for your particular location. (Work in Progress - We will be adding more to the section very soon.)

Passive Solar Heating, and Solarium Esthetics

In geographical locations with a significant winter heating requirement (most of the continental U.S. except Southern Florida), we use passive solar heating – vertical South-to-Southeast-facing glass for the lowest-cost direct solar gain, ONLY in the winter.

The amount of South-facing solar heating glass is determined by the local solar gain potential, and the degree-day heating requirement in the winter. It is even needed in the Northern half of tropical Florida, where the winter temperature sometimes drops below freezing when the frigid Canadian jet stream swings South.

In the past, passive solar designers have often used too much glass and been surprised at the need to exhaust excess heat on very cold clear winter days. In a warm humid climate like Florida, passive solar techniques have to be used very carefully to avoid excess solar heat gain in the Spring and Fall.

We have observed that winter solar gain increases due to reflection from the low angle of the sun through vertical South-facing glass, when snow is on the ground. This is a desirable winter heating characteristic of passive solar design that architects need to understand when sizing solar glass in snowy climates.

Two simple inexpensive 1980’s ZED homes with integrated solariums

The passive solar South-facing glass is often isolated from the interior living quarters of a Zero Energy Home, with an esthetically-creative solarium (greenhouse / sunroom / conservatory), which may contain tropical plants, fresh fruit/vegetables/flowers, a hot tub, swim spa, pool, fish pond, waterfall, or sporting / exercise area for ping pong, racquetball, basketball, gymnasium, exercise equipment, etc. Sunrooms can be very inexpensive, with a dirt floor for planting, or as formal and elegant as you like.

I enjoy natural wood interiors, but the walls can be anything you prefer. The solarium is a great place for sunny meals and starlight entertaining at night. Music and a dance floor are romantic and usable when outside temperatures are too hot or too cold. The fact that that your solar greenhouse helps reduce heating AND cooling energy requirements for the entire home is an incidental side benefit to some prospective homebuyers. (But, it is of primary importance to ZED.)

Many tropical and flowering plants (which grow well in the solar greenhouse) release pure oxygen and pleasant fragrance into the air. Both are healthy and pleasant environmental factors, in harmony with nature viewed through the Southern glass wall.

Many potential homebuyers, who do not have a clue about the energy issues in our lovely brilliant Zero Energy Homes, but they love the great beauty, sunshine, and unique esthetic creativity that only ZED can cost effectively provide.

The greenhouse solarium acts as a year round thermal buffer zone between the house interior and the outside temperature - with two small delta T’s (temperature differentials across the inner and outer glass walls), instead of one large delta T (across a single exterior wall). This thermal buffer greatly lowers interior / exterior heat transfer along the longest (South) side of the house.

A movable floor can cover a well-designed solar-heated swimming pool, swim spa or hot tub, to nearly eliminate undesirable humidity and evaporative heat loss, AND add entertainment and usability flexibility to the solarium, providing additional floor space when not using the pool. The movable floor can optionally align with the rest of the sunroom floor, making the pool disappear altogether when not in use.

The passive solar glass South wall is normally the least expensive wall in the house – often using low-cost high-volume 34” x 76” tempered single pane patio door glass (with low lead content in the glass). Our inexpensive off-the-shelf insulated weatherproof glass mounting system minimizes installation labor, materials, and total wall construction time-and-cost.

Optional “window quilts” can greatly reduce single pane sunroom glass heat loss on cold winter nights, and heat gain on hot summer days, to minimize solarium heating and cooling energy requirements. The window quilts lay flat against the window frame to reduce convective heat loss. They can include a radiant barrier (similar to that used in the International Space Station exterior and in astronaut space walk suits). The simplest form of window quilts are operated manually with a pull cord.

As an option, automated solar-powered motors can control window insulation throughout your custom ZED home. Inexpensive micro-computer-controlled motor switches can then operate window treatments in an unattended mode, based on programmable states like: available sunlight, storage battery power levels, time of day, internal / external temperature, cloud cover, day of week, etc. This maximizes the benefit of window insulation versus solar gain, without requiring the home to be occupied.

Our first 1979 Zero Energy Home required the owner to do things like opening and closing drapes to maximize its performance. We quickly learned that automating such things simplifies the ZED abundant energy lifestyle, without asking the occupants to even be home, or understand when and why to do simple things.

For example, If want to sleep late on a clear cold winter Sunday, let your ZED system automatically open your solarium drapes when the sun warms your South window wall, but leave your bedroom drapes closed until you want to wake up. However you would like it to work, ZED can make it happen, and show you how to set it up and change it yourself.

On a winter weekday, you may have to go to work before the sun comes up. Let your ZED system open your drapes at the appropriate time, when the sun is shining brightly, and close them if there is a heavy overcast in the late afternoon. The intelligent sensor controls will maximize the performance of your passive solar system, and have your home just the right comfort level when you arrive home. You can even “talk to your house” over the Internet or a phone and tell it anything you want to monitor or change. Web cams are also an obvious option to help you monitor what happens in and around your home.

During the summer, you may want the drapes closed whenever no one is home, and only open to allow cheery sunlight to lift everyone’s spirit during the day. Your automated window treatments can even act as a spectacular alarm clock to help you be alert when it is time to get up and begin another happy day. You can specify individual drapes to open, to minimize early morning direct sun in your face.

The investment in things like automated window treatment controls can be justified by improved overall system thermal performance, simplified energy-abundant lifestyle, and the high-tech esthetics.

Interior Glass Walls and Mirror Esthetics

Living in a Zero Energy Home with a comprehensively-integrated beautiful ZED solarium has given us many uniquely-creative interior-decorating concepts, which are now being exploited by www.FloridaDecorators.org

Our enlightened esthetic artistic goal is normally to have every room in our Zero Energy Home designs filled with wonderful sunshine and pleasant views through the solarium / conservatory, outward toward the Southern glass wall exterior view of nature.

Sometimes, this is accomplished with single-pane inexpensive tempered patio door glass, with our simplest mounting system. It may involve glass walls on both sides of a hall, with interior window treatments for nighttime privacy in bedrooms.

1979 Zero Energy Home - Inner Glass Wall
Notice how the solarium sunlight aligns with the interior glass

Careful ZED analysis oriented the glass precisely to make this happen
By design, high-angle sunlight cannot do this in the summer
The sunroom is a thermal buffer zone between the interior & exterior

Sealed convection fireplace uses “outside air only” for combustion
There is a thermal break between the fireplace stone and outside
Small shaded western window, with exterior “Shade Screen”
Landscaping shades the West wall during hot summer afternoons

Imagine a living room with significant glass and a beautiful view on only one Southern wall. It can be framed like a gorgeous animated seasonal mural with a lovely (motorized) window treatment, and become the focal point of the sunny interior room.

We try to design our entry doors to all rooms so you face the South wall view, and your attention is first drawn outside to Mother Nature’s ever-changing seasons. Your interest is then drawn back inside. We try to use interior Earth tones that harmonize well with the natural exterior views to the South.

Experienced ZED decorators know how to do this quite well. Those that have not been exposed to integrated conservatory solariums usually do not, but we can assist them with ideas and photographs, without inhibiting their own creative imagination. We appreciate many divergent thoughts and opinions about how to decorate our unconventional lovely Zero Energy Home designs.

Our intelligent customers have great imaginations. We have appreciated and consolidated what we have learned from them. We will gladly help you meet your “Lifestyle Decorating” goals. Our mastery of ZED technology gives us the ability to efficiently exploit far more glass than you have probably ever seen on any other home.

We also love to work with Magic Mirrors, and often have been complimented on our inexpensive dramatic interior decorating creativity. Imagine again a room with glass covering most of only the South-facing wall. If you would appreciate an even-more-open expansive atmosphere, we can add inexpensive ceiling-to-floor, wall-to-wall mirrors on one or two walls that are perpendicular-and-adjacent to the South wall windows. The mirror reflection gives you a different view angle through the glass behind you. The resulting brilliant magician’s illusion is of a room with two or three walls of solid glass, when there is actually only one. The fact that the view angle of the reflection does not match the primary window view makes this illusion even more realistic and panoramic, as shown in this photo. Dramatic draperies can enhance this visual effect and make it even more attractive, as window treatments are amplified in the perpendicular reflection. A little bit of luxurious material looks like a lot.

1980 Small Dinning Room with Mirror Wall
There are only two glass windows in this room
New home – Window treatments not yet added
Draperies will pull back to the left side of the room

We also work with mirrors that are cleverly set at odd, non-perpendicular angles. In the Northeast or Northwest corner of a room, two odd-angle mirrors can make a single tree look like a forest, with the South wall view of you behind many trees. A few tiny ceiling lights look like a field of stars on a clear night. You have probably never seen this before, unless you have toured one of our spectacular home designs.

Our creative success does not stop with the elimination of energy bills. We are also award winning Home Beautification Imagineers. A camera has not been invented that can capture the excitement you will feel the first time you enter one of these outstanding Zero Energy DesignTM Homes.

Your next home will probably be your best lifetime investment ever. Do not let an inexperienced architect experiment with your money, and take costly trial-and-error risks at your expense. I’ve seen it happen many times since 1980. A little bit of project consulting time is well worth a significant improvement in customer satisfaction.

Arrogant architects with no ZED experience or training have tried to imitate our thermal performance and spectacular esthetics WITHOUT our detailed specifications or Construction Checklists, and they almost always fail to satisfy their frustrated customers. Lack of experience without seeking the wisdom of past experience is ALWAYS FALSE ECONOMY, in my humble opinion.

No wait a minute! There is no reason for me to display a false sense of modesty. Let me be frank about my 25-year-long successful track record. You should rely on a ZED expert with decades of expertise, and a wonderful “bag of new tricks” IF you seek consistent success in the kind of things that we are the world’s experts at doing. For example:

This is a primary NEVER-VIOLATE ZED MANDATE. It may look like a good solar energy thing to do (to a person who is clueless about ZED) but,

(1) Roof-angled glass is a huge heat loser on winter nights, when warm air rises to touch the low-thermal-resistance highly-conductive glass. It is like a thermal hole in your ceiling and roof, allowing enormous, expensive heat flow.

(2) Roof-angled glass is also a huge heat gainer on hot sunny summer days, when the scorching sun is nearly straight overhead for hours.

Why are these things not intuitively obvious to everyone? This is the plain and simple absolute scientific truth, often overlooked by those who should know better.

VERY BAD DESIGN SUMMER AND WINTER !
These two stupid houses were costly failed experiments - by others
who blindly thought they were improving on our own ZED expertise.

These arrogant non-learning architects thought they were wonderful,
BUT - They used more expensive energy than conventional houses, and
still they were very uncomfortable on winter nights and summer days.
It is very expensive to remove the glass from the roof and then insulate.

In the summer, huge exhaust fans with fresh air intakes cannot possibly make a sunroom with roof-angled glass cooler than the outside air temperature. However, in a ZED solarium with only vertical South facing glass, the peak interior air temperature is lower than the peak outside air temperature, by using intelligent design and NO ROOF-ANGLED GLASS EVER! This is an essential part of the ZED thermal buffer zone concept of two small Delta T’s to greatly reduce undesirable heat flow.

This dumb photo appeared on the National Association of Home Builders’ website during the International Builders Show in Orlando, 2005. (They have since removed this webpages.) This picture demonstrates catastrophically STUPID energy wasting architecture! The 6 windows face South, but they present a large glass area directly to the exterior through a single wall – One large Delta T, results in large heat flow on cold winter nights and hot summer days through many sq.ft. or glass.

The large Delta T inefficient South wall is not the worst design flaw in this NAHB photo. Notice the huge West-facing skylight. On winter nights, warm air will rise to touch the low-thermal-resistance skylight, and transfer a thousands of BTU’s of heat, which will then be radiated wastefully into the night sky.

BUT the very worst thing that will happen in this insane house will be during the hottest part of the summer afternoon, when the sun will be nearly perpendicular to the skylight, creating a terrible summer solar furnace, requiring huge amounts of expensive air conditioning electricity, and still the room will be very uncomfortable until long after dark. A more efficient high-SEER air conditioner will NOT solve this easily avoidable energy disaster. The owners will eventually have to pay significant money to have the skylight removed and thick insulation added where it once was.

Even Dilbert would be truly amazed that this lunacy was FEATURED prominently by the NAHB, instead of being ridiculed for what it really is – a gigantic waster of expensive energy during a national energy crisis. This thoughtless design also produces an uncomfortable house no matter where you set the thermostat, or how much money you are willing to spend on utility bills. I cannot think of one good thing that this design does for the house, other than to embarrass the arrogant, uninformed architect, and serve as an expensive lesson of WHAT NOT TO DO!

Here is the clueless official position of the “NAHB Research Center”, published on their website in February 2006: “… with continued federal research and development programs to lower the cost of advanced energy-efficiency building technologies, the ZEH concept will BEGIN to diffuse into the U.S. home market as early as 2012.”

The NAHB STILL essentially refuses to acknowledge that Zero Energy Homes even existed over 25 years ago, and have been working wonderfully ever since. These homes were presented widely to NAHB members in Jimmy Carter’s early 1980’s Energy Expositions (where I was the largest exhibitor and most popular presenter). The NAHB blind dumb and stupid position is STILL essentially, “wait until the technology gets better next decade.” How outrageously ignorant the NAHB is of the decades-old ZED / ZEH truth!

The obvious NAHB failure to recognize the serious skylight energy flaw in this featured house (above) is characteristic of the uneducated people who build most American homes today. They are totally clueless about ZED - unable to recognized or correct the error of their ways.

The NAHB was exposed to Jimmy Carter’s Energy Exposition publicity about my homes in 1980. A few of their members bought my books and tried to get through to the NAHB leadership, but their managers were intransigent and refuse to change business-as-usual for more than 25 years. As documented in 2006, the NAHB STILL holds on to their unjustifiable resistance to change to this day.

New conventional energy-wasting homes have been built at the rate of roughly a million per year recently. If the new homes built by the NAHB for the last 25 years had even part of the energy saving concepts demonstrated clearly in 1980, America would NOT have a home energy problem today.

What will NAHB homes be like in 2010? We suspect that they will continue to be nearly as bad as the ones they were building before the 1973 oil embargoes, will only small increment improvement over three decades of energy wasting home construction. The strategy of most penny pinching myopic NAHB general contractors seems to be to build the WORST possible house that are legally allow by building codes (and sometimes to bribe government inspectors to allow them to build houses that do not conform to building codes, as has been frequently proven many times over throughout America). If you have been around the construction business very long, you have seen it happen many times already. Quality and efficiency are NOT the most important issues for profit-motivated builders.

PLEASE prove me wrong NAHB. Come to your senses and begin to take advantage of rock solid, scientifically proven practical, cost-effective ZED. Please begin doing what is right for America today. Your customers will see the difference and reward you for making significant improvements in quality and energy efficiency.

If past performance is a good predictor of the future, then we must ask: “Will the NAHB solve our home energy problems tomorrow? ABSOLUTELY NOT! THE NAHB IS STILL THE PROBLEM – They represent living modern examples of the worst of our Non-Learning Nation, ESPECIALLY when it comes to home energy inefficiency.

“The thinking that created today’s problems is insufficient to solve them.” – Albert Einstein

Is it a good idea to rely on a builder with decades of experience constructing stupid energy-inefficient homes? Do you agree with the NAHB Research Center that America should wait until 2012 to BEGIN investigating Zero Energy Homes?

YOU must decide when you buy your next home. There are a few intelligent NAHB builders who have “seen the sunlight”, but most still have a very long way to go. A public track record of the energy characteristics of homes designed by each architect, and homes constructed by each builder would go a long way toward informing the buying public about what these people do, and do not, know about how to lower or eliminate energy bills.

The voting records of politicians are public domain, why not the track records of architects and builders? (And by the way, we also need the professional track record of medical doctors and hospitals too, as mandated by the outstanding Massachusetts 2007 Healthcare bill.) All professionals should stand behind their work, be rewarded for their successes, and be held accountable for their worst errors in judgment (of which the NAHB has many, including roof-angled glass and stupid skylights, which should NEVER be used).

Adding a large skylight to an existing house is a surprisingly popular remodeling retrofit. The naive, misinformed owners’ goal is to add sunlight to a room. The actually net effect is to add a significant increase to both the summer and winter utility bills, while making the room much less comfortable on winter nights and summer days. How ridiculous is that?

What does the above chart mean? It is based on the altitude and azimuth angles of the sun’s winter and summer path across the sky.

In sunny Florida (which is much closer to the Equator than most of the U.S.), Roof Angled Glass at its very best (cold clear winter days) is still MUCH LESS EFFECTIVE (only 69%) than vertical South facing glass. This is because even in Central Florida, the peak altitude of the sun is only about 38 degrees above the Southern horizon, and most of the day it is much lower. Farther North, this fact is even more true. The sun’s rays strike roof angled glass at a very low (nearly parallel) angle, and much of the potential winter solar radiation is reflected off of roof angled glass (over the roof peak).

This simple solar gain chart explains why South facing vertical glass is much more effective than roof angled glass in the winter, since the sun’s radiation strikes South glass at a nearly perpendicular angle of incidence for full solar gain around midday.

