Thus, a house located in an area where the prevailing wind comes from the south will have to take this element into account in its implementation.
Nevertheless, and despite these adaptations necessary for implantation, we can synthesize some main principles of the bioclimatic house.
- orientation A bioclimatic house should not be oriented according to the view, the movement of cars (garage opposite the road) but many climatic elements. Thus, we will arrange to place the living rooms (Lounges, bedrooms) in the South and the unheated technical rooms (garage, laundry room) in the North to serve as a thermal buffer between the outside and the living rooms. As far as possible, no openings will be drilled on the north facade of the house.
- passive solar A bioclimatic house must get the maximum energy from its environment and this by doing without technical devices that consume energy themselves, can break down ...
One of the pillars of the bioclimatic is therefore passive solar. This results in large glazed openings to the south (or even south-east or south-west depending on the prevailing winds in order to recover the morning or late afternoon sun). These glazed areas to the south will obviously be supplemented by a system outside allowing to hide the sun in summer (an interior blind does nothing to prevent the greenhouse effect).
These devices can be fixed architectural elements (caps) or mobile (shutters, external blinds) or vegetation (deciduous tree planted south of the house, deciduous climbing plants that run on a horizontal fence above the Bay window.
The other elements of passive solar are the torn wall, solar storage devices (see inertia). - isolation It goes without saying, a house tending towards energy autonomy must be perfectly insulated. In this regard, we prefer an exterior insulation to an interior insulation in order to take maximum advantage of the thermal inertia of the walls (see the paragraph "inertia"). An economical and very efficient solution is, for example, a semi-troglodyte house for which the entire north wall is covered by backfill which is extended by a green roof.
- thermal inertia One of the elements that is very often forgotten in construction today is thermal inertia. Thus, if you take a standard subdivision pavilion with its interior insulation and its convectors, the only element of thermal inertia is the ground. This has the effect that only the air is heated (or air conditioned) and that the slightest opening of door or window makes losing all the benefit of this heating (or this air conditioning).
In an old house with thick walls, without interior insulation, the masonry will act as a buffer. When you open a window in winter, you cool the air but the walls have kept their warmth. Less than 10 minutes after the window was closed, the walls returned some calories to the air which, in fact, returned to its pre-opening temperature.
If we add to this that the perception of well-being in humans depends for a lot on radiation (we feel better in a room where the air is at 14 ° C and the walls at 24 ° C than air at 24 ° C and walls at 14 ° C), we can see the advantage of providing "thermal buffers" at certain strategic places in the house.
Solid materials (concrete walls, terracotta or raw, or stone) are excellent thermal buffers. A can filled with water, painted black, placed behind a bay window in the sun will thus accumulate heat during the day and restore it during the night.
Another method of stamping consists in carrying out, a tornado wall
Be careful, however, for houses that are only inhabited for short periods of the year, it may be in your interest to limit thermal inertia in order to avoid "heating the walls" too much without really benefiting from the heating.
Here is a small synthesis of the basic elements of the bioclimatic. Do not hesitate to point your finger at omissions or inaccuracies.
