Well if you want to save big on energy costs and you don't mind your house being quirky an underground home is for you. When you're below the frost line, the underground temperature is 55-57 degrees F, in winter or summer. Plus you get great noise insulation.
This is an excellent point! Just building an earth bermed home can save a fair bit from improved insulation properties. In the US we have not explored this option nearly enough, in my opinion.
That would be better, but for most places, there isn't much solar energy coming in during the winter, so they aren't losing much by being white.
Maybe for winters the best would be to use fluid based collectors with coils inside the envelope of the building to skip the energy past the insulation. With a low sun angle you don't need much area of them to capture all the sun and in the summer they would provide shade to a portion of the white roof. Now, if only they were free.
I don't mean to make fun, but this sentence struck me as funny: "Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones"
As if before those "centuries" light and dark objects absorbed heat differently. :)
A friend who used to live in Florida told me they would put water on the roof in the summer. The evaporation of the water would cool down the roof and house.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_sheltering
Maybe someday when I'm rich I will build my house like this - less for the energy efficiency and more because it looks totally badass.
The roof is white, but you put black panels on it for the winter. In the summer, you take them off. Or vice versa.
Maybe for winters the best would be to use fluid based collectors with coils inside the envelope of the building to skip the energy past the insulation. With a low sun angle you don't need much area of them to capture all the sun and in the summer they would provide shade to a portion of the white roof. Now, if only they were free.
As if before those "centuries" light and dark objects absorbed heat differently. :)