On cold winter nights, warm interior air rises to touch the cold roof angled glass (or plastic), and far more BTU’s are lost through the glass at night than are gained in the daytime (for a net 24-hour heat loss). The larger the temperature difference between the inside and outside, the more significant the heat loss and room discomfort level will become. This type of ceiling level heat loss does not happen with vertical South facing sunroom glass, which acts as a thermal buffer zone on cold winter nights between exterior temperature extremes, and the comfortable interior living quarters temperature. A Southern solarium is like building your house inside a greenhouse. Roof angled glass is like cutting a hole in your ceiling.

In the summer, the huge disadvantage of roof angled glass becomes even more incredible. The sun is 47 degrees higher than it is in the winter, and it is nearly perpendicular to roof angled glass for much of the day. Every single square foot of roof angled glass increases your expensive air conditioning requirement by 2164 BTU’s! Even West facing glass (which is a terrible solar furnace on hot afternoons), is only one half as bad as spectacularly stupid roof angled glass – which is the very worst thing you can do to a house thermally short of leaving the doors and windows open year round.

Notice that in the summer, Northern vertical glass has slightly higher solar gain than Southern glass. This is because the sun rises in the Northeast and sets in the Northwest, but is hardly on the South side of the house at all. Simple overhangs can eliminate direct solar gain on South facing glass, but overhangs help very little on North, East, or West glass (as the sun approaches the horizon. Overhangs cannot help roof angled glass (unless you cover it completely with plywood – chuckle).

Owners of houses with roof angled glass will either be uncomfortable year round AND pay high utility bills, or they will pay money to have the roof angled glass removed and the hole covered with matching roofing material, and well insulated.

When the huge expensive Houston Astrodome was first built, they quickly wound up painting the glass. Many important issues had been completely overlooked by the over priced (but clueless) arrogant Astrodome architects. As the expensive special paint peeled off the roof-angled glass, the Astrodome became REALLY UGLY.

What was the first word spoken from the surface of the Moon, when the Eagle landed? Answer: “Houston…” It is interesting that the home of the NASA space program control was also the home of the stupid Astrodome roof-angled glass financial disaster.

Condensation forms on the inside of roof-angle glass on cold days, and especially winter nights. Skylight manufacturers have tried to design troughs to catch the condensation, but on extreme winter nights, it can be come excessive and drip into the room.

Roof-angle glass with stuck-on leaves, grass, debris, or rained-on dust, dirt, mold, mildew or algae is UGLY and difficult to clean. Just look at the windshield of your car, if you leave it outside very long. The sticky stuff on the glass exterior builds up and becomes worse over time. Small twigs carried by the wind often get stuck in the glass mounting system. I’ve even seen a mis-delivered newspaper lodged on a glass roof. That really impresses your guests (negatively). Would YOU like to slide around on top of a large glass roof to do maintenance?

Unbelievably STUPID, expensive, modern roof-angled glass architecture

Roof-angled glass is at high risk of breaking in hailstorms, and possible heavy ice-and-snow loads in some Northern locations. Rain and ice get caught uphill of a skylight mounting system, and can build up and expand underneath the roofing materials, causing leaks and rotting the surrounding roof decking. Water leak discoloration often forms below skylights on the ceiling, walls, or carpet. Large roof glass metal mounting systems can conduct more heat, oxidize, rust, corrode and lose their paint over time – a real ugly maintenance headache. Are you convinced yet?

Roof-angled glass is ALWAYS BAD ON ANY BUILDING in any location. Roof-angled glass is NEVER GOOD. New England settlers learned this important lesson hundreds of years ago by simple observation of poor thermal design, when every house was “off the grid” (no public utility companies back then). Old homes with roof-angled glass simply did not survive for long. I can’t imagine why this dumb thing is happening today.

Plenty of cheery natural light can be designed into an intelligent modern Zero Energy Home using efficient vertical South-facing glass ONLY. Even the most-Northern rooms can make advantageous use of Southern glass, using interior glass and mirrors – look at any of our ZED floor plans. We can easily accommodate artists who want diffused daylight, WITHOUT using North-facing roof-angled glass.

If you see a building with ANY roof-angled glass (skylights, transparent domes, etc.) it’s clueless architect and builder are BLIND, DUMB and COMPLETELY STUPID about the most critical issues of passive solar design, and ZED. Listen to NOTHING that such idiots have to say about energy. If they have not discovered this foundational principle by now, they are Non-Learning Entities with Zero Powers Of Observation. Let them experiment with someone else’s money, NOT YOURS.

Non-learning architects’ and builders’ first experience with designing and constructing a passive solar house should be with their own residence, so they will learn well the true price of ignoring the wisdom of others, and repeating the stupid mistakes that many have made before them, like roof-angled glass. A few years of uncomfortable winter night and summer day high energy bills should be a memory they will never forget.

“First, glass and plastic have little structural strength. When installed vertically, glass (or plastic) bears its own weight because only a small area (the top edge of the glazing) is subject to gravity. As the glass tilts off the vertical axis, however, an increased area (now the sloped cross-section) of the glazing has to bear the force of gravity. Glass is also brittle; it does not flex much before breaking. To counteract this, you usually must increase the thickness of the glazing or increase the number of structural supports to hold the glazing. Both increase overall cost, and the latter will reduce the amount of solar gain into the sunspace.

“Another common problem with sloped glazing is its increased exposure to the weather. Hail, sleet, snow, and wind may cause material failure. For occupant safety, regulatory agencies usually require sloped glass to be made of safety glass, laminated, or a combination thereof.

“Finally, it is difficult to control solar heat gain in a sunspace with sloped glazing during the summer and even during the middle of a mild and sunny winter day.

“Therefore, vertical glazing is the overall best option for sunspaces for much of the United States. Vertical glazing accepts almost as much winter solar heat (or in many cases much more) as sloped glazing, without most of the disadvantages. A vertical wall can support larger areas of glazing relative to the necessary structural support area. The glazing is easier to install and less susceptible to leaking. It is also easier to shade the sunspace during the summer with vertical glazing. A well-designed roof overhang will shade south-facing vertical glazing during the summer, while allowing winter solar-heat gain. Movable insulation and shading devices such as blinds are much easier to install and use.”

“Although SKYLIGHTS have been around for many decades and function as a simple means of bringing natural light into a building, they can have a number of drawbacks . . .

- Suitable for downlighting only (i.e. N/A to directional lighting or up lighting)

If you an uninformed architect who still does not agree that roof angled glass is VERY BAD, then you’re probably a non-learning entity who will not get much value out of the rest of our ZED material.
Why don’t you go smoke a cigarette and start planning your retirement? (Snicker)

Oakridge National Laboratory Hybrid Solar Lighting Systems

ORNL has developed a superior solution to the many problems caused by ineffective, expensive skylights called Hybrid Solar Lighting, which uses (1) a 2-axis tracking solar collector, (2) fiber optics, and (3) modified florescent lighting fixtures. 2006 field tests of the new HSL technology are promising, but it is still quite expensive. HSL should become more cost effective in the future, and an improved version that can withstand windstorms could begin to replace conventional commercial florescent lighting systems with improved implementations in 2008.

Until something better emerges in the future, a well-designed floor plan focused around a south facing solarium can fill every room with diffused natural daylight and pleasant seasonal views every day of the year, without any new technology maintenance or reliability issues.

ORNL HSL uses variable intensity florescent lighting control ballasts. As the sunlight gradually decreases at sunset, the florescent fixture is gradually turned up to give a near constant level of interior lighting from daylight until after it becomes dark outside.

HSL Alternatives

The Zero Energy DesignTM consortium includes experts in electronic engineering, sensor-based pulse-width-modulated florescent and modern LED full-spectrum rainbow lighting controls (which are much more flexible than standard 4-foot florescent lighting fixtures and very low power consumption).

In contrast to the promising ORNL HSL, the ZED consortium feels that diffused daytime lighting should be provided by designing floor plans that are oriented toward a South-facing solarium, and controlled with motorized (or electrochromic future) window treatments.

Sensor-based variable-intensity florescent or LED interior lighting systems can be used to provide constant lighting levels as sunset approaches. The LED RGB rainbow system can add blue light only to balance the orange-red sunset, and gradually compensate with white daylight as the sun disappears beneath the horizon and the skies eventually turn dark, if the occupant desires constant color and light intensity 7/24. For soft night lighting, we also work with extremely efficient electroluminescent materials (including Walt Disney World, Pleasure Island dance performance computer animated LED and electroluminescent light suits).

The ZED approach is at least as cost effective and comfortable as HSL, but it eliminates the high expense and visual distraction of a heavy roof-mounted HSL parabolic 2-axis tracking mirror mounted on a 4 inch PVC pipe on the roof, which is very sensitive to windstorm damage in areas with frequent hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms and hail (unless you particularly like the idea of a shiny dish mounted on a pole on your roof for all to see what a solar techie you are – grin).

For nighttime lighting, rainbow spectrum RGB LED’s powered by DC batteries that are recharged by photovoltaic systems in the daytime can provide much more lighting flexibility and programmability at lower cost and space requirement than traditional thick 4-foot florescent lighting fixtures. Ceiling mounted florescent fixtures either protrude into the room, or the create air infiltration heating and cooling problems if they are recessed into the ceiling.

Slender RGB LED lighting strips have the added benefit of being able to set any color, any light level, any ambience (like flickering firelight), anytime the occupant of each room desires. They can be tied to music systems or allow the occupants to wake to a gradual sunrise effect (any specified time of day, regardless of what is happening outside).

PV solar electric panels are less susceptible to sever weather patterns than a heavy tracking dish on a plastic pole. PV panels are flat, clean, and green, and many come with a 25-year warrantee. PV DC is a perfect energy efficient match for LED DC lighting systems.

ZED enthusiastically encourages anyone to offer near-zero energy lighting innovations. We just happen to have a biased opinion that the options we offer are the very best that anyone has come up with so far. We would be glad to receive your constructive criticism and discuss the merits of any innovations that others suggest. We solicit and appreciate all constructive input.

Averaging Diurnal Day and Nighttime Temperatures

In many climates, seasons, and locations, the days are too warm and nights too cold for human comfort. A SUPERINSULATED Zero Energy Home can average out the diurnal (24-hour) temperature swings. The Spring / Fall temperatures and humidity can be mild and pleasant outside, during significant portions of the diurnal and seasonal cycles.

Zero Energy Homes are often designed specifically to take advantage of pleasant outside air, by introducing it into the solarium thermal buffer zone, or sometimes directly into the interior living quarters, where it is appropriate.

Automated controls and dampers can eliminate the need to manually open windows, etc. Natural convection airflow design can eliminate the need for fans, thermostats and most electricity requirement. Specially designed outside air filtration systems can be provided to eliminate: insects, dust, mold, pollen, bacteria, etc. for the very best in oxygenated fresh-smelling outside air intake, when it is pleasant to do so (but not during temperature extremes).

The ZED fresh air ventilation system draws outside air into the home through a dedicated duct with an effective filtration system. Fresh air is thus introduced from a controlled source, through an engineered airflow path. It provides much cleaner air than unplanned infiltration through unintentional cracks in the building envelope, where it would pick up undesirable humidity, allergens, mold, mildew, fungus, pollen, small particles of building materials, insulation, various exhaust gases from combustion appliances, and solvents or chemicals used in common building materials, as do almost all conventional poorly-constructed houses today. Some people are even more allergic to their home’s interior air pollution than they are to unfiltered outside air. That is a very sad characteristic of most American homes.

Mold invades households via air-borne spores. Fungi and bacteria can gain footholds where leaks or condensation proliferate. Many building construction errors and materials can nurture dangerous fungal and bacterial growth.

The very worst molds can kill outright. A few years ago, nine infant deaths in Cleveland were attributed to the fungus ”stachybotrys atra.”

“Legionnaires’ Disease” is caused by a type of bacteria that can grow rapidly in the air ducts of a conventional air conditioning system. The bacteria got its name in 1976, when many people who went to a Philadelphia convention of the American Legion suffered from an outbreak of this deadly disease, which is a type of pneumonia (lung infection). More illness from Legionnaires’ disease is being detected now than ever before. It is getting worse, not better. Between 8,000 and 18,000 people a year are now hospitalized with Legionnaires' Disease in the U.S. Poor ventilation systems are a significant source of the bacteria growth and distribution to all occupants.

ZED is MUCH more concerned with mold, fungus and bacteria prevention and elimination in the home, than conventional builders and subcontractors can begin to understand.

We caution homebuyers AGAINST the use of popular “ionic” air fresheners

They are designed to introduce deadly ionic “free radical oxidizers” like unhealthy ozone, hydroxyl radicals, super oxide ions, etc. into the air that their users breathe. Intelligent humans who care about their health and longevity intentionally consume “antioxidants” (fruits, vegetables, and food supplements) to neutralize free radicals from our highly polluted environment, extend our lives, and slow the oxidative aging process. SO, WHY BUY a device designed specifically to generate free radical ions?

Using a device that increases powerful free radical ionic oxidizers has been shown to be a really dumb idea, despite what the late night cable television advertisements say. Ionic air fresheners do remove certain types of allergenic particles from the air, of that we are certain. BUT, they are unsafe due to their long-term “burning” of the lung’s alveoli (air exchange sacks) through free radical oxidation. This increase the risk of multiple health problems, including lung cancer, caused by constant irritation. Breathing oxidative free radicals is very much like smoking – it does not kill you immediately – it is early unnecessary death on the installment plan.

Ionic air fresheners should be legally banned from use by non-professionals. Ionic air fresheners should ONLY be used when no one is in the home, and then immediately turned off when any air-breathing occupant arrives. The worst possible use of such an unhealthy device would be to sleep near an ionic air freshener. Your allergies may be significantly reduced by using an ionic air freshener, but so will your life expectancy. Sometimes, what appears on the surface to be a good idea is really a very bad one. It certainly has made a lot of money for the vendors of these dangerous products, which even Consumer Reports has recommended against.

The air introduced into our home does need to be effectively filtered, but NOT purified with free radical toxic oxidizers that damage human and pet lungs.

Passive Solar Cooling – Use Sunshine To COOL Your Home

It is VERY IMPORTANT that the roof and west wall have effective “radiant barriers” (explained in detail on our sister website Natural Energy Applied Research ) to block solar heat gain through the roof and hottest afternoon wall of the house. Conduction and convection are significant thermal transfer mechanisms in sideways heat transfer through shaded walls, but radiation is just about the only mechanism that causes downward heat transfer through roofs into your hot attic and interior ceilings (something that very few architects understand).

A conventional house attic can be more than 40 degrees hotter than the peak outside daytime air temperature. Naive Americans just assume that this has to be, but it does NOT. In stark contrast to a conventional house with a hot attic, our ZED attic space acts like a buffer zone, with a temperature that is LOWER than the peak outside air temperature.

Radiant barriers are BETTER than a well-ventilated attic (which cannot possibly be cooler than the outside intake air temperature). On the hottest summer days, you would rather be in a ZED attic, than outside. This surprises almost everyone.

Does “fiberglass insulation” block radiant heat flow? NO, not very well! Radiation goes right through glass, even if you spin it into small fibers. Hold some fiberglass insulation up to the sun and you will see the light. The Florida Solar Energy Center has documented the fact that a radiant barrier can reduce the heat flow through standard insulation by an impressive 40%.

“Conductive heat flow” R-value is NOT the critical issue in blocking summer solar radiation through the roof into your very hot attic. Radiant barriers have a conductive R-value that is essentially ZERO! Your attic is like a huge greenhouse, getting hotter every hour that the sun shines on it. It IS very important that radiant barriers have at least a 3/4 inch air gap on one side of them (or conductive insulation like Dacron, etc.), to also block conductive heat flow. How do we do this cost effectively, with no additional labor cost? (See Natural Energy Applied Research for pictures of the technique.)

If dust settles on top of a radiant barrier, it becomes much less effective. Its ability to reflect radiation drops, and its emissivity increases in a negative way that increases undesirable heat flow.

Older methods of constructing a simple radiant barrier system (RBS) decades ago were nowhere as effective (functionally and cost wise) as modern new-construction zero-labor-cost RBS. Retrofitting a RBS into an existing home is labor intensive. It is so much better to include ZED from the ground up in all modern home construction, than to add it as an afterthought.

The well-engineered ZED radiant barrier thermal buffer zone greatly reduces (or eliminates) the need for expensive air conditioning systems in well-designed, passively-cooled Zero Energy Homes. On a conventional home a radiant barrier roof can reduce your air-conditioning bill by 12%. In a passively-cooled home (with cool tubes for solarium replacement air, or Earth buffering, etc.) the RBS is even more functionally effective. The (1 + 1 = 3) synergy of ZED integrated systems engineering can in many cases completely eliminate the need for electrical-compressor-based air conditioning systems in a modern Zero Energy Home, even in a warm humid summer climate like Florida.

Radiant barriers can add less than 10 cents per square foot to the material cost of a new Zero Energy Home. That is all that is needed with a zero-labor-cost new construction RBS. The very-effective use of an RBS in warm climates is totally overlooked by the majority of clueless residential architects and undereducated homebuilders. The new energy efficient home RBS ROI (radiant barrier system / return on investment) is almost immediate in the first summer after construction. It even makes the house more comfortable during construction (which can help lower labor costs a bit, and improve worker quality and productivity.

