Firstly hello to everyone! I am a newbie here and I hope to become apart of your community.

I am not sure if this is the place to post this query, if not please let me know.

I work as a chartered building surveyor and have recently developed a keen personal interest in sustainable construction. I would love to one day build my own passive home but taken a few steps further so that i can be near self sufficient. Earth Sheltering (insulated) would also be a must as i have always had a belief on the idea after writing a dissertation on basement construction.

Anyway, the reason for my query is to see what books or documents others have read that would be useful for me to read. There are hundreds out there but i am sure you guys can point me in the direction of the 'better' ones. Ferid Abbasher has a website about an 'Earth-Sheltered Passive Home' but it is to buy plans off. I am not interested I buying plans but the idea and design is what i am looking for and i want to do some reading on it

1) An upto date book on Passive House design and construction. Details and regulation inclusions would be useful.

2) Earth insulation. There has been a lot of mention on 'Passive annual heat storage' by John Hait. This is a few years old now but is it still worth reading of is there something better now? Also is the .pdf available to download anywhere free now or is it still only for sale?

3) Energy / water - something again upto date on different means to collect and store energy. Tested methods and self sufficiency would be ideal, maybe using various methods.

Any tips or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks all

Thankyou for your comments.

I have googled PAHS on numerous occasions and have found some good material. The reason for my post was too see whether other forum posters here had come across any books I can buy which might cover more detail. Not everything is on Google. Whether insulated or not I would like to read up on it. Hait's book discusses insulation layers for instance but what tested methods have proved more successful since his book.

Welcome Jamie

I see John Hait's book in 1983 vintage. One thing you can be sure of is that the laws of thermodynamics and the amount of sunshine in the UK have not changed since then. Don't think that materials have changed much either, just got cheaper in real terms.

If you want to become totally self sufficient, and that is a good aim, then you are limited to burning wood (a bad thing), wind (if you can get planning), water (if you can get permission) and solar (and this will be a big array).
Oh and lots of batteries. These do not need to be the very latest, just go for the cheapest that are good enough for your usage. Reason being that they do not last forever and there are small incremental improvements, so in 3 years time you may get a new set that hold 5% more energy, last 10% longer and cost 20% less.

I would start with working out some energy usage scenarios, then you can design an off grid system that best matches that.
As an example I have a worse case of 40 kWh/day (winter with washing and drying) and a bets of 5 kWh/day (summer on my own).
Not unusual for me to be around the 25 kWh/day for winter and 10 kWh/day for summer.

So for me to have PV I would need at least a 10 kWp system to keep things as they are.

I have little faith in thermal inter-seasonal storage in the UK climate as it relies too heavily on sunshine rather than daylight, two things we lack in the winter.

Posted By: SteamyTeasunshine rather than daylight, two things we lack in the winter

That's why it's interseasonal i.e. winter solar is then irrelevant.

slim_j, if you're just starting out on this journey, you can expect to make several major adjustments in your views as you explore the various possibilities, so keep an open mind.

On the earh-sheltered side, don't forget to read about Hockerton, and about earhships.

On the passivhaus side, I think people here feel the Passivhaus Handbook is a good start, although I haven't seen it myself. There's also a lot of stuff on the passiv.de site.

Interseasonal storage you really need to dig around websites and form your own opinions.

Posted By: SteamyTeato last from last summer (was a good one wasn't it), this year, so far, you would just have a very large cold lump of mud

Different weather pattern here (last summer was good), but even so there is a very noticeable difference to this year's soil temp data. The 1m sensor usually starts on its way back up in Feb. This year it's taken till April to even bottom out.
This time last year & the year before it was just over 8C down there (& 7.5C the year before that). Currently it's at 6.5C, only 0.1C above the minimum (so far this year).

There's a detailed project blog for "Underhill House" here.

http://www.aipassivhaus.com/

That was the Grand Designs one where they built underneath a barn in the Cotwolds.

Try these results:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.aipassivhaus.com%2F+earth+sheltered&aq=f&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.aipassivhaus.com%2F+earth+sheltered&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.9930j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Ferdinand

Despite A level Maths for some reason I really struggle to understand even simple things like these graphs - strange, seeing my mind is visual/spacial biased.

