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DIY Seasonal Mirror-Based Window Extender for Heat and Light
Some months ago, lessons learned from my previous adventures with managing summer cooling in the passive solar building where the Lab calls home sent me down a rabbit hole in the opposite direction: maximizing thermal gain in the winter time! One of the main trade-offs with traditional passive solar design lies in the sizing of the south-facing windows. On the one hand, the more glazing a building has, the more solar heat it can capture and store on sunny days. On the other hand, when night falls, even the most efficient modern windows have a tiny fraction of the insulation value of an insulated wall. So, even when somewhat mitigated by insulated blinds, a wall of windows dumps a great deal of heat back outside. A key question is whether the amount of solar heat captured during the day is, on net, greater than the heat lost by having windows rather than walls. Fortunately, a 2018 article by Robert Opaluch on GreenBuildingAdvisor.com crunches the numbers on this, with Burlington, Vermont as one of the cities analyzed. By his reckoning, south-facing windows show a net energy gain