Zero Energy Home South wall eve overhangs are carefully designed to give full near-perpendicular exposure to the low winter sun, and completely block the high summer sun all day long in the summer. On two-story homes, special design consideration is given to first-floor South-facing window overhangs.

The “angle of incidence” of high summer sun is such that almost all of the midday direct sunlight is reflected off of vertical South facing glass in the summer anyway (even if there is an insufficient overhang). This is the same optical principle that can make a flat black highway look like a mirror, and create a “mirage” of the sky, which looks like a distant lake on a dry desert road.

Designers must also understand that the hot summer sun is on the Northeast side of the house in the morning, and on the Northwest during the sweltering afternoon / evening.

Western and Northwestern windows need special shading or window treatment in the summer in hot climates. Western roof overhangs can NOT be completely effective, since the hot evening sun descends all the way down to the horizon. Trees, bushes, trellises, shade screen, etc. can make a large difference on western window solar gain. Placing reflective film on the inside of western insulated-glass windows is a BAD idea, since it can cause overheating between the two panes of glass, break the vapor seal, and draw in humidity, which can fog the insulated glass and make it UGLY in only a year or two.

A well-engineered ZED solarium design thermally buffers the South side of the house interior all year long. In the summer with no solar gain allowed through the South wall, the sunroom maintains a temperature that is between the interior living quarters temperature, and the extremes of the hot afternoon air. The home’s interior glass wall thinks it is in a milder climate, and gains heat much slower than does a single exterior wall with one large temperature differential across it.

Natural convention (lighter warm air rising) exhaust vents (often augmented with 18” zero-energy industrial size turbine vents with sturdy bracing and quiet jeweled bearings) remove hot attic-and-solarium air at the top of the sunroom buffer zone. They are oriented so they are in the flow of prevailing summer winds, but do NOT interfere with the street appeal of the home.

Design consideration must be given to where the replacement air will come from at the base of the sunroom …

Earth Temperature Cool Tubes

1979 Hillside Cool Tube Filtered Fresh Air Intake (before being packed in sand and buried). In hot locations where necessary and feasible (such as South-facing hillsides or low-water-table areas) large-diameter underground “cool tubes” can lower the outside replacement air temperature for the sunroom and attic, which are buffer zones between the interior temperature of the home and exterior temperature extremes. When warm outside air passes through the underground cool tube (surrounded by ambient temperature Earth), condensation forms on the walls that must be drained off (just like the dehumidification process of an expensive high-energy-consumption conventional air conditioner). This is why hillsides are the best location for the use of cool tubes. ZED NEVER allows ground water, condensation, mold or mildew to accumulate inside a cool tube. This design factor is critical.

Cooler, dryer air from the cool tube is then input to the solarium thermal buffer zone (by natural convection created by turbine vents with no fans, thermostat or electricity). The cool dry replacement air is not added directly into the living quarters interior, unless the owner intentionally leaves the sunroom interior doors open on mild days or nights. Cool tubes are NOT for every house everywhere (there are several critical design issues), but where applicable, they are a nice tool of Zero Energy DesignTM.

The lower solarium and radiant-barrier-attic buffer zone summer temperatures, and the higher winter passive-solar-heating temperatures of the solarium, all but eliminate the need for a conventional central heating and air conditioning system, in most of the U.S. on most days of the year. You can then nearly heat the house with a candle, and cool it with an ice cube (chuckle).

The efficiencies of other energy-using devices in your home (like hot water tank, range / oven, refrigerator, lighting, etc.) all influence your need for summer cooling. If you use more efficient appliances that to NOT dump so much heat into your house in the summer, then your cooling requirements will be that much lower. Baking a turkey in your oven can measurably increase your summer air conditioning bill, in addition to the high-current electricity used by the oven itself. (See our other appliance discussions below.)

From a “ZED Integrated Systems Engineering” perspective, every energy-consuming device impacts other systems in a ZED-engineered home. Inefficient energy usage can frequently have a cascading negative impact than is obvious at first glance. The “Energy Guide” posted on the front of new appliances is only PART of the complete picture that ZED takes into consideration.

Earth Sheltered Thermal Buffering

2400 years ago, the ancient Greek city planners accurately determined that the most desirable place to locate buildings was the South / Southeast side of a hill (or mountain) with a nice view to the South (like the city of Priene). If you can find and afford such a near-perfect piece of real estate, consider yourself very lucky. A cut into the hillside, and an Earth berm buffer zone on the North (east and/or west side, and optionally an Earth covered roof with greenery) is a VERY ENERGY EFFICIENT, esthetically pleasing Zero Energy Home location.

The energy requirement for such a beautiful Earth berm home will be the minimum possible. In the hottest climates, a cool tube, with downhill condensation drainage can be used for hot summer days, but the Earth berm will probably eliminate the need for a cool tube, since much of an Earth sheltered house is underground (depending on site characteristics).

Our ZED tricks for passive solar greenhouse glass can be used for the South (street side) of the beautiful house façade, with interior glass and mirrors to fill the entire Earth sheltered home with happy sunshine during the day. It will NOT be a dark, damp underground cave, IF high-experience ZED is used to maximize beauty as well as thermal performance. Special consideration is required to control condensation, humidity, mold, mildew, etc. All of these potential problems are easy to solve, by an experienced Zero Energy DesignerTM (but often overlooked by a first time novice).

Absorption Chillers

In the more tropical portions of the Southern U.S., where air temperatures peak above 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the day, humidity is high, and overall low night time temperatures remain above 80 degrees, a solar-powered “absorption chiller” can be used to reduce air temperature and humidity in the interior living quarters down as low as any human could possibly desire.

The absorption chiller concept is unfamiliar to most homebuyers, architects and builders today. They are skeptical about everything that they do not understand.

In the 1920’s, this reliable, low-cost, noiseless, phase-change, absorption cooling technology was used extensively in “gas refrigerators”, especially in urban-and-rural homes that had no electricity. Many modern designers are not familiar with the characteristics or economics of absorption cooling. It revived for use in Recreation vehicles, and now for Zero Energy Homes.

A water-based absorption chiller can inexpensively drop the temperature down to 40 degrees. Other non-water versions can go well below freezing for making ice, etc. When powered by concentrated solar energy (instead of 1920’s natural gas), absorption chillers cost almost nothing to operate, and have essentially nothing in them to wear out (as do today’s noisy, expensive, electromechanical freon-compressor-based air conditioners and refrigerators, which have to be replaced at high cost every few years). The heat source causes circulation, fluid/gas phase change, and cooling.

Some hundred-year-old antique absorption cooling gas refrigerators still operate perfectly today. They were unwisely phased out during the late 1920’s, by electrical appliance manufactures that advertised their less-efficient refrigerators heavily, (and designed “planned depreciation” into their complex compressor-based refrigerators and air conditioning systems, which are still commonplace today).

The old 1920’s absorption chillers used the phase changes of ammonia to extract heat from gas-powered refrigerators. It is interesting to note that the International Space Station ALSO uses efficient ammonia phase change absorption chilling to extract excess heat from space station equipment and exhaust it outside the space station. Sometimes, hundred-year-old technology is the most reliable, cost-effective way to meet a modern challenging goal!

It is now long overdue for America to return to reliable, efficient absorption chiller technology that would be good for our energy crisis, WITHOUT planned-depreciation guaranteed profits for misleading electrify appliance manufacturers. The remerging absorption chiller industry will be very profitable during the transition away from electric refrigeration, and should continue to prosper with economic growth and worldwide acceptance of ZED. (This is not the time to invest in old-fashioned electrical appliance manufacturers, with huge physical plant assets for building soon-to-be-obsolete compressor-based cooling systems. That which once was a good investment may soon become very bad.)

Absorption cooling is currently in successful cost-effective use in industrial thermal processes, large commercial buildings and shopping malls. (Photo of a 50-ton capacity commercial absorption chiller)

Residential solar-powered absorption chillers need to be geared up for large-volume production in tomorrow’s Zero Energy Homes, in some climates where air conditioning is still required after ZED SUPERINSULATION and energy conservation measures. Cool tubes, etc. do not make the interior living quarters quite cool enough on hot summer days (in some of the warmest U.S. climatic zones).

Hot Water

The traditional American hot water tank is an energy disaster. It wastes fuel 24-hours a day, even when not in use. We wait for long periods for warm water to arrive at the tap and slowly heat up, wasting clean cold water at the tap, and the energy required to heat the cold refill water that enters the tank while we wait at the tap. American hot water lines are normally uninsulated, losing heat in the garage or basement, and in the walls all along the way (which can increase air conditioning bills in the hot summer).

The European point-of-use instant-on tankless water heater is much more efficient, but it requires utility connections at every location where one is installed. There is the offsetting construction savings of not having to run two expensive water lines (hot and cold) to every location in the house.

America’s inefficient water heaters are used with faucets that mix hot and cold water to attain the desired end usage temperature. In contrast, with a point-of-use water heater the temperature is determined quite differently - by the rate of water flowing through it – Faster flow for lower temperatures, Slower flow for the hottest water output. Thus, a vigorous high-volume hot shower is not possible on a cold day. This is one aspect I did NOT like in some European hotels.

ZED is NOT about energy austerity. ZED IS about a joyful energy-abundant lifestyle that is in harmony with nature. I love my half hour vigorous shower massage. I want my shower water to be heated for free by the sun. I do NOT want to have to pay utility bills for a hot shower that is as long as I like.

Solar Hot Water

Throughout most of the U.S., the AVERAGE ANNUAL solar gain potential is significant, ranging from over 1,000 BTU/sq.ft./day to over 1,800 BTU’s in the clear skies of the arid Southwestern U.S.

On cloudy winter days, solar gain potential is well below average (sometimes only 30%). In the summer, solar gain potential is often over 3,000 BTU/sq.ft./day in many areas. Solar hot water is feasible and cost-effective most of the year in most locations, using all but the lowest capacity “cheap” solar water heating systems.

There are multiple types of Zero Energy Home solar hot water systems. The simplest is a cheap “passive” solar hot water heater (called a “thermosiphon” - used in Southern U.S. tropical areas that seldom freeze).

Inexpensive Passive Solar Hot Water Heaters

A passive solar thermosiphon hot water heater is basically a solar collector (made up of black water tubes with fins designed to absorb solar radiant energy), connected to an insulated hot water storage tank, which must be higher than the collector.

When the sun shines on the solar collector, the warmer water expands somewhat and becomes lighter than colder water in the storage tank. “Natural convection” causes the warmer water to rise into the tank (like warm air rises up a chimney), and the coldest water to descend into the collector, where it is warmed and recirculates back into storage in a continuous gravity-fed “flow loop” that gradually warms the stored water, depending on the available BTU’s/sq.ft. of solar gain potential, and solar collector square footage. The system is engineered to economically meet the large-or-small desired hot water needs of the owner.

An inexpensive, efficient, renewable-solar-energy thermosiphon needs no electric pump or electronic controller. It is completely self regulating and harmonious with nature. Cold water flows into the system from local water pressure, and heated water is made available for domestic use.

A downstream water heater of any type can be used as a backup, if all of the solar heated water is used up. Engineered insulation slows heat loss through the hot water storage tank, and the hot water lines to the home.

Of course, such a system works best in the summer, (when hot water requirements are much less). Still, it seems senseless to burn non-renewable, expensive, highly-polluting fossil fuels to heat water for domestic use ANY time of the year.

Thermosiphons in areas that occasionally freeze (like Northern Florida) need a temperature-activated automatic mechanical valve that protects the whole system from damage by freezing. Alternatively, the entire system can be isolated with valves, and manually drained, in locations with extended freezing conditions. Thermosiphons are not perfect systems for everyone, but in many areas they are the least expensive way to eliminate (most) hot water bills.

With only a low capacity solar hot water storage system, bathing, washing clothes and dishes need to be done at the sunniest time of the day, OR a larger hot water storage tank is required, OR a back up water heater is necessary (tankless point-of-use, etc.).

The largest demand for hot water can be when sunlight is not available, if you do not plan your day well. Sensor switches can be added to things like dishwashers and clothes washers, to only activate them (in an unattended mode) when solar hot water is available and free (to avoid the use of back up water heaters).

Energy-related lifestyle changes may be needed for minimum-cost off-the-grid homes with marginal designs, but not for well-designed moderately-priced Zero Energy Homes with adequate capacity planning.

Active Solar Hot Water Heaters

There are several types of more-expensive “active” solar hot water heaters. Most require the use of solar collectors with an antifreeze fluid, and a heat exchanger (a set of coils) to transfer the solar-heated antifreeze solution BTU’s of heat into a domestic hot water storage tank. This advanced technology is evolving, being refined, and improving every year.

Unlike passive solar thermosiphon hot water systems, the active solar hot water system storage tank can be located below the solar panels, closer to where hot water is used. With such a Zero Energy Home, the hot water storage point(s) is(are) designed to be as close as possible to the hot water points of use, in a cluster(s) not far from the hot water storage tank. This also lowers installation plumbing costs.

Active solar water heating systems normally use an electrical pump and controller to move the solar-heated antifreeze solution through the collector to the storage tank. Solar collectors are the most effective when they are filled with the coldest water in the system (maximum temperature differential for maximum BTU heat gathering). Conversely, solar collectors become less efficient at gathering BTU’s as the antifreeze solution approaches the maximum desired hot water storage temperature (which is not a problem).

“Photovoltaic” solar electric cells (discussed below) can be used to power the pump when the sun is shining (no need to run it at night). Some vendors integrate the photovoltaic cells and the pump into a single conveniently packaged module to simplify installation and reduce power loss through longer, heavy, PV direct current (DC) electrical wires. Controller sensors make the electrical pump operate only when the solar collector and photovoltaic solar cells are receiving energy from the sun, AND water in the solar collector panel is warmer than water in the hot water storage tank.

Capacity planning for hot water usage determines the necessary size of the capital investment in solar collectors, and the hot water storage tank (or tanks in a multiple-zone multiple-cluster hot water usage system). The economics of return on investment determines how quickly such a system pays for itself, which is becoming much shorter as power company prices increase every year. Many more of these cost-effective solar hot water systems will appear in the coming years. (Other than passive solar heating through South facing windows, solar hot water is one of the most cost effective ways to directly harness the power of the sun, and reduce power company utility bills.

Solar hot water heating systems have been in extensive use in American, with many iterative refinements, since the late 1970’s, when Jimmy Carter’s energy tax credits encouraged their early development. Solar hot water heating options, characteristics, economics, and engineering tradeoffs are well known and reasonably easy to integrate into a modern Zero Energy Home, or a retrofit to an existing conventional home.

One of the main (not well resolved) issues is the esthetics of the exterior solar collectors on the roof (or elsewhere) of the home. Most look like UGLY unattractive afterthoughts (even on new homes). The most effective roof color for a Zero Energy Home in an area with significant degree-day cooling requirements is SHINY BRIGHT WHITE. The most effective solar collector color is highly absorbent FLAT BLACK. This is an esthetic design issue right up front (unless you the checkerboard roof look – smile).

ZED strives for total systems engineering integration, with maximum esthetic appeal. We have many ways to “hide” solar collectors, so they do not interfere with the “street appeal” value of your real estate investment. We don’t like black raised solar panels on our highly reflective white roofs.

ZED encourages solar component manufacturers to develop integrated roofing systems that (1) simplify construction effort and thus lower total cost, and (2) result in attractive solar energy additions to a new Zero Energy Home. This task is not easy, but it is important.

Swimming Pool, Swim Spa, and Hot Tub Design Issues

In most American locations, expensive swimming pools are only usable during hot summer months. Even then, they are often uncomfortably cool in many locations with cool nights.

Water is much more “conductive” than air. People may like 72-degree air, but they will shiver badly in 72-degree water, even in the summer. If you like to RELAX in warm water for many hours (as I do), it needs to be 98.6 degrees to be perfectly comfortable, or it will slowly siphon away your internal core body heat.

Lower water temperatures are acceptable for shorter periods, IF the surrounding air is warm. I personally like 88 to 92 degrees in the winter with snow on the ground, and 84 to 88 degrees in the summer. Lower temperatures in the 70’s are better for high-energy exercise swimming, where the body is generating a lot of internal heat.

Water temperature is a personal opinion, just like the air temperature in your home, for those of you who are married. (smile)

Different people like different temperatures in different situations. ZED understands the need for multiple zone temperature regulation for families. Room temperature, showers and baths all need individualized temperature controls, but the family swimming pool needs negotiated compromise on the best temperature for everyone’s enjoyment.

Very few wealthy pool owners can afford to keep a 40,000-gallon pool above 90 degrees for comfortable winter swimming, UNLESS they use free solar energy. I do a LOT of my most creative thinking in relaxing warm water (just like the royalty did in the ancient Roman baths, etc.).

Swimming pools lose heat rapidly by “phase change evaporation.” The warmest water rises to the top, where it is exposed to cooler air. The surface water molecules boil off, cooling the remaining water, which falls to the bottom of the pool. A “convection flow loop” in the pool water continues to bring the warmest water to the top, where it is cooled rapidly. When common wind blows across the surface of the pool, this heat loss process accelerates. There is also radiant heat loss to the open sky, which is highest on clear nights when the air is cooler than the pool water. There is even some heat loss to the ambient temperature of the Earth around the pool. The temperature of the thermal mass of the pool drops, and it is very expensive to slowly heat it back up by conventional means. Hundreds of thousand of BTU’s of heat may be required, just to maintain a constant temperature in a home-sized pool. The warmer you want your pool water, the faster heat is lost by various different mechanisms.

