Rotating Houses

We here at drunkenpacket are concerned about energy efficiency. Really. You might think that bouncing around the Internet would make us not care but in our corporeal identity, there are gasp seasons.

Seasons are the bane of the architecture of energy-efficient houses: a house needs to keep in every last erg of heat in the winter. But in the summer, this would slowly bake the packet. (Perhaps poach or desiccate depending on the humidity. Dry days would mummify the packet like dried fruit. Dried fruit is yummy. Perhaps we should return to the original topic.) In the summer, the house has an optional constraint: dissipate as much heat as possible to the outside.

The best way to heat a house is to let the sun warm the house. This implies a winter architecture like the one shown here:

The house features thick opaque insulating layers on all sides except the southern side. The southern side features windows by which sun light can enter the house and warm its interior. These windows need to be optically transparent at the wavelengths that the sun emits and reflective to infrared energy leaving the interior as shown below.

Large expanses of windows with the above properties on the south side of the house will maximize the ability of the house to collect and retain heat from the sun.

In the summer, our goal is inverted: to minimize the amount that the sun warms the house and to maximize the amount of energy that the house radiates into the environment. The summer goal can be achieved by building a different house: thick opaque walls on the south side shade the house and all other sides of the house feature windows that are reflective to infrared energy from the outside and transparent (the packet likes seeing outside) in the optical wavelengths.

The packet has been thinking about these conflicting requirements. There appears to be a solution: a rotating house with shutters. Here, we simply rotate the house to adjust its interaction with the sun and environment. (This idea is really just a green (and hence tax credit inducing) justification for having a turret. The packet has always wanted a turret.)

Let me explain. In the winter, we want to capture all of the sun and have it go into warming the house. Conversely, in the summer, we want the house to have light but to block most of the sun’s intensity so as to avoid over-heating the house. These two configurations are shown in the following diagram. The house slowly rotates over the course of the year from its summer to its winter configuration.

In the winter night, we further supplement the night configuration of the house with a thick insulating shutter (the solid black segment sliding over the window.) In the summer, we remove (or perhaps open) the windows to permit light and breezes to enter the house. The following diagram shows the rotating house.

The diagram also shows an optional extension: a second layer of windows in the winter to help retain heat during the day. As soon as we’ve finished building the rotating platform large enough for a five-story turret, we’ll get around to calculating the benefit of more layers of glass.

The packet so wants a turret. And if the house rotates, the view would change. That would be nice. It would help encourage staring out the window instead of blogging. And I could still wear my woven bamboo hat.

Original OmniGraffle File