So, first graph means out of those 3 months, for 270hrs temp was around 8C, for 60hrs solar was around 8kWh/m2, and for 20hrs wind was around 120kWh/m2 swept area?

How come, in the second graph, covering 3yrs instead of 1yr, the no of hours seems for everything to be around 8x as great?

Posted By: SteamyTeaThat is because you don't use it every day. Use it or loose it as they say.

No I didn't have it even then!

Posted By: SteamyTeaThe temperature data is just the count of how many times the temperature was between two bounds, nothing fancy there.

OK I get that.

Posted By: SteamyTeaThe solar and the wind are the mean number of kWh that are received between 2 temperatures.

If the horiz scale does not also serve as kWh solar (or x10 kWh wind) but is still oC air temp, and the vertical scale is still hours, then where is the scale for kWh? Ah - later on you say ... well, it looks like

Posted By: SteamyTeamean number of kWh that are received between 2 temperatures

is misprint, shd be

Posted By: SteamyTeabetween 2 kWh outputs?

So are you, or not, trying to correlate solar/wind output with air temp?

Posted By: fostertomIf the horiz scale does not also serve as kWh solar (or x10 kWh wind) but is still oC air temp, and the vertical scale is still hours, then where is the scale for kWh? Ah - later on you say ... well, it looks like

The horizontal axis is temperature bins. The vertical axis is hours only.
So if you decide that your house needs heating when the outside temperature is below 10°C (as mine does), you can read off how many hours (in each one degree bin) you need to heat for. You can also work out how much solar and wind energy, in kWh, there is.

Posted By: fostertomand you're demonstrating that there's precious little of that too?

Yes, there is only enough when you don't need it.

Posted By: fostertomyou'd use it direct to the interior, not via the interseasonal storage.

Yes you would, but some of that would diffuse out to your cold lump of mud, taking away from heating the air, so just wasting what little you can grab.

Posted By: Ed DaviesThe point of inter-seasonal storage is to store energy in the summer (and autumn) to use during the winter.

Yes, during the summer and autumn the incoming energy is greater than that required to heat the building and so the store sits at maximum capacity. Then there comes a day when the incoming energy is less than that required. The difference is drawn from the store. It's the sum of those differences over the period until the first day in spring when there is enough energy again that determines the necessary store capacity. Of course, it's not really that simple because there can be good days in winter, and all kinds of losses etc.

Posted By: Ed DaviesMy doubts about claimed passive inter-seasonal storage poleward of about 50° (e.g., Hockerton and a few Earthships) are quite the opposite of Steamy's. I suspect that actually quite a lot of the heating achieved is from solar gain during the winter and that the main function of the thermal store in these houses is to even out the temperature on much shorter than seasonal timescales.

Just looking at the temperatures involved and the heat capacities of the stores seems to indicate that they're unlikely to be doing much on seasonal timescales. What I haven't seen, though, is any detailed analysis or measurements to confirm or refute this.

There are published figures for the storage capacity of the concrete in the Hockerton houses, but I don't remember the numbers. I think as you say that they're just looking to even out variations and to ensure that the walls are surrounded by earth at a roughly constant annual average of 10°C or whatever it is rather than a seasonally varying external temperature. So their delta T is a lot less in winter.

Posted By: Ed DaviesA minor point is that solar energy on a horizontal square metre is irrelevant.

As we aren't "high mass" the following may be off topic, but I hope it has some relevance, at least to Ed's point about the potential for solar further North (we are at 57N).

With the generally clear cool weather we had between mid Feb & early April we've enjoyed a lot of solar gain this year, more so as we now have a sunspace/conservatory to help make the most of it. In the winter months the sun is so low that any sun there is comes "straight in".

The SR is pretty low mass, so we've been using the "grab the heat & run" approach, opening the outside front door & windows to let the heat in when it's available (even in February that could be around lunch time on a bright day). Our kWh/HDD heating demand is markedly greater on (relatively) "warm" dull days than on cool clear ones.

Now the sun is getting higher, it's also getting stronger so the two factors are balancing to an extent & it's not too hard to keep the temps down to reasonable levels (we are growing veg growing in parts of it) using ventilation & shading.