This process of pool water heat loss is greatly reduced with a floating solar pool cover (like heavy duty clear bubble wrap). It provides minor thermal insulation, but the main benefit is to stop warm water evaporation.

Each gallon of 80-degree pool water that evaporates extracts 8,000 BTU’s of heat from the pool. Evaporated water must also be replaced. A pool cover cuts evaporative water loss roughly in half. For outdoor pools, the water temperature should remain about 5 degrees warmer if you use a cover 12 hours a day. If you use your pool cover 20 hours a day, it could be as much as 10 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be. This can be very significant, since even a small temperature increase can mean the difference between a comfortable relaxing swim, and a stressful unpleasant experience that makes you shiver.

A manual (two person) or motorized automatic mechanism can drag the pool cover in place, when the pool is not in use. A one-person roller mechanism can be use to remove the pool cover.

With the reduced heat loss of a solar pool cover, it becomes much less expensive to solar heat the pool for many months of the year, or even all year long in many American climatic zones. The annual usability (and overall value) of the swimming pool can be more than tripled, if you can keep it comfortably warm most of the year. A pool cover means less capital expenditure on solar pool collection panels.

No one likes swimming with bugs, leaves and grass clippings blowing in the pool, SO many pool owners erect expensive (afterthought) screened-in pool enclosures that do not blend well with the style (or shape) of their house. The bug screen blocks at least 30% or more of the potential solar gain needed to keep the pool warm, even in the summer, reducing the value of the pool.

For very little more money than a screened-in pool enclosure, you can add a well-engineered, inexpensive, year-round swimming pool solarium, integrated into the design of a new Zero Energy Home, or retrofitted to a house with a pool on the South side. Your solar greenhouse (like mine) can be 88 degrees in the Midwest, when the sun is shining on the coldest subfreezing winter days.

Indoor pool enclosures protect your pool from the tiniest insects (including “noseeums”), leaves, debris, dust, dirt, mold, mildew and especially algae dumps each time it rains. Outside pools (even with a screened-in pool enclosure) require more pool chemicals, replacement water, EXPENSIVE pool pump running time, filter cleaning, and sidewall manual brushing (even if you have a bottom-crawler vacuum system, which adds a burden to the pool pump and your energy bill). The elimination of wind across the pool surface reduces pool water heat loss, and the wind chill effect on swimmers’ skin.

The initial investment in a year-round indoor swimming pool enclosure is MORE THAN PAID FOR BY REDUCED LIFETIME OPERATING COSTS, when compared to a common screened-in pool enclosure. In the long term, an indoor pool enclosure is essentially FREE! (Pay for it up front, or pay for it in higher pool operating costs, and not receive its many benefits.) Your indoor swimming pool enclosure adds year-round swimming comfort, and much greater value to the investment in your new home. If you are going to own a swimming pool, it should have a year-round South-facing solar pool enclosure.

In a ZED Planned Community, shared-usage, year-round, indoor swimming pools (sports courts, gymnasiums, clubhouse, etc.) add great value to all of the community homes, while eliminating the high cost of heating a large outdoor swimming pool year round. ZED can show you how inexpensive such large passive-solar heated and cooled enclosures can be. The result can be much-lower condominium dues, by eliminating conventional energy bills. This is wonderful for the expanding retirement communities in places like Florida, where fixed income owners want to minimize unproductive monthly expenses.

Which would YOU rather have: a high-maintenance, three-month-per-year cold swimming pool in your back yard, or a twelve-month comfy pool, synergistically integrated into your entire home design (esthetics and energy considerations)? The price is very-little more. The long term ROI and enjoyment values are outstanding.

Large sliding patio doors, or double-open French doors, can ventilate the poolroom in the summer, and make it like a screened-in pool enclosure with lots of fresh air. Your lounge chairs can be taken just outside for sunning.

By the way, you cannot get a suntan or sunburn on the inside of a ZED solarium. Harmful ultraviolet rays are completely blocked by our solarium glass. Infrared rays also are not transferred through the glass (this optical science is the “greenhouse effect” that traps heat from the sun so most of it does not escape). The visible (red / green / blue / white) winter sunshine that does come through our South-facing glass will warm your skin, and everything in the sunroom, but direct sunlight cannot enter the solarium in the summer (since the summer sun is 47 degrees higher in the sky, and on the Northeast or Northwest of the house most of the day).

Bug screens are removed from solarium doors in the winter, to maximize Southern solar gain when the doors are closed to retain sunroom heat day and night (except when excess solar heat needs to be released, which does happen at times).

No Chlorine

For ZED swimming pools, we strongly recommend the use of inexpensive non-chlorine water purification systems. Traditional active chlorine in pool water is very toxic (by design). When chlorine kills organic matter, it leaves “chloramines” which are on the list of 228 known carcinogens in the toxic, polluted American environment.

No one should drink unfiltered chlorinated water, especially children and senior citizens. Bathing in chloramines is also a health risk, since the skin is so very porous. Chlorine and chloramines can be absorbed directly through the pores in the skin. The more time you spend around chlorine, the more risk of various serious health problems (with your skin and internal organs - cancer, etc.).

Indoor pools have a much lower need for pool chemicals. How much is YOUR time and health worth to you?

Solar Heat For Pool Water

With a solar pool cover, solar greenhouse, or both, for your South-side swimming pool, solar pool water heating becomes very cost-effective, with minimal solar panel equipment capital investment required, and a smaller pump that efficiently runs fewer hours per day.

The cheapest solar pool heaters (for inexpensive aboveground backyard pools) only cost around $300. They are merely a black plastic mat with water tubes. 50 or 100 square feet make a significant difference in pool water temperature, IF you use a pool cover at night. You simply lay the inexpensive solar collector mat on the ground and connect it to your pool pump. It extends the swimming season and usability of an inexpensive pool. Larger in-ground solar water heaters for year round swimming can cost a few thousand dollars, but the simple solar water heating principle is similar. They are often hundreds of square feet of solar collection area.

“Drain down” (can’t freeze) rooftop swimming pool water heating systems are normally much simpler and less expensive than active domestic hot water heating systems per BTU of solar gain captured. Most use inexpensive black plastic solar collectors and easy-to-install conventional (PVC) plastic pool plumbing, often using the pool pump to circulate the water through the solar panels, or a dedicated photovoltaic-solar-electric-powered pump.

Manual or automated valves can be used to regulate pool water temperature year round. These systems are especially less expensive when designed into new construction. The collector area and mounting angle / orientation are important Zero Energy DesignTM factors. The solar collection panels do not have to be on the roof. For year round swimming, their orientation needs to be optimized for low winter sun, solar energy collection, since much less heating is needed (if any) in the summer.

It should be against the law to heat a swimming pool with anything but clean renewable energy (from the sun). A ZED integrated swimming pool, swim spa, or hot tub greatly enhances the pleasure, enjoyment and value of an impressive Zero Energy Home. Even people who do not know how to swim love a hot tub. Everyone needs some time in comfortable water to de-stress and relax their cares away for a while. Warm water with a friend is very nice indeed. Enjoying it year round is even better. The ZED abundant lifestyle is very habit forming.

It is good to have a warm restroom nearby when you get out of your solar heated pool in the winter, and a large beach towel wrap or robe. A warm tile floor in the bathroom is very nice as your body dries off and you adjust to the cooler interior living quarters air temperature. ZED has inexpensive ways to meet these standard-of-living comfort goals.

Waterfalls

A waterfall can be an attractive addition to the natural harmony of a Zero Energy Home, but we’ve learned that interior waterfalls cool the water by evaporation, and add humidity to the solarium (which may or may not be desirable, depending on your objectives and planned room usage). Another option is to locate a beautiful waterfall and landscaping just outside the solarium in full view of every room of your home, without the above issues involved. It should not block solar gain from the low winter sun.

South wall shading in the summer can be a good thing, if designed properly, which implies the use of deciduous trees (that lose their leaves in the winter, as in my own 1979 Zero Energy Home.

Pool, Swim Spa, Hot Tub Esthetics and Usability Flexibility

A well-designed ZED year round swimming pool clearly demonstrates the awesome luxury and beauty of intelligent energy frugality. ZED enhances the quality of a NATURALLY HARMONIOUS ABUNDANT ENERGY LIFESTYLE. ZED does NOT imply poverty, hardship, or energy austerity. ZED IMPROVES YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING, rather than imposing restrictions on you. Americans merely need to understand how to take advantage of the renewable energy potential that we have been ignoring for far too long. Your property receives an abundant supply of energy for free every day – far more than you need to live a very comfortable life. Your conventional home architect and builder just didn’t have a clue how to take advantage of what nature freely gave you to enjoy as you chose. Americans just need to stop being energy IGNOREant.

The swimming pool solarium for our 1979 Zero Energy Home was 50’ x 32’, with a 22’ high single-pane tempered glass wall. You could fit a 3200 square foot house (roof and all) INSIDE our swimming pool room! (How large is your home?)

At first you might think “What an expensive thing that must have been”, but actually, it was cleverly designed to be EXTREMELY INEXPENSIVE TO BUILD. Notice that the floor next to the south facing glass is just dirt, for beautiful indoor greenhouse planting and year round tropical plant, fruit and vegetable enjoyment.

Our spectacular indoor swimming pool room was only a bit more expensive than a screened-in swimming pool enclosure of the same size (which often have a high retail markup over actual construction costs). BUT, our indoor swimming pool enclosure provided much more value with year round swimming in all types of weather when the outside temperature was well below freezing.

A year round sunroom for a smaller swim spa or hot tub is much less expensive than a 50’ x 32’ swimming pool room. Some people who want a full-length exercise pool have made it only 8’ wide, to minimize pool, and pool room, construction costs. An 8’ wide swimming pool, swim spa, or hot tub is also much easier to cover with a movable floor system.

Automated Movable Floor and Window Quilts

A motorized pool cover floor adds flexible utility and usable floor space when you are not swimming. Motorized window quilts can conserve solarium heat and minimize window condensation on the coldest Northern winter nights.

Your new friends and guests’ jaws will drop when you activate the movable pool cover floor motors, or your intelligently programmed sensor controls automatically close the window quilts at sunset (one at a time to minimize peak drain on the electrical system).

“OMG!” is the frequent response that I love to hear from people who previously had little respect for the idea of a Zero Energy Home, or living “off the grid.” ZED esthetic creativity can NOT be cost-effectively equaled by anything else in the world.

Most of yesterday’s “house of the future” demonstrations have failed miserably, and been forgotten long ago. Their inaccurate prophets have died or gone on to other jobs.

ZED on the other hand has endured for decades, and is now growing in well-deserved recognition worldwide. The beauty of scientific truth is that eventually it must overcome fallible politics. When a society demands that the world is flat, that does not make it so forever.

ZED has always been cost effective, regardless of traditional resistance to change. America cannot continue being the world’s largest energy waster for long. We MUST innovate or decline rapidly. The wonderful thing is that our ZED future WILL be more beautify and productive than ever. We hope you can see our ZED future through our well-informed imagineering eyes. Our track record gives ZED the credibility you demand.

More About Space Age Window Quilt Technology

In 1960, NASA developed and deployed a 100-foot diameter “aluminized mylar” (AM) passive communication satellite called Echo 1. AM has played an important role in our space program ever since. AM is an effective “radiant barrier.” It works for all kinds of electromagnetic wave radiation including radio waves (Echo 1), infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet.

If you hold some AM between your face and the sun, two things happen: (1) it reflects roughly 97% of the sun’s radiation, and (2) it has “low emissivity” so it does not radiate thermal energy on the other side of the product. This is also true of inexpensive grocery store aluminum foil, but AM is a bit less conductive than metal foil, especially if one side of the AM has fibers that trap air molecules next to it, to make it less “conductive.” Aluminum foil tears easily. Mylar does not.

A body in orbit around the Earth can get 250 degrees Fahrenheit on the sunny side, and –250 on the shady side facing black outer space. When an orbiting object like the Space Shuttle or the International Space Station goes behind the Earth, it can instantly get frigid cold. When astronauts took their first space walks, their suits had multiple layers of AM,plus Dacron fibers (like those in your pillows). The Dacron separated the layers of AM to keep it from conducting heat. The multi-layered AM+Dacron insulation is called “MLI.” It is used to line the Space Shuttle and the International Space Shuttle. NASA engineers know that it is the most effective insulation available for these extreme SUPERINSULATION purposes. They do NOT insulate astronauts or space craft with ineffective fiberglass home insulation, for very good scientific reasons.

Why not line your windows with quilts made of inexpensive space age MLI? How about your roof where summer sunshine would otherwise make your attic over 130 degrees, (which makes it necessary for you to have large air conditioning bills)? (More discussion on this topic on Natural Energy Applied Research)

Perhaps you say “Oooo, an indoor swimming pool with a movable floor and motorized window quilts – That’s way too expensive for me. All I can afford is a conventional house with an outdoor pool. Maybe I’ll add a screened in pool enclosure later.”

If you think about it and do the math, what we have described above does not cost much more. When you realize the amount you will save on utility bills in a Zero Energy Home, you can afford to add that much to your mortgage payment, which is tax deductible (utility bills are not). The new “Energy Efficient Mortgage” program is a special financing option tailored to support the capital investment required to eliminate conventional public utility bill payments. You probably will also qualify for energy tax credits, and maybe state or federal government construction subsidies (for early adopters) for your new Zero Energy Home.

Such government subsidies will likely decline in the near future when the majority of new homes exploit ZED, and little public education or motivation is required. The sooner you make the obvious decision, the more support you will receive. In this case, waiting may be a bit more expensive. The added value of unique Zero Energy Home quality-of-lifestyle features will appreciate much faster, than do down-the-drain utility bill payments.

Would you rather have a nicer ZED home for the same monthly expenditure, or continue subsidizing the highly paid executives at your local power company? The decision is yours.

If you really cannot afford (or want) any type of swimming pool, maybe you would enjoy a small greenhouse with an inexpensive hot tub. You could hinge a simple hot tub hard cover up against the greenhouse East or west wall, and lower it manually when the hot tub is not in use, adding a few feet of temporary floor space for any other purpose you might like. A well-design custom Zero Energy Home can allow unique artistic creativity opportunities, and high entertainment value, on a tight budget. What special features would you like in your dream home?

Tomorrow’s future is not what the ineffective energy-and-architecture prophets once thought it would be. On the other hand, rock solid ZED has endured for decades, and is about to see a major explosion in the energy starved American new millennium. (Big toothy grin)

Some people suggest that we will all need to reduce our standard of living by wearing coats indoors in the winter, and sweltering in the summer, BUT ZED has demonstrated for 25 years that a Zero Energy Home means a MORE comfortable ABUNDANT LIFE for the intelligent far sighted people who understand how to exploit modern energy technology, to make their innovative lifestyle much better than ever before. Would you enjoy warm indoor swimming on the coldest winter days?

Near-Zero-Energy Clothes Drying (Getting rid of another expensive temperature changing energy waster)

Great grandma hung her wet clothes out on a clothesline (in the summer). They came back fresh smelling, and sun bleached, but not very fluffy. She didn’t have fabric softener for her wringer washer. (Leaning over an operating old fashioned electric wringer, could be much worse than a getting a mammogram - ewww)

The process of solar energy clothes drying (on an exterior clothesline when the weather was nice) was labor intensive and took hours. Wind, dust, dogs, cold weather, and rain were not popular things.

Today, there are a few old fashioned clotheslines next to rusty mobile homes, and off-the-grid log cabins, but they don’t work well in the winter, and ZED frowns on opportunistic people who sell “Solar-Powered, Scientifically Proven, Clothes Dryers” (a rope and clothes pins) on eBay for $50 to endlessly-gullible American consumers. (chuckle)

A modern electric clothes dryer uses more-than-8-times more electricity than the clothes washer does, because of its high-current heating element. Once again, we repeat that changing temperature is energy expensive.

Conventional clothes dryers also increase whole house heating and air conditioning bills by blowing a large volume of expensive conditioned air out of the building through the dryer vent, which must then be replaced by unconditioned outside air that is sucked in through unplanned small air infiltration leaks around the house (bringing with it undesirable dust, pollen, microorganisms, bits of insulation, etc.). The convenience of an interior clothes dryer is an expensive, unhealthy thing to do. It is a measurable source of allergies and respiratory illness.

A conventional clothes dryer should be located outside of the conditioned inner living quarters of a home, with a planned path for air blown out of the dryer vent to be replaced. In the winter, a large family that does a lot of laundry can install a simple air-to-air heat exchanger to recover some of the expensive heat from the clothes dryer, and use it to warm air in the conditioned interior living space. In the summer, a clothes dryer outside of the conditioned airspace does not increase expensive air conditioning bills.

At the end of the modern clothes washer cycle, the washtub spins at a few hundred RPM for a couple of minutes to remove only part of the water by centrifugal force. Then, we have to move our clothes to a violent-tumble clothes dryer, which damages them for an hour (and breaks buttons), using expensive high-current electricity, or natural gas, to remove the rest of the water.

