Hello. Here are some photos of our passive solar home. We had long wanted to build our own mud-brick house, but with mud-brick building being very labour intensive, and with us working full time, we kind of never got there. Finally we decided that if we were ever going to get a house we liked, we would have to get some help to do the bulk of it. We took the advantage of hiring tradesmen for the bulk of the building, and we did a lot of the finishing ourselves. Instead of mud-brick we used 'Timbercrete', which are hand made blocks, similar to mud-brick, but made from sawdust/wood-shavings mixed with concrete. Laying them is very similar to conventional bricks, so normal bricklayers had no trouble with them. We would have loved to use a lot of recycled materials, but due to lack of time to select them, and to make it easy for the tradesmen just about everything was new. We did try to have as many individual touches as possible though, such as our hand-basins which are basically modified flower-pots, mounted on TV stands.

We designed the building along passive solar lines to minimise heating and cooling costs. The long front of the house faces due North. That is where the large open plan living/kitchen/dining area is. The winter sun comes through the large double glazed windows to warm the dark slate on the concrete slab. This helps to keep the house warm in winter. In summer, the sun being higher in the sky, is blocked from entering the north side of the house by the eaves. There are no windows on the west (where many houses get a lot of excess heat in summer), and a pergola is planned for the east, to protect this side of the house from morning sun in summer. The bedrooms are all on the cooler south side.

We live in a very hot climate, but are lucky enough to have cool sea breezes from the south most evenings in summer. We designed the house to take advantage of these sea breezes by making it very easy for the breeze to blow from south to north through the house. Each bedroom has double French doors, and all the northern windows can be fully opened. Hence during the hot summer days we keep the house closed up, but at night we can open everything up to cool the house down for the next day. Our plan is to have a large fernery to the south, covered in shade cloth. This should act like an evaporative air conditioner, and help to draw cool air into the house. However, even with-out this, there have been only a few days where the house has been uncomfortably hot.

Water to the house is from 2 X 26,000 litre rainwater tanks, which collect water from the house and adjoining barn. We also have mains water connected, which is usually only used to establish our garden of native trees and shrubs. Waste water from the house is recycled back onto the garden by an aerobic treatment system.

Our hot water comes from a gas boosted solar hot water system. Gas being much more 'greenhouse friendly' than the more usual electricity. We are planning on installing solar electricity panels, which will feed excess electricity back into the grid -- when our budget, and hopefully government rebates allow it. Until then we are buying the 'green electricity' option from our electricity retailer, which is mostly from wind turbines.