Currently 28C in there, and 20C in my office on the far side of the house with the doors open (14.5C at 8am. I've not had the heating on at all. The electrical equipment in here is using < 100W). Outside it's 8C, 79%RH and ~20mph gusting to 25mph.

Some day I hope to get around to mounting some ST (which I picked up cheap) hear vertical on the SSE gable to provide some early heat (& with the addition of a store, some means of keeping at least part of it for a rainy day).

Posted By: Ed DaviesHow? The vertical axis is in hours, not kWh. Or is it both?

Should have been both, sloppy typing as usual.

Posted By: Ed DaviesApart from that, though, I'm afraid I think Steamy's graph is completely bogus.

How come, the data does not lie, it is what it is. So down here, we have warmer air temperatures when it is cloudy. We have lower windspeeds when it is either cold or hot. Point is that the weather in Cornwall is against using thermal mass as the 'weather' is not a reliable and consistent resource, it is a non starter unless you put in a large turbine or a large solar array, and then find a way to store that energy until it is needed several months later.

Posted By: Ed DaviesThe amount of energy available in the winter isn't really the point, at all.

Why I did the second graph, with 3 years data, shows the same thing. If you want, find 3 years of reasonably high resolution data for your area and see what pans out, I suspect from some earlier research, that Norfolk has a better resource profile than Cornwall as it is less cloudy and is less affected by the ocean (well North Sea over there).

Posted By: Ed DaviesA minor point is that solar energy on a horizontal square metre is irrelevant. We don't normally lay windows or other solar collectors horizontally when we're closer to the poles than to the equator. I'm getting a bit bored with this conversation.

Not irrelevant at all, is easy enough to adjust for latitude, azimuth and daylight hours. Or use an online calculator, NASA has a good one.

Posted By: Ed DaviesMy doubts about claimed passive inter-seasonal storage poleward of about 50° (e.g., Hockerton and a few Earthships) are quite the opposite of Steamy's.

Are you talking globally or just the UK here. I just use the weather in Cornwall, cause that is where I live, as mentioned above, Norfolk is different, but not so different that all the red tiled, brick built bungalows don't need heating.

Posted By: Ed DaviesJust looking at the temperatures involved and the heat capacities of the stores seems to indicate that they're unlikely to be doing much on seasonal timescales. What I haven't seen, though, is any detailed analysis or measurements to confirm or refute this.

Agree with that, usually there a lot of reasons why it is not as good as expected, and nearly all weather related, which is what all this is about really. Weather in the UK has no memory, but an awful lot of damping, why it varies so much.

Posted By: skyewrightCurrently 28C in there, and 20C in my office on the far side of the house with the doors open (14.5C at 8am. I've not had the heating on at all.

Quite relevant as it shows that low mass heats up quickly when you want it rather than a more steady temperature that is a little too low. The more thermal mass you put in the closer to the mean air temperature you are going to get. When I go climbing on the black granite slabs down here they are cold when the sun is not on them and warm when it is, they weigh a lot more than a house.

Thermal inertia is a strange thing, half the time it works against you.


Don't get me wrong on all this, all I am saying is that to try and heat a house in a consistent manner using thermal mass and solar with the UK's weather is just about impossible unless you start to go for complicated active systems.
If it was easy it would have happened, not as if we have always had cheap energy, but we have had mud, stone and caves for millennia.

Posted By: fostertomLike a lot of other ancient wisdom - 'science' (aka ideology in the service of profits) has a lot to answer for.

Really, I take everything I have said back and start to listen to the elfs, fairies and piskeys, I missed that bit in histories lessons. So glad that unicorn farts generate electricity or life would be so much harder

Just teasing Tom.

Posted By: fostertom

Posted By: djhsurrounded by earth at a roughly constant annual average of 10°C or whatever it is

Beneath and diminishingly up the sides/back and towards the front, the earth will stabilise at target internal temp, 20C or whatever, whether or not it's insulated from the interior - just a matter of how many months/years to equilibrium.

The best way to think of an earth sheltered building is as a cave, where the surrounding rock, in full thermal contact with the interior

Hockerton has 300 mm (IIRC, anyway lots) of EPS between the concrete structure and the earth, so hardly in full thermal contact and definitely not at the same temperature inside and outside.

edit - I posted this reply before I saw Ed's comment. Glad to see we agree.