Have you noticed the “lint” that comes out of your rough-and-tumble clothes dryer? That lint is not dirt. It used to be part of your clean clothes, which get thinner each time they are abusively dried. The familiar drying process eventually wears holes in them (stylish for some, ugly for business attire).

If we try to dry fitted sheets, clothes get balled up inside them and do not dry. They may take another expensive 45 minutes to dry. Sometimes clothes get twisted into a big knot.

The modern clothes dryer is far from perfect. We must quickly hang up our permanently pressed items, so they won’t wrinkle and look UGLY.

How dumb is all that? We all do it, BECAUSE that is the way Forest Gump’s momma taught us. Right?

A clever new “Spin X Spin Dryer” product extends the idea of using centrifugal force to remove much more water from clothes than the spin cycle on a conventional clothes washer does. It operates at an impressive 3,300 RPM for only 3 minutes and uses very little electricity per year. Balancing the load is obviously very important at such a high rotational speed. Other manufacturers are now delivering similar 3,000+ RPM Spin Dryers that cost a fraction of the Spin X price.

High RPM Spin Dryers are available today, but why not integrate this great idea into tomorrow’s one-pass clothes washers? Maybe you’ll be the ZED appliance manufacturer who adds this obviously necessary feature to your product line. I have noticed that some European and Australasian clothes washers already wisely use over 1,000 RPM spin cycles to remove more water than American washers do. I don’t understand why the Europeans (and others) seem to be more intelligent in such things as clothes washers, and tankless hot water heaters. Maybe some American companies are just Non-Learning Entities. The buying public that tolerates inferior mediocrity are partially to blame.

To minimize clothes washer energy expense, use unheated water (when appropriate) and cold-water detergent. (For health reasons, some things like underwear, bed sheets and pillowcases should still be washed in HOT water.)

Try using 5/8 of the recommend amount of detergent (too many suds waste soap and increase energy consumption). Liquid soaps are sometimes more effective than some of the old technology powered soaps. Minimal-detergent washing leaves less of the (irritating) detergent in your clothes, and makes rinse cycles more effective. Match the water level to your load size.

Wait until your have enough of one type of laundry for a full load. Do not wash heavily soiled clothes with lightly soiled ones. Use the shortest wash cycle for the soil level of your clothes. Select high-speed spin, where available.

Consider the use of a portable, manual, hand washing machine (like the $45 five-pound-load Wonder Wash) for delicate items and small loads. There is nothing electric about the very simple little countertop Wonder Wash. It uses very little water, and the exercise will benefit some individuals (smile). Your delicate clothes will last longer.

Some of the newest energy-efficient full-sized clothes washers are beginning to achieve much better energy efficiency. Finding a way to use less water to wash clothes saves both hot water heating requirement, and water removal drying requirement. New DC digital integrated circuits are doing impressive things by improving low-speed-motor clothes agitation performance, with more-efficient permanent magnet motors, while eliminating conventional less-efficient gearboxes and belt drives. The spin cycles are getting up to 1,200 RPM. Its not Spin X speed, but 1,200 RPM does remove more water than conventional lower-RPM spin cycles did, thus reducing drying time requirement. The entire process from heating water to drying clothes must be considered as a holistic systems engineering problem to be solved. One energy / performance improvement may help several other areas as well. One problem for energy-minded consumers is that conventional clothes washers cost only a few hundred dollars, whereas some of the most energy efficient ones are $1,000 to nearly $2,000 dollars. They may save hundreds of dollars a year, but will consumers pay the price for extreme efficiency?

The New Zealand company Fisher & Paykel offers their advanced technology Ecosmart clothes washer (with 1,000 RPM spin) in the U.S. for less than $600. It uses one-fourth of the energy of a clunky American clothes washer, and can quickly pay for its higher-quality cost. It may currently have one of the lowest “total ownership costs” of any clothes washer in America. Check the EnergyGuide posted on the unit. Fisher & Paykel also offer a similar technology dishwasher. American companies (with production sites in China) have a long way to go to catch up with other foreign energy-conservation innovations.

The proof-of-concept systems are in place. Let the innovation competition begin! Many the most energy-efficient cost-effective units win the appreciation of intelligent buyers. Often “lowest initial cost” does NOT mean “lowest total cost.”

In a Zero Energy Home, nearly-dry high-RPM-spun clothes could be hung in a passive-solar-heated closet (with a tiled floor) located next to the washer (next to the sunroom), where warm, dry, fresh, moving air would quickly finish the drying process, in less total time AND less labor than an expensive conventional clothes dryer consumes today, without damaging delicate clothes. The drying closet would take the space normally occupied by a clothes dryer. It would have near-zero-energy consumption. Less effort, less time, nicer undamaged clothes, no buttons to replace - WHY NOT SAVE ENERGY DOING YOUR CLOTHES?

Why didn’t YOU think of that simple solution long ago? I had the clothes dryer closet in MY home in 1979. What must go on in the fantasy world brain of these crazy ZED imagineers? If you want holes in the knees of your blue jeans, this ZED solar-powered indoor clothes-drying closet system won’t do it for you.

Like great grandma, you also won’t need to dispose of clothes dryer lint (no indoor solar clothes dryer damage to your delicate clothes). Less of your time will be spent washing and drying clothes. Life will become so much easier. I should be a professional salesman. (snicker)

Healthier Food Preparation

Our ancient ancestors caught or gathered their food as needed, and ate it very fresh. That is what our internal metabolic processes still assume. Fresh organic foods that are close to their natural, unadulterated state is the way our bodies would be their healthiest today. Our ancestors did not lug around energy guzzling refrigerators or range / ovens, in an RV. They learned to EAT FRESH!

Our ancient ancestors did not have to deal with unhealthy feedlot animals, or chickens crammed into small spaces - recycling EVERYTHING on the ground many times. (ewww) Deadly trans fats and sugar substitutes had not been invented in uncaring chemical laboratories yet.

Our ancestors did not have to deal with moldy fruits and vegetables, grown in depleted soils with harmful chemical fertilizers, using pesticides like DDT that are banned in the U.S. but not in places that we import foods from. Our misleadingly named “fresh produce” was actually picked days before (often outside our country), and is already starting to decay by the time it reaches our local supermarket. Our organic-food natural-diet ancestors did not have to deal with wrapped produce, full of questionable preservatives that our modern bodies do not know how to deal with. But WE do. In America, the average food item is transported 1,500 miles before it gets to our plate – nowhere near “fresh.”

Americans now erroneously think that they have to cook their food to death to kill all of the bad stuff in it. But, even lengthy overcooking does NOT remove the cancer-causing pesticides, chemicals, drugs, amphetamines or growth hormones used today to bring domestic and imported animals to market faster.

The inefficient American range oven is like the inefficient American hot water tank – you have to wait a long time for it to warm up, and that wastes a lot of unproductive expensive energy unnecessarily. We must be unconventional and ask: Why do Americans cook food to death anyway? Is there a better way to prepare and eat much healthier food?

Cooking ALWAYS destroys the valuable enzymes and antioxidants found in natural foods. Natural enzymes and antioxidants are essential to proper metabolism, fighting diseases like cancer, slowing the aging process, etc. Our genetic DNA uses enzymes to control every aspect of how we grow, what we are, and the daily repair of cells throughout our entire body. The process of how our bodies exploit natural enzymes is so complex, that you could say it is a “mystic miracle.” Destroying enzymes in the foods we eat is bad, in ways that are difficult for the best scientists to fully understand. Cooking oxidizes (burns up) our natural food and uses up its beneficial antioxidants. When a light colored food turns brown, it has been severely oxidized, and is no longer in its original (healthier) state. Cooking is an unnatural process that our ancient ancestors did not do.

High temperature cooking in neurotoxic aluminum cookware is directly linked to Alzheimer’s disease (ask any Pathologist – Aluminum in the brain is how Alzheimer’s is accurately diagnosed by post-mortem brain tissue analysis). Mother Nature created our natural food sources. Americans frequently do themselves a great unhealthy disservice by over processing and overheating our food literally “to death.”

Commonplace overcooking alters any food chemically into complex inorganic substances that are at the very least useless, and at worst can do great harm to our bodies (like “acrylamides” and “heterocyclic amines”), if consumed for long periods of time. Overcooked food is loaded with empty calories that contribute to weight gain (the great American obesity epidemic), while leaving us undernourished and much less healthy. Frying foods in high temperature trans fats (like french fries or snack chips) is the very worst possible thing anyone can do with food. Heart disease is the number one killer of Americans, and trans fats are the number one cause of heart disease – NOTHING in the common American diet is worse for you to eat.

Eating one overcooked meal (prepared in unhealthy metal cookware with trans fats) is probably not going to kill you, but the cumulative effect of eating overcooked food for decades will add up, and increase your risk of many deadly diseases, especially cancer of the intestinal tract and brain damage. There can be little doubt that poor nutrition and poor food preparation are the direct cause of tens (hundreds) of thousands of untimely, easily avoidable American deaths every year.

Raising the temperature of some foods to 165 degrees Fahrenheit does kill the deadly molds and bacteria that are very common in our adulterated food supply, but most Americans want to badly damage their food by cooking it at temperatures well over 250 degrees for way too long.

You would not put your hand in boiling water. Think of the permanent damage it would do. Why cook your food above 200 degrees? Do you really want to eat badly damaged food?

Modern nutritional science has clearly shown that traditional range / oven overcooking (that grandma taught your mother) is often a VERY UNHEALTHY thing to do. It can be the direct cause of colon cancer, debilitating dementia, and a variety of other painful ways to die an unnecessary early death.

ZED Healthy Cooking Conclusion: (1) Eat more fresh, unprocessed, uncooked foods. Begin with organic FRESH foods. Wash them thoroughly and eat them soon after they are purchased. The American Heart Association says that broccoli, cauliflower and squash are excellent heart healthy foods. They taste great when eaten fresh. If you cook broccoli very much, you change the chemical state of its natural enzymes, antioxidants, beneficial sulfur, etc. It ceases to be “bioactive.” 2% of every human cell is sulfur. You need bioactive sulfur for healthy elastic cells (youthful skin, internal organs, etc.). Cooked broccoli is much less beneficial than fresh, but you have to wash fresh vegetables very well to remove nearly invisible mold, fungus, bacteria, etc. Your stomach acids do the rest to prepare your chewed food for internal distribution to various metabolic functions that extract what you body needs to make you healthy and maintain the energy you need to survive and thrive.

Vegetables with beneficial water-soluble complex vitamins are also AIR SOLUBLE. Nutritional value begins to decline rapidly the instant they are harvested. Wrapping them in airtight, vacuum-packed plastic can reduce the rate of vitamin decay, but bagged produce department vegetables often contain harmful preservatives – they look great, but are less healthy to eat. Check the ingredients of bagged vegetables, salads, etc. for preservatives, and avoid them. If you see nice white sliced apples in a bag, you KNOW they have been badly adulterated with strong preservatives. Apple slices naturally turn brown very quickly. Fruit skins (like oranges and tart apples) were designed by nature to preserve nutritive value. Man’s laboratory chemical preservatives are usually unhealthy unnatural things that our bodies don’t know what to do with.

(2) When you do cook foods, use a microwave oven, or a small special purpose low-current electrical appliance (e.g. low-temp crock-pot slow cooker). A microwave oven uses one forth of the electricity of a conventional range / oven. Microwave ovens heat the food, NOT the kitchen in the summer. Unlike inefficient ranges and ovens, microwave ovens INSTANTLY begin to heat what is inside them.

Microwave ovens heat food very safely and efficiently by “molecular agitation.” To heat anything, you must make its molecules move faster. A microwave oven make the water molecules in your food oscillate at a high radio frequency (around 2,450,000,000 cps). Heat is generated by simple intermolecular friction (like rubbing your hands together). Modern microwave ovens are very safe for naive consumer usage. You have nothing to fear from a microwave oven, if you follow basic directions (like do not cook in metal containers). Do NOT override the safety switch and put your head inside a microwave oven! - smile

Only safe-and-inert GLASS and CERAMIC cookware should be used (Corningware and Pyrex – I like the 9” round pie plate). Never cook or warm in plastic of any kind (it outgases when heated, and strange solvents enter your food).

All types of food in any state of preservation (fresh, refrigerated, or frozen) can be cooked in a microwave oven, as long as they are properly prepared and heated. Microwave thawing requires a low heat setting and frequent turning to raise the temperature evenly.

Microwave ovens have been around for half a century, since the Ratheon Radarange in 1947. They were introduced safely in airplanes by Litton in 1965 and fully approved by the FAA as totally safe in all ways.

Microwave ovens are quite different than the way great grandma used to cook, but they do not perform magic. The product turned out of a microwave oven is only as good as the ingredients put in, and the skill of the modern microwave cook. However, because of the speed with which microwaves heat food, fewer detrimental cooking effects occur, and the microwave prepared food will probably have better appearance, quality, taste, moisture, AND nutritional value, since conventional higher temperatures and longer cooking times badly damage all food, and microwaves do not, unless you leave the food in for way too long.

If you overcook anything in ANY type of range, oven, toaster, skillet, etc. THROW IT OUT. The dark stuff is loaded with carcinogens. Learn from your mistake and do NOT do the same thing again.

Microwave ovens are especially nice for quick cooking of flash frozen vegetables, which are frequently more nutritious than the moldy declining (preservative-laced) things you’ll find in the produce section. Mixed frozen vegetable packages are quick-and-easy starters for a healthy, tasty, nutritious meal, but stay away from unhealthy starchy potatoes, corn, sugar, flour, rice, etc.

By minimizing cook time and temperature in a microwave, deadly cancer-causing “acrylamides” (from starchy foods) and “heterocyclic amines” (from meat) will be avoided or significantly reduced. Use only the minimum cooking time necessary to raise food temperature no higher than 170 degrees (well below the boiling point of water) for maximum nutritional value and safety. If you touch it and it instantly burns you, you left it in way too long and badly damaged your food.

A microwave oven uses about one forth of the energy of a conventional range / oven, to do a superior job. It takes time to learn how to use a microwave oven properly as your primary (or only) method of cooking. My ZED kitchen has two microwave ovens for maximum food preparation speed and appropriate sizing – one large one, and one medium/small unit. Don’t use a big one, when a small one will do. The small ones are now very inexpensive (< $40). You can afford to buy several for different eating places in your home (solarium, entertainment area, etc.).

Microwaves cook from the thinner outer edges inward. Suppose you want an egg omelet. Prepare the ingredients the way you like them (I throw away most of the egg yokes and add high-antioxidant RED bell pepper, uncolored soy cheese, etc.) I lightly put Canola oil (high omega 3 essential fatty acid) and a few chopped walnuts in my 9” round Pyrex pie plate. I zap it for a couple of minutes in my smaller rotating microwave. The edges of my omelet begin to get solid, but the center is runny, so I mix it all together with a fork and zap it again. My yummy omelet is then cooked homogeneously – no burned spots and nothing raw.

You have to do something similar with meat to make sure it is cooked evenly, not a mix of overdone and underdone. Make sure the internal temperature of your food reaches 165 degrees, but never above 185 degrees (to avoid cancer-causing heterocyclic amines). Thicker cuts of meat should be cut thinner (strips or same-size chunks) to ensure more-even cooking throughout. Don’t try to cook thin and thick pieces of meat at the same time.

Low fat meats come out of a microwave oven much moister than any other cooking technique (except boiling, which depletes much of the nutritive value). Drain off any fat that cooks out ad enjoy.

I NEVER turn on my stove or oven any more. I just don’t like the taste of what comes out of conventional cooking.

If I cook outdoors, I slow-smoke meats (for 14 hours) at very low temperature. Smoke from an offset firebox does the tasty cooking, NOT flames directly under the meat that produce huge amounts of cancer-causing black heterocyclic amine char. (Double Yuck! Colon Cancer On An Ugly Black Plate!) Those grill marks that everyone loves from char broiling, are where the most carcinogenic (cancer-causing) heterocyclic amines are found. (Sorry if that messes up your day.)

ZED cooking is the healthiest, lowest-cost way to prepare delicious world-class food. It takes time to learn how to do it correctly, and why. It IS unconventional. Why waste money and floor space on an old-fashioned range and oven ever again? I now feel the same way about fireplaces, but You can have anything you want in YOUR Zero Energy Home.

Photovoltaic Solar Systems – “Free” Electricity, Directly From the Sun

The photovoltaic (PV) solar-electric cell was discovered in 1954 by Bell Telephone researchers who were examining the sensitivity of a properly prepared silicon wafer to sunlight. The wonderful PV discovery came quickly on the heels of transistors and integrated circuits. By the late 1950s, PV’s were commonly used to power U.S. space satellites.

The space program success of PVs generated commercial applications for PV technology. The simplest photovoltaic systems power small calculators and wristwatches everyday. Larger PV systems now cost-effectively provide remote electricity to pump water, power communications equipment, and provide electricity to rural “off-the-grid” homes.

Today, the large “wings” that you see extending from modern satellites, and the International Space Station, gather all of the electricity that the spacecraft need for the life of the system, at no additional operating cost. A one-time capital investment provides almost endless (25+ year) free energy, regardless of what your local electric company wants to charge tomorrow.

The amount of solar energy striking the Earth’s surface every minute is greater than the total amount of energy that the world's entire human population consumes in a year. The sunshine that falls on your property belongs to you. It is probably much more energy than you need to live very comfortably. No one can charge or tax you for the solar energy on your property. It will not decline in the lifetime of your descendants. You merely need today’s photovoltaic (or other solar) technology to gather, store, and use it.

In the 1960’s, PV solar cells were VERY expensive. Now they are in $1 hand calculators. The price of modern PV’s has dropped by about one half every five years, (similar to Moore’s Law for the price/performance of silicon chip integrated computers, which are now in almost everything around us today). After seeing the explosion of growth of intelligent integrated circuit devices from spacecraft to entertainment, it should not be difficult to understand WHY and HOW there will very soon be a similar economy-changing explosion of PV systems almost everywhere. The U.S. Space Program has always created innovations that have eventually had dramatic influences on our entire nation, just as 1960’s PV’s are about to do in the 2010’s.

By 2010 and beyond, the current PV price/performance trend says that PV systems should begin to cost much LESS than buying electric power from highly polluting public utility companies.

In 1980, The Walt Disney World EPCOT Center, Future World, Energy Pavilion opened its doors. Its roof was covered with PV’s that powered internal energy exhibits (the longest ride at Disney World). It doesn’t flip you upside down, but it has always stretched MY mind. I like the idea of a happy, energy abundant Future World, where we no longer have to worry about providing for basic human needs. And, we can live a life of adventurous exploration of the universe around us, in harmony with nature.

Today’s PV’s are many times more cost effective than those available in 1980. They are also being produced in much higher volume than ever before. The growth trend is clearly established, and federal and state governments are encouraging even faster growth in the near future, with multiple R&D subsidies and significant incentives for homeowners. In some cases, the net cost (all equipment and all things considered) for a cost-effective PV system is now only one twelfth (roughly 8%) of the 1980 cost. It will continue to drop in the near future. Who can resist the economics of such an outstanding bargain, compared to ever-increasing, highly polluting public utility bills?

According to the 2006 www.WhiteHouse.gov Advanced Energy Initiative Fact Sheet:

“President Bush's FY2007 budget proposes nearly $150 million in funding for government and private research into solar technology – an increase of more than 75 percent over current levels. This support can help make solar power competitive by 2015.”

It is not the kind of aggressive technology innovation budget that the 1960’s Man on the Moon project had, but any increase in public PV funding is better than nothing at all. Our President has finally been convinced that the promise of a near-term PV energy solution IS well worth the political investment, in light of America’s current energy crisis and pressure to resolve it quickly. PV systems are already working on thousands of homes worldwide, and the PV successes will greatly increase in number in the next few years of significantly accelerated development and deployment. The current short-term goal is a million solar roofs, with the rest of America’s 120+ million households close behind.

ZED believes that home-generated photovoltaic energy, which costs LESS per kilowatt hour (kWh) than public utility electricity, will take place BEFORE 2015. It should be closer to 2010, IF current trends continue, and the PV price improvements are further accelerated by increased public spending on future PV research, development and deployment education incentives.

PV’s can already cost less than the price to run an electric power line a quarter mile or more to a rural home. Many thousands of home-sized PV systems are currently in use in off-the-grid standalone homes. The reliable PV technology works very well.

PV’s are now being used to cost effectively power modern road signs, street lights, traffic signals, roadside call boxes, rural water pumps, fans, remote radios, transmitter antennas, hilltop microwave towers, cell phone antennas, and many other electrical pieces of equipment, even INSIDE cities where utility company power is readily available, (but electric company power is now LESS cost effective than today’s PV’s in many applications – all things considered).

Photovoltaic Powered Road Sign Near The Florida Solar Energy Center

The road sign PV application obviously demands a reliable power supply for safety and information purposes. These road signs use efficient modern lighting systems to minimize the drain on their batteries at night (in contrast to the inefficient century-old incandescent Edison base light bulbs that are still found in most American energy wasting homes today).

PV road signs MUST work properly, even after many cloudy days, (which does happen during Florida’s “liquid sunshine” rainy season). On a cloudy day, roughly 30% of the maximum sunny day solar gain potential is still available. You can get a bad sunburn on the cloudiest Florida days. The only difference is that the sunlight is more diffused on a cloudy day, which means that solar collector angle is less important. Solar panels do collect some energy on cloudy overcast days (to recharge batteries, heat water, operate pumps, warm a greenhouse in the winter, etc.) even when the sun is not shining brightly.

To maximize solar gain, collection panels should be approximately perpendicular to the altitude and azimuth angle of the sun. Latitude determines what is correct for your location. For example:

Orlando Florida USA, 28 Degrees 32 Minutes North Latitude

The mid point between 38 degrees and 85 degrees is 61.5 degrees. A panel mounted at 28.5 degrees (90 minus 61.5 degrees - Perpendicular to the annual average peak altitude of the sun) would maximize annual solar gain for a few minutes around the peak each day. Since the sun it not at its peak all day long, a more vertical mounting angle would improve daylong solar gain, particularly in the winter when days are shorter and solar gain is more critical. Your latitude will directly influence the optimum angle for your particular locations.

For a primarily summer PV application when the peak altitude of the sun is higher, solar collection panels would be tilted back (up to about 20 degrees) more horizontal, depending on your location. For a primarily winter application, panels may be more vertical (since the summer / winter altitude of the sun varies by 47 degrees, due to the 23.5 degree tilt of the Earth on its rotational axis.).

For a primarily morning application, PV panels could face more to the East. For an afternoon application they would face more to the West.

PV solar electric panels work best overall when facing Solar South (toward the Equator in the Northern hemisphere). PV panels facing 30 degrees East or West of Solar South will lose about 10 to 15 percent of their potential electrical output power. If a PV panels faces 60 degrees East or West of Solar South, the power loss will be 20 to 30 percent. When choosing a site, avoid trees, buildings or obstructions that could shade PV panels at any time of day, during any season. This is perhaps the worst during the winter, when the sun never gets very high above the horizon. Roof areas that are not shaded in the summer can become shaded in the winter, due to the 47 degree seasonal change in the altitude of the sun.

PV Solar panels produce the most electrical output power when they are perpendicular to the sun. For optimal performance of panels with a fixed mounting system, the altitude angle of tilt of a South facing PV panel is determined by the location latitude (distance from the Equator). In most cases, if the PV system electrical power production is adequate in the winter, it will also be satisfactory

during the rest of the year (even though the altitude tilt angle is optimized for the winter), since summer days are longer, and the sun’s rays are more intense.

Examples: Orlando 28.5 + 5 = Tilt Angle 33.5 Degrees From Horizontal (winter days are longer than Chicago)

Chicago 41.9 + 20 = Tilt Angle 61.9 Degrees From Horizontal (Sun Altitude is lower than Orlando)

Swimming pool water heaters are a bit different than PV solar electric panel orientation issues. For example, due-West-facing (270 degree azimuth) solar water heating panels (90 degrees West of Solar South) can raise the temperature of a swimming pool effectively in the afternoon of late Spring and early Fall (but not in the winter, when South facing, more vertical, solar collection panels are required).

Another location specific example: In Central Florida, summer mornings are often clear, with cloudy conditions building into thunderstorms in the afternoon. A Southeasterly azimuth can improve solar gain during the morning, and then when clouds build in the afternoon, the diffused light is less critical on solar collection angle. This would not be true in the arid Southwestern U.S.

For solar water heating, a sensor can monitor the temperature of the collection panel, and only pump water through the panels when they are being warmed by the sun, which would be at different times of the day, depending on season and the azimuth of the panel orientation. For a photovoltaic system, the PV array would essentially only be connected to storage batteries when it is producing more voltage than is currently in the batteries.

Solar collection panels can be mounted on a simple one-or-two-axis movable rack that allows their altitude (and azimuth) angles to be manually adjusted (2 to 6 times a year) if the system’s solar collection panel capacity is marginal for summer and winter applications. A ground level installation, or a flat rooftop, could make this adjustment easier to do. Reflection off of winter snow can measurably increase solar gain when the solar panel altitude tilt angle is higher (for Northern climates). (This reflection effect is especially true for vertical South facing sunroom glass.)

A “PV concentrating module” can use an optical element (such as an inexpensive “Fresnel lens”) to increase the amount of sunlight captured by each PV cell, but diffused sunlight on cloudy days cannot be focused by a lens, reducing the value of this technology in some heavily overcast climatic zones or seasons.

To maximize direct solar gain all day long in any season, PV panels can be motorized on a (one or) two-axis mounting system (for altitude and azimuth) to track the path of the sun. This is initially more expensive, with higher lifetime mechanical maintenance cost. It may not be cost effective for most residential applications. Fixed or tracking mirrors (flat or parabolic) can also increase total BTU’s of direct solar gain captured, by essentially increasing the square footage of solar gain potential redirected to the solar collector.

In a couple of decades, a simple non-tracking photovoltaic system installed on your Zero Energy Home today will probably still work just fine, but the newest future PV systems will be so inexpensive that you will most likely want to upgrade what you have to an advanced renewable energy technology that we cannot even imagine today. It will most likely still be powered by the sun, but who can say for sure? Science fiction has talked about hard-to-comprehend things like “cold fusion.” Scientific knowledge is exploding so very fast (redoubling in less than two years) that we cannot accurately predict what wonders will be discovered next year. One thing we do know from experience is that technology we implement pervasively today needs to have been working well on a smaller scale years ago, which is certainly true of 25-year-old elements of practical ZED.

So … Why not use PV’s for YOUR Zero Energy Home TODAY, and even plan to recharge your near-future electric car batteries with rooftop PV’s, thus eliminating the ever-increasing costs for household power bills AND gasoline?

The Southern roofline of your new Zero Energy Home needs to be “clean” with no cuts and jags, or shaded areas, and plenty of room to add new technology solar collection systems tomorrow. The angle of your Southern roofline should be close to the optimum solar collection angle for your latitude – steeper for more Northern latitudes (which is also a good idea where you have heavy snow loads).

In the next few years, we should see a major unprecedented ramp up in the use of photovoltaics on the roofs of many homes, on the road toward a nation of Zero Energy Homes, and rechargeable electric cars (or something even better next decade).

PV’s will NOT solve all of the energy problems of poorly-designed traditional homes, or old gas guzzling cars, but almost every intelligent (or subsidized, law abiding) citizen will want at least a few PV panels on their roof to defray electric bills, operate their electric car, and even sell peak electricity back to the utility company (by running our electric meters backwards).

This rapidly growing PV technology is going to have a major impact on American Zero Energy Homes in only 5 to 10 years. By the 2010’s, financial institutions will have to completely rethink funding utility company (negative?) growth. It may be a very different energy production outlook than what we have today.

Community planners will have to consider economy-of-scale housing-addition PV’s, so solar panels won’t have to be on every resident’s roof. Large local PV panel arrays can be more cost effective, but there are special transmission and storage considerations that must be properly engineered. DC PV systems need to be close to the point of use to avoid transmission inefficiencies, or the need for inverters to transmit high voltage AC.

Tomorrow’s PV manufacturers will have a huge capacity expansion problem that they would LOVE to have to solve very soon. New PV technologies are appearing regularly. Today’s PV manufacturing capacity is already over committed. Demand far exceeds supply (keeping prices higher than necessary). And, PV demand is about to explode as prices fall below what electric companies must charge for their inefficient, polluting power production. Many of yesterday’s obsolete energy-wasting jobs will be lost very soon in many different industries, but PV job security seems fairly certain for decades into the predictable future.

Future PV equipment production plants will have to be very agile, in order to accommodate rapid future advances in how to make cheaper PV’s much faster than ever before. ZED concept integrators will come out with many new ideas, like PV roof shingles, integrated structural radiant barrier insulation plus PV power generation, all in easy-to-apply roofing materials (similar to lightweight 4 x 8 roofing sheets).

ZED knows what is clearly needed. We understand the (unrealized) innovative renewable energy potential of the nation that sent a dozen men to walk on the Moon decades ago. We believe that American needs a lot of PV creativity, and we expect that the unprecedented marketing potential to a BILLION homes worldwide should spark a rapid PV transformation VERY soon. Suppose you only received a royalty of a few dollars each for a million homes, would that be worth some of YOUR time?

AC versus DC Lights and Appliances, in a ZED PV World

When Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park innovation laboratory invented the first electric light bulb, it used direct current (DC) from batteries. It is said that Edison tried over 5,000 different things for the incandescent filament, and then discovered one that worked well (trial and error experimental engineering). We do NOT want trial-and-error experimentation of 5,000 future Zero Energy Homes. We already have clearly superior ZED alternatives that were proven effective decades ago, and they are readily available today.

The Thomas Edison light bulb used the “Edison screw-in base.” A century later, most of our energy-wasting traditional homes still depend on obsolete, inefficient, Edison base incandescent lighting. “Incandescent” means that electricity is used to inefficiently generate heat, which gets so hot that it gives off light (and eventually burns up the bulb’s hot wire filament, even in a mostly-evacuated thin glass bulb.). Today’s “extra-long-life incandescent light bulbs” are designed to operate at cooler temperatures, which means they are even less efficient at converting electricity into light than conventional bulbs, which burn out faster.

Antiquated incandescent light fixtures are “cheap” for builders to install, and “cheap” for you to replace, but very expensive to operate over the life of your house. Power companies love the way most Americans have refused to upgrade to modern low-energy lighting systems. “Why bother?” you may have asked yourself. “Doing the same old thing year-after-year is easy – Just flip the switch. Right?”

Florescent lights are much less expensive to operate, and closer to true daylight white, than expensive yellow incandescent lighting. Florescent lights come in long tubes, circles, and small “compact florescent” bulbs, with century-old Edison screw in bases for easy retrofitting. Florescent lights initially cost more, but they last much longer than incandescents, and consume far fewer watts per lumen (unit of visible light energy).

Fluorescent lighting is much more cost effective overall, but they are NOT the best thing for an off-the-grid Zero Energy Home with PV solar electric power.

In the beginning, Edison wanted to provide DC power plants to electrify the entire country. One MAJOR problem is that transmitting DC electricity very far is extremely inefficient. Very-large-diameter expensive cables are required, and energy loss per unit of distance is still quite significant. This fact worked against the economy of scale of Edison’s large electric DC power plant idea, (unlike the first alternating current (AC) power plants at Niagra Falls, which were designed by Nicoli Tesla, who knew far more about the nature of electricity than Edison ever did).

Edison fought AC long and hard. Edison invented the capitol punishment “Electric Chair” using a Westinghouse AC generator to show how deadly AC could be. But, in the end, AC won the future (because of the transmission issue), and today our electric house current is 115 volt 60 cycle per second alternating current (AC). For a century, all of our lights, radios, TV’s electronics, motors and appliances (since Tesla invented the AC motor and built the Niagra power station) have assumed 115v 60 cycle per second AC.

One problem with tomorrow’s Zero Energy Homes is that PV’s ARE DC !

DC PV’s work just fine with deep cycle 12-volt DC storage batteries (like those common used for marine applications and sold almost everywhere, including WalMart). All types of appliances and electronics are currently available for 12 volt DC (in RV’s etc.: refrigerators, blenders, shavers, coffee makers, toasters, hot plates, burner / grills, circulating and ceiling fans, pumps, timers, thermal drink bottles, stoves, room heaters, vacuum cleaners, electric blankets, stereos, TV’s, portable food cooler / warmers, slow cookers, televisions, hair dryers, curling irons, vacuum sweepers, rechargeable hand tools, and all types of efficient florescent and LED lighting systems.

When you cannot find a DC appliance that you need, we know HOW to convert 12v DC into 115v 60 cycle AC – We use a modern solid state “inverter.” You can buy a power inverter for your car, in reasonable wattage capacities, and run small 115v AC things off of your car’s battery/alternator. Small ones start at about $20, and go up to hundreds of dollars for thousand(s) of watts. Some cars like the 36 mpg Pontiac Vibe have a 115 volt AC power inverter built into the dash. Why not?

Inverting DC into the U.S. regulated AC standard allows PV energy producing homeowners to sell electricity back to the power company (run the electric meter backwards by using a less-than-efficient “utility intertie”). DC-to-AC power inverters let us make use of century-old AC motors, lights and appliances with PV DC electricity.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT INVERTING PV DC TO CENTURY-OLD 115v HOUSEHOLD AC HAS A SIGNIFICANT EFFICIENCY LOSS. No inverter can ever be 100% efficient. It takes power to run any inverter, even if nothing is connected to it. The more load placed on inverts, the more inefficient heat they generate (and the shorter their life).

The larger the maximum capacity of an inverter, the larger the efficiency loss, unless they are loaded at 50% to 90% of their rated capacity. Running a 20-watt device on a 1000-watt inverter can be much less than 70% efficient. With only a few exceptions (in perfectly matched applications), most DC-to-AC power inverters are no more than 90% efficient, at best.

The output of a low-priced inverter is often not a perfect AC “sine wave.” Some appliance warrantees may be voided if you use them with DC-to-AC power inverters. Each model appliance is a bit different. This impacts a few AC devices that may not work properly, or their efficiency may be degraded. A square wave (inexpensive, imperfect sine wave) inverter may badly damage some electronic devices. Output “waveform quality” is one feature that may increase the price of high-quality inverters.

In the past and current, devices (like laptop computers) that must have DC, have provided AC-to-DC power supplies, which are optimized to meet the device’s internal power requirements. They have special adapters to work from airplane seats, etc. It is silly to think of generating DC with a PV system, then using an inverter to produce standard household AC, then using an AC-to-DC power supply to provide what the device actually needs internally, but I’ve seen it happen. (I’ve even done it myself briefly, when I did not have the correct DC-to-DC power supply adapter.) Each type of power adapter has an efficiency loss, which is a significant total percentage in this silly scenario.

In the near future, as PV DC becomes more pervasive, the dimishing number of devices that must have AC internally will probably have their own optimized cost-effective power inverters built in, as 12v DC florescent lights already do, etc. The hundred-year-old standard was 115v 60 cps AC, but very few things really need that old standard internally any more. Old TV’s needed 60 cps to display the 30 fps interlaced image television standard. Movies were 24 fps, but TV’s (which often show 24 fps movies) used the 60 cps AC standard to generate 30 fps (instead of movie-quality 24 fps directly). Today, popular LCD HDTV and computer monitors can generate whatever scan rates are appropriate for their technology.

Let future electrical devices provide exactly what type of electrical power they need, with safe input in the form of familiar 12v DC, which works very well with PV DC solar cell arrays and common deep cycle DC storage batteries.

The unavoidable inefficiency of trying to have a general-purpose power inverter work for many different AC devices implies an expensive capital investment requirement for more Zero Energy Home PV panels, more expensive deep-cycle storage batteries, and different size/type power inverters than we would need IF every electrical thing in our Zero Energy Home ran on much-safer DC electricity, and we did not need any power inverters (other than those optimized power inverters inside the devices themselves).

What about the primary reason that America went against Edison’s wishes and used deadly AC instead of much-safer DC in the first place?

Car batteries have never killed anyone (unless you drop one on someone’s head – smile). Household 115v AC has instantly killed many thousands of unsuspecting adults and children in a variety of “freak” accidents (predicted by Thomas Edison over a hundred years ago). A pair of scissors and a 115-volt AC household electrical socket almost killed me in a memorable shower of sparks when I was 4 years old. It is something I will certainly never forget.

In contrast, 12 volt DC cannot “electrocute” anyone. It can make something hot, which can burn you, but 12v DC cannot electrocute anyone, adult or child. In this respect, Edison was quite right – America went the wrong way, from a safety perspective. The families of many people killed by AC electrocution over the last century certainly understand.

The remaining issue with DC usage is long distance transmission inefficiency, BUT …
With PV’s on your rooftop, you do NOT have to worry about long distance DC power transmission!

The sun itself is the universal power distribution and remote transmission mechanism. Ain’t it great! No more new power poles, power line easements, or ugly power transmission towers required. No wind or ice storms taking out the power lines to thousands of customers. No traffic accidents running into new electric power poles, that mess up the view of the local landscape. No huge power transformers that are statistically linked to deadly diseases like leukemia, etc.

Do we really want to continue electric power company business as usual? About one thousand new residents a day move into Florida. Building new electric power plants is much more expensive than ever before. Do we want to pay power companies’ ever-increasing electricity rates, so they can build and fuel these environment-destroying power generating and distribution plants?

On average, it takes over three units of energy to generate and deliver only one unit of energy in the form of electricity to the ultimate end user, due to the inefficiency of all the “stuff” you see pictured above, plus huge generator and transmission losses. The heat generated by these many inefficient electrical processes could warm many Alaskan homes for a very long time. Cooling towers and toxic cooling fluids surround this place of great waste.

If you have ever been near a 600,000 volt long distance power transmission tower they hum loudly, constantly turning power into inefficient noise. In the rain, you can hear them sizzle and pop with even greater inefficiency.

One time I walked near a 600,000 volt power line with an umbrella, and a 1/4 in spark jumped out of the umbrella shaft and zapped my very surprised check. I put a volt meter on a car parked near a transmission line and measured over 20 volts between the bumper and the ground. A great deal of energy is wasted needlessly in the power transmission process, and many serious health problems are created also. Suppose that umbrella was held by someone with a pacemaker installed. What then? Immediate death?

When consumers capture “free” solar electric power at the point of consumption, this long-distance transmission inefficiency is essentially eliminated, and we eliminate the price of imported electric power company fuel. We could terminate ALL of this insane power company madness, by having our own home PV systems, which will soon cost LESS than electricity supplied through this maze of less-than-reliable inefficiency.

It is going to happen. It cannot be avoided. Further resistance is futile. The inescapable truth of the predictable trend is now easy to see. The old-fashioned petroleum and power companies are now nothing but inertial zombies that will predictably fall down and turn into nothing but rust and dust in the decades to come.

What happens to all of this “stuff” when there is a windstorm? When was the last time you lost power from these guys during a thunderstorm? Florida is just about the lighting capital of the world. Do you have a surge protector and battery backup power supply for your electronics, refrigerator, etc.? Do you have a gasoline generator for when another hurricane will damaging your local inefficient power distribution infrastructure? Is that the way it really has to be forever? Absolutely not!

One lone crazy American or foreign terrorist could easily destroy this concentrated electric power distribution infrastructure with a bomb on a timer, in a small old car – No suicide required – probably wouldn’t even be caught. There are no guards on duty where this picture was taken, and only lightweight chain link fences around some (not all) of this essential electrical distribution equipment.

This picture was taken very near the Kennedy Space Center, not far from the Florida Solar Energy Center. Where do you think NASA KSC and their employee homes get their electric power? You probably have something similar not too far from your business and home. Your child’s classroom may have a power transformer just outside of where your child sits every day. Are you worried? Perhaps you should be?

The Florida sun shines brightly on this UGLY inefficient, wasteful, electrical power transmission equipment, but the free sunlight is ignored year round, except for a few decorative trees.

People who work around this type of high power transformer equipment have a much higher incidence of cancer. Power companies refute the hard facts of the epidemiological cancer statistics. They say that transformers and power lines are no problem, just like tobacco companies said that smoking was not harmful to your health (Yeah, right!). Sadly, there are private houses only a few feet away from where this picture was taken.

America is truly a Non-Learning Nation. Corporate profits, and taxes paid to the government, are all that is important to our “leaders.” The failing health of our aging population is an Inconvenient Truth that is generally ignored altogether. We have learned to accept things the way they have always been, and we pay no attention to the clear cause-and-effect of our many modern energy, political and health problems.

Next to this oil-fired electric power generation station is a huge tank of imported petroleum. Oil fired power generation contributes greatly to MANY American problems, including lung cancer, escalating energy costs, sending HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars a year to Persian Gulf nations that harbor terrorists. Oil-fired electric power generators compete with motorists for the price of gasoline, etc. How spectacularly dumb is this electric company business as usual?

The laughable sadness of this extremely bad American energy tragedy is something that only Dilbert could appreciate. It is a crime against humanity, and an embarrassment to a declining unhealthy nation.

In the 1960’s, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center WAS the epitome of American scientific progress. Engineers with slide rules, flat tops, and pocket protectors put men in electric cars on the surface of the Moon! Some of their critical computers had less memory than a modern solar-powered hand calculator. Since the mission-critical Apollo program, the rate of American problem-solving ability has fallen into the dumpster.

Computers do our lock step preprogrammed thinking for us, and our children cannot read or do simple math in their heads. Today’s school kids hate problem-solving word problems. Here is a classic FOURTH GRADE MATH PROBLEM example:

“Five boys meet to play a game. Each boy shakes hand with every other boy. How many total hand shakes take place?”

“What is the generic formula if the number of boys is the variable ‘n’ ?” (The answer is critical to modern network design.)

Today’s students much prefer “multiple guess” scholastic achievement exams.

Ask your child what 8 times 7 is and see for yourself how long it takes, and if the answer is correct.

Ask a high school graduate for an estimate of the square root of 8 and see what you get.

Suppose a square house is 1,000 square feet, What is the length of one side of the house?

Could they do it in their head? With a calculator? With a PC? How high do they score
on their favorite video game? Their heads are full of useless high-speed mush, but simple

math eludes them. They were raised by commercial television standards of what they need.

Most high school graduates can’t read out loud many of the words on their diploma.

Some intelligent individuals did it decades ago. People who cannot read don’t have a clue.

According to NASA’s own post-mortem written reports, poor modern program mismanagement, lack of critical engineering communication, and a general absence of essential quality control destroyed two BILLION-dollar Space Shuttles, in ways that could have been easily prevented by the kind of “nothing-but-top-quality” people who ran and supported our extremely innovative Apollo space program in the late 1960’s. Even Apollo 13 was a “successful failure.”

I am still in great awe when I stand under the huge Saturn V at KSC. I participated on the NASA Industry Technical Advisory Board years ago when the Space Shuttle was designed and making its first flights. I wonder, where would we be today if America had NOT dropped the ball with scientific creativity, and challenging the minds of next generation’s potentially great leaders? America is now producing far fewer U.S.-born engineers and scientists than we did when our space program was aggressive and viable decades ago.

What would John Kennedy do in light of today’s unbelievably dumb, unnecessary energy crisis? Where is the courageous leadership we need to initiate a Man On The Moon type of project for clean, renewable solar energy in the U.S. today? Where would we be today, if we had invested the TRILLIONS of dollars we’ve spent on oil-related wars, on breaking our devastating addiction to oil, long ago? Where will we be tomorrow if we do not? We are slowly boiling to death, like an insensitive frog in a pot of hot water.

Today, when you visit the NASA Kennedy Space Center, you drive by red and white, air-polluting smoke stacks, next to huge oil tanks filled with imported petroleum, a field full of UGLY inefficient electric power transmission and distribution transformers, and a complex spider web of power line towers (as pictured above).

These are not the sooty smoke stacks of the Great Depression, but they do put very large volumes of invisible Global Warming greenhouse gases into the blue skies, and other toxic lung-cancer-causing chemicals into the air breathed by millions of Floridians. Even strong breezes from over the ocean do not dilute the carcinogens enough to make the air safe for our precious children.

This is NOT living in harmony with nature! It is NOT sustainable. Burning petroleum is a primary cause of Global Warming and many serious economic and health problems. It MUST end very soon. America will be healthier and wealthier when these big oil tanks and smoke stacks are torn down. ZED is the only possible short-term answer.

NASA brought photovoltaic systems into practical common space program usage in the 1960’s. Why can’t our space program doctor heal itself, in the middle of our national-security-threatening significant energy crisis, and unprecedented political pressure for a coherent, effective, national energy policy?

When you visit the Apollo Saturn V exhibit at the NASA Kennedy Space Center, your heart wells up with great pride in our once-great nation’s powerful-problem-solving engineering and scientific ability in the 1960’s - with our youngest aggressive national leader, a vision to go to the Moon, and good reason to decisively win the national-security-threatening space race. As a unified nation, we accomplished so very much, with such puny computing tools. It was all done with well-educated, unified, motivated human intellectual accomplishment.

Rather than educating the public about renewable, sustainable, clean, cheap energy technology, NASA KSC is installing a new joy ride to simulate the fun of a rocket launch. Americans pay billions to be entertained and spun around, but they won’t spend an hour a week to be educated in things that are important to their daily lives. How very sad. We are to busy working and playing to take time to learn how to live an abundant energy lifestyle.

Now our poorly educated, unmotivated, high-school drop out hamburger flippers cannot even accurately push a picture of french fries on a cash register, or add two items and calculate sales tax on a solar powered hand calculator, when their cash register computer has one of Bill Gates’ many famous software errors in it. Have you ever seen a clerk ask the supervisor “Which button do I push?” when there are only about 30 in front of them? Do you remember when Americans USED TO have a vocabulary of over 20,000 words, and use them well to communicate effectively? Today’s vulgar street talk consists of little more than a hundred repeated shock words and jargon phrases. Which the high school dropouts and blue comedians think are so cute (and profitable).

Its been over three decades since we left electric cars on the Moon, and we still won’t be back very soon. If we had colonized the Moon (as “2001, A Space Odyssey” speculated that we would) the technology of sustainable ecologic biosphere total-energy-independent living WITHOUT petroleum would have been widely implemented on Earth long ago.

Our Non-Learning Video-Game Nation has completely lost our 1960’s ability to decisively solve major technology problems. We still ignore 25-year-old cost-effective well-proven off-the-shelf energy-efficient systems engineering principles. Leaving NASA KSC and seeing the above imported-oil-fired power plants brings big tears to my sad eyes. Our shortsighted unrepentant nation has damaged the once-positive technology future for our poorly educated grandchildren. We have squandered trillions of dollars on unproductive wars that only increase the international hatred against our declining, vulnerable nation.

I hope our grandchildren revolt against our many past mistakes, and see the sunlight in ZED’s N.E.A.R. future, but our failure to fully fund motivating education programs has stolen their ability to think for themselves, as the space race generation once did.

It is somewhat like the Internet – developed by our government in 1972, our compartmentalized secretive intelligence agencies STILL cannot do things that an 8-year-old child can do with Google, years AFTER 9/11/2001.The FBI wasted nearly a billion dollars on their failed Virtual Case File project, and they STILL lack a workable enterprise architecture for effective inter-and-intra-agency information sharing.

We are truly a Non-Learning Nation in ever so many ways. Technology is often not the issue – It is bull-headed resistance to the clear-cut steps that are required to implement proven technology innovations. (I know, I’ve been a large-scale systems integration methodology mentor to the failed U.S. intelligence agencies, with a Top Secret Security Clearance, as well as a frustrated user group President in the NASA Industry Technology Advisory Board – Integrated Programs for Aerospace Vehicle Design.)

In the 1960’s before the 1973 OPEN oil embargoes, it (maybe) made sense to someone to have petroleum-fired electric power generators, but this has NOT been true since the important lessons that our nation SHOULD have learned in the 1970’s. The “Inconvenient Truth” of Global Warming is making our total lack of a coherent, national, independent-energy policy even more embarrassing and painful for us all.

We knew HOW to eliminate America’s dependency on imported oil decades ago, (just like we could have fixed the problems that killed our Space Shuttle Orbiter, Columbia and Challenger crews, but NASA mismanagers cut corners and were directly responsible for the great loses we suffered as a nation.

Jimmy Carter promised that we would NEVER increase oil imports after 1977, but we ignored him then, and still do today. Large oil companies still justify huge (60%) oil imports and tell us that everything will be just fine (in THEIR bank accounts). Americans APPRECIATE what our oil companies are doing for (to) us.

Oil related wars are similar unpopular political blunders, that we might have never gotten involved in, IF we were not so dependant on oil imported from such a fanatical, unfriendly, part of the mixed up world we live in today. If we never sent our money to the poor desert dwellers, they would never have had deadly rockets and bombs today. The outrageous wasting of expensive non-renewable, polluting energy is a primary reason why so many nations hate Americans so very much, but our citizens just don’t seem to care when they continue living the failed energy policies of a century ago.

So, when will we wake up and solve our very-fixable American energy problems? If an immediate solution to escalating oil prices was mandated by a courageous political leader tomorrow, would it take as long as it took to get to the Moon, after John Kennedy set the clear national goal in 1960? I think not – A great people can do a great deal in only one decade, why set goals that will take much linger?

The solutions to today’s energy crisis were readily available 25-years ago. I’ve experienced ZED myself. I know it works well. We must accelerate our effort to develop clean, renewable, sustainable energy usage, and become safer, healthier, and wealthier than we ever were before. We don’t need to wait for future technology. We just need to do what we already know how to do, with high motivation and enthusiasm. The benefits will quickly become more obvious to everyone.

John Kennedy set the goal of going to the Moon in only one decade, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. His words ring loudly in our ears when we visit the NASA Kennedy Space Center. The stark contrast with today’s misguided mismanagers is astounding.

Jimmy Carter strongly vowed that America would NEVER be allowed to import more oil in the future as we did in 1977. It was very possible to do back then. BUT, our nation quickly forgot the reason why Carter set this important goal for us all. We “fell off the wagon,” and have been totally taken over by our outrageous addiction to unstable, unhealthy, expensive, environment-damaging imported oil ever since.

Like going to the Moon, the energy crisis solution WILL be hard, but first we must plant our heels in the ground (not our heads) and pledge to make it happen, no matter what, THIS time. ZED is our best, last, and only hope of a cost effective rapid solution with off-the-shelf, ready-to-go technology today.

From a non-political, technology-only perspective, solving our current American energy crisis will actually be MUCH easier than going to the Moon. We knew how to solve today’s predictable energy crisis more than 25-years ago. It should have been solved shortly after the 1973 OPEN oil embargoes. Corporate-and-government politics are still the main issues that are yet to be resolved.

Soooo, when we finally face reality, stop denying the inescapable truth, and begin to widely deploy pervasive photovoltaic solar electric systems on our homes in the very near future, consumers need to learn many lessons, such as the fact that DC electricity is much better than AC for today’s Zero Energy Homes with PV roofs.

It is not really so very unusual to think about an off-the-grid energy-independent house using 12-volt DC – Look at everything inside your Recreational Vehicle. Your RV lights and appliances are probably mostly 12v DC. Maybe you have a small RV DC-to-AC power inverter for compatibility with a few small things, where the inverter efficiency loss is not very important to you, but you do NOT have any high-power AC things in your RV. All portable, rechargeable things like hand tools, small vacuum sweepers, electric razors, flashlights (torches) etc. are also DC battery powered. The DC power trend is already well established today, and must expand rapidly in the near future.

So it should probably be with tomorrow’s PV-powered extremely-efficient super-insulated Zero Energy Homes.

It is NOT a matter of putting PV panels on a stupid conventional house. It requires intelligent ZED systems engineering.

ZED eliminates the need for all of the high-power AC temperature-changing things in your Zero Energy Home, and what remains are all low-power consumption devices that we can easily make run on DC PV’s. DC also works great for charging an electric car (like the EV1 from GM once was, or the cute neighborhood electric vehicles in Celebration Florida). We hope more solar communities do what Celebration did with extremely efficient, appropriately sized electric cars.

If we use ZED to eliminate the need for AC-motor air conditioning, and the AC-motor kitchen refrigerator, (by replacing them with non-electric solar-powered absorption cooling, or other possible, practical, proven alternatives), and we eliminate the need for AC (or gas) hot water heating, and get rid of the old AC stove and clothes dryer, THEN we will have gone a very long way by eliminating the most expensive AC-wasting appliances in the conventional American home. Then, we just have to think about the rest of the small electrical things that we like to have around us.

Solar Water Pumps

If you live in an area with NO public utilities of any kind, you will probably need to pump (and purify) your own water. Rural residents understand that the cost of the equipment needed to do this will be offset by the elimination of conventional water and sewer bills. The capital investment can be included in a tax-deductible home mortgage, instead of paying non-deductible monthly utility bills that increase every year.

Swimming pools, swim spas, hot tubs, irrigation systems, etc. may also need water pumps. Special PV-powered DC pump motors have been available for Zero Energy Homes for decades - Not a problem - You just need some familiar ZED magic. Many such pumps can be run only during the day time, eliminating the need to connect them to battery storage systems (lowering capital investment costs).

Efficient 12-volt DC pumps, fans, and lights for cost-effective use with PV solar electric power systems are all readily available at competitive prices, with a large number of suppliers and models to choose from on the Internet and locally in many areas.

Energy Star Program

The federal-government-backed Energy Star ® program is designed to help businesses and individuals protect our environment through superior energy efficiency.

“The average family spends $1,900 a year on energy bills, much of which goes to heating and cooling. … Americans are looking for ways to cool their homes, stay comfortable and save money. When you reduce the amount of energy used in your home, you save money on energy bills, and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by burning fossil fuels to make that electricity. That also reduces the risks of Global Warming and protects our environment for future generations.”

Energy Star approved products reduce conventional home energy bills. They are a good first step for anyone with unacceptably high home energy bills, An Energy Star refrigerator can reduce your TOTAL household electric bill by more than 7 or 8 percent, compared to a pre-1993 electric refrigerator. 1970’s refrigerators used more than 5 times more electric energy than modern Energy Star refrigerators now do. We are clearly going in the right direction. Do NOT move your old refrigerator out to the garage as a second food storage box. It will waste more electricity than it is worth. Recycle old refrigerators (don’t just dump them), but replace older refrigerators with modern ones that are AT LEAST Energy Star compliant.

BUT, Energy Star electric appliances assume a conventional house, with conventional 115-volt AC power. They may be less efficient when used in a Zero Energy Home that has photovoltaic home-generated electric power. The comparison of Energy Star AC appliances to conventional less-efficient appliances is easy – the numbers are posted on the yellow-and-black Energy Guide on the front of each appliance.

The comparison of Energy Star to alternatives like PV DC and passive heating and cooling may be a non-trivial mathematical effort. Which is better, an Energy Star air conditioner, or a passive solar design that requires NO air conditioner? Which is better, an Energy Star appliance that requires an inefficient power inverter to run off of a PV system, or a non-Energy Star DC appliance? That becomes difficult to calculate in holistic ZED systems engineering without specific input about each component in the entire system. Running a refrigerator in the summer heats up your kitchen and increases you electricity bill. The entire impact of a system must be understood to make the best design decisions.

Summary, Energy Star is clearly better than conventional appliance inefficiency, but Energy Star may, or may not, be as energy efficient, when compared to other Zero Energy Home alternatives. The issues are not simple. It is not a one-size-fits-all problem. ZED can assist with personalized holistic systems engineering for your particular home characteristics and objectives.

Innovative DC Lighting

What kind of savings are available with modern intelligent interior lighting fixtures? In a conventional home or office, if you have one 75-watt incandescent light bulb that is left on an average of six hours a day. It can cost $88 more per year than one Energy Star 18-watt compact fluorescent light (CFL). which screws into the exact same Edison light socket as the less-efficient incandescent bulb, and lasts many times longer than incandescents that literally “burn up.” How many lights do you use for how long on an average day? Are your hundred-year-old technology light bulbs worth hundreds of dollars a year to YOU?

Homeowners with PV systems on a Zero Energy Home probably do NOT want 115v incandescents OR 115v fluorescents, since they require inefficient AC power inverters. Efficient 12-volt DC florescent light fixtures are readily available for RV’s, etc. They cost a bit more than the common 115 v AC versions, but they work just fine, and are available off-the-shelf today. Their price will continue to decline, as PV DC Zero Energy Homes become more common (and gas guzzling RV’s fade away into the sunset).

There is a new highly efficient DC lighting “kid on the block” – Light-Emitting Diodes (LED’s). They are inexpensive, produced in high volume, and come in all colors. They are used in automobile headlights, stage lighting, dance clubs, flashlights (torches), nightlights, instrument lights, etc. You are probably already surrounded by LED’s in your home, office and car, but you may not be away of how they can be used for innovative whole-room lighting..

The newest “Ultrabright LED’s” are used to create huge (30 feet wide or more) outdoor animated television advertising screens – impressively visible in bright daylight. They are also in car headlights, etc.

We can now string inexpensive DC red/green/blue LED’s together side-by-side (manufactured in convenient interconnectable strips), and hide them in special light fixtures, cove or crown molding. This allows a room occupant to have one dial for room brightness, and another dial for full-rainbow-spectrum room color changes: any ambience, any atmosphere, anytime.

Room lighting LED’s can be controlled by microprocessor digital system boards, and respond to music or preprogrammed special effects, like: flickering firelight, misty moonlight, sunrise, sunset, moving clouds, etc.

Multiple RGB LED groups (pixels) can all be set to the same color and brightness in a room, or they can be configured for all-points-individually-addressable (like a television screen or computer display’s pixels) with unlimited low-cost image and animation flexibility.

Creative digital DC LED room lighting applications are as endless as a TV program. From white lights, to basic variable rainbow room colors, to animated special lighting effects, the cost of flexible LED’s is minimal, and they consume very little DC power (from your PV storage batteries).

We can also use modern image projection systems (less than $1,000, with prices dropping every year) to paint your entire wall with any moving image that you want: recorded, live web cam, computer animated, real-time charts, video conferences, etc.

You can feel like you are sitting on top of a sunny ski slope, or under a palm tree on a sunny beach with gentle waves rolling in, and a breeze in the trees with colorful flowers, while you sit in your solar-heated hot tub or indoor pool in the winter. We can make your ceiling look like a clear night sky during a spectacular meteor shower, or watch the harvest Moon rise every night, whenever you like. All of this joyful romance conveniently powered with renewable “free” energy from the sun using PV DC electricity and readily available 12v DC deep cycle storage batteries.

DC Electronics

Old fashioned AC television CRT’s are rapidly being replaced by DC HDTV LCD’s, etc. An LCD monitor can save over $20 a year on electricity compared to the old fashioned CRT’s. Larger LCD displays and above average usage times can save even more electricity. Phase out your analog CRT TV’s and plan on replacing them with HDTV LCD’s (or newer energy saving technology). Laptop computers with LCD’s use DC (they need a DC power supply if you want to plug them into 115v AC wall outlets).

Almost all of our future digital electronics will need DC power internally. Today, digital electronics have an AC-to-DC power supply built in, or integrated into their power cord. In an all-DC PV world, it would NOT be necessary to have an AC-to-DC converter, which could potentially lower the product price a few dollars each.

When PV DC becomes more pervasive (in 201x), electronics and appliance manufacturers should begin to sell more products that use safe-and-efficient DC, like those found in your RV already do.

ZED understands these issues very well, and is more-than-prepared to lead the way toward tomorrow’s pervasive PV’s in well-designed Zero Energy Homes. A Zero Energy Home built today may not have everything we have described on day one, but ZED should allow these features to be quickly added at minimal cost if-and-when you want them, and tomorrow’s declining technology price is within your budget, as you prosper in the more-productive ZED world of the near future.

Photovoltaic System Sizing

The capital investment in PV panels and storage batteries depends on the kilowatt hours (kWh – units of electricity) that your family will consume. It is equivalent to sizing the electrical load circuit breaker box in a conventional home – more kWh means higher initial PV equipment and battery investment cost. The ZED featured that you select will have a significant influence on you PV system size requirements.

There are many significant sizing variables, including size of your family, length of hot showers, loads of laundry per week, etc. We have tried to explain above how the following kWh requirements can be drastically reduced, to minimize the PV investment for an off-the-grid Zero Energy Home.

The following table shows some very rough estimates of the kWh required for some popular electrical items. The more of these you eliminate with superior ZED solutions, the lower the cost of your PV investment.

For example, landscaping with native plants that are ecologically sound, drought tolerant, and do not require watering, will reduce the operating cost of a water-pump-based sprinkler system. A microwave oven uses roughly one fourth of the power of an electric range / oven. Disable the high-electric-current dryer cycle on your dishwasher, etc. Did you realize that pre-rinsing you dishes under the faucet can waste over 6500 gallons of water a year? You should scrape off most of the food and then let the dishwasher do its job. If dishes are not getting clean, perhaps you need a newer type of detergent.

Intelligent ZED can reduce your PV equipment cost from tens of thousands of dollars, down to only a few thousands of dollars for a comfortable off-the-grid Zero Energy Home. This is already a very low amortized cost, considering the ever-increasing monthly electric bills of a conventional home today. These capital investment costs should continue to drop by about one half every five years in the future.

Rare use of back up power from a small home-sized wind generator, waterfall generator, efficient propane generator, or a utility company (if available) is a small compromise, but back up power can further reduce the cost of PV storage batteries, for the rare case of weeks of cloudy days. Other system backup capabilities should continue to emerge in the future, as PV systems grow in popularity. Energy security and contingency plans are issues homeowners must decide for themselves.

Non-essential things like a small artistic waterfall pump should be isolated from ever making demands on battery storage capacity. Less essential items can be automatically or manually shut down, if storage capacity becomes low after several cloudy days. A cloudy day may only capture 30% of the solar gain of a sunny day. Your local weather is part of the basic input to ZED.

The Inconvenient Truth of Global Warming brought about many 50-to-100-year all-time-high heat waves across America in 2006. The unusual heat, plus electrical grid failures killed many Americans. The high 93-degree temperature of the Gulf of Mexico is what fueled hurricane Katrina in 2005 with major disruptions and loss of life. We do expect ZED cooling to continue to become a more important issue in the next few years. We have the solution to America’s current heat wave energy problems.

We have explained how all of the following things over 30 kWh can be totally eliminated by good ZED, and most of the rest of them can be judiciously reduced, or made more PV efficient by using DC versions of the item.

If you undersize the PV system capacity on your Zero Energy Home, and you supply no back up energy source, a passively heated and cooled ZED home would still be comfortable and well lighted in the daytime. Passive-solar hot water would still be available, etc. Water pipes would not freeze at night in the winter, and you could still live well (without some modern conveniences). This is NOT true of conventional homes when frequent power company outages occur across the nation (like the summer of 2006 and similar large power grid failures in the recent past).

The following table is not comprehensive or precise, but it should give you a basic idea about your PV capacity priorities. There is a PV capital investment price to be paid for everything that you fail to reduce or eliminate. For most low-kWh things, it is trivial, when you amortize it over the lifetime of your PV system.

Don’t even consider a PV system, until AFTER you have committed to ZED energy conservation. Putting solar electric cells on the roof of an inefficient conventional home will probably NOT be very cost effective any time soon.

City	St	Lat	Cool	Heat	Solar
San Juan	PR	18 30	4981	0	1640
Honolulu	HI	21 18	4221	0	1630
Miami	FL	25 46	4037	205	1473
Orlando	FL	28 32	3226	733	1487
Houston	TX	29 45	2889	1433	1351
Mobile	AL	30 42	2576	1683	1385
Savannah	GA	32 05	2317	1951	1365
Jackson	MS	32 20	2320	2299	1409
Dallas	TX	32 46	2754	2290	1468
Charleston	SC	32 47	2077	2146	1345
Birmingham	AL	33 30	1928	2844	1345
Atlanta	GA	33 45	1588	3094	1345
Los Angeles	CA	34 03	614	1818	1594
Albuquerque	NM	34 05	1316	4291	1828
Memphis	TN	35 09	2029	3226	1366
Amarillo	TX	35 11	1433	4181	1659
Charlotte	NC	35 14	1595	3217	1344
Tulsa	OK	36 09	1948	3679	1373
Las Vegas	NV	36 10	2945	2601	1864
Nashville	TN	36 10	1694	3695	1270
Roanoke	VA	37 17	1030	4306	1270
Wichita	KS	37 43	1672	4685	1502
San Francisco	CA	37 47	108	3042	1553
Charleston	WV	38 21	1055	4590	1123
Saint Louis	MO	38 35	1474	4748	1327
Washington	DC	38 53	940	5009	1208
Grand Junction	CO	39 05	1139	5603	1659
Kansas City	MO	39 06	1283	5357	1340
Baltimore	MD	39 18	1107	4729	1215
Reno	NV	39 30	328	6021	1761
Denver	CO	39 45	625	6016	1568
Indianapolis	IN	39 46	974	5576	1165
Springfield	IL	39 48	1116	5557	1302
Philadelphia	PA	39 57	1103	4864	1169
Pittsburgh	PA	40 27	646	5929	1069
Newark	NJ	40 44	1022	5033	1165
Salt Lake City	UT	40 46	927	5981	1603
New York City	NY	40 47	1067	4847	1099
Omaha	NE	41 15	949	6601	1321
Cleveland	OH	41 28	612	6152	1091
Des Moines	IA	41 35	927	6709	1312
Providence	RI	41 50	531	5971	1112
Detroit	MI	42 20	742	6228	1120
Boston	MA	42 21	661	5620	1105
Sioux Falls	SD	43 33	718	7837	1290
Boise	HI	43 36	713	5832	1496
Minneapolis	MN	44 59	585	8158	1170
Fargo	ND	46 52	472	9270	1203
Seattle	WA	47 37	128	5184	1053
Chicago	IL	51 50	923	6125	1215

Dec 21	Sunrise	7:14 AM EST	Azimuth 116.4 (63.6 E of S)
	Midday Peak	12.24 PM	Altitude 38 degrees, Due S (June 21 Angle – 47 degrees)
	Sunset	5:34 PM	Azimuth 243.4 (63.4 W of S)

June 21	Sunrise	6:29 AM EDT	Azimuth 62.6 (27.4 N of E)
	Midday Peak	1.27 PM	Altitude 85 degrees, Due S (Dec 21 Angle + 47 degrees)
	Sunset	8:26 PM	Azimuth 297.3 (27.3 N of W)

Site Latitude In Degrees	Fixed Altitude Tilt Angle In Degrees
0 TO 15	15 (nearly flat)
15 TO 25	Same as Latitude
25 TO 30	Latitude + 5
30 TO 35	Latitude + 10
35 TO 40	Latitude + 15
40 +	Latitude + 20

Small 4 Ton Central A/C	2750 kWh
Small 3/4 HP Pool Pump	375 kWh
Water Heater 4 Persons	310 kWh
Frost Free Refrig. 18 cu. ft.	205 kWh
Clothes Dryer	75 kWh
Self-Clean Range / Oven	61kWh
Whole House Attic Fan	30 kWh
Dishwasher	30 kWh
Sprinkler System (1 1/2 HP)	28 kWh
Conventional Color TV	27 kWh
Microwave Oven	16 kWh
Ceiling Fan	12 kWh
Slow Cooker	12 kWh
Coffee Maker	9 kWh
Washing Machine	9 kWh
Broiler/Rotisserie	7 kWh
Stereo	7 kWh
Roaster	5 kWh
Iron	5 kWh
Circulating Fan	4 kWh
Hot Plate	4 kWh
Trash Compactor	4 kWh
Vacuum Cleaner	4 kWh
Sandwich Grill	3 kWh
Toaster	3 kWh
Baby Food/Bottle Warmer	2 kWh
Waffle Iron	2 kWh
Hair Dryer	2 kWh
Egg Cooker	1kWh
Sewing Machine	1 kWh
Hair Roller	1 kWh
Heating Pad	1 kWh
Food Mixer	< 1 kWh
Laptop Computer	< 1 kWh
Curling Iron, Shaver	< 1/2 kWh
AC Electric Chair (for people who waste expensive, highly-polluting precious energy)	More than they can imagine

TM ABUNDANT ENERGY In Harmony With NatureTM

Zero Energy DesignTM Architecture and Technology Summary by Larry Hartweg