SF New Mexican: Solar system that heats via air circulation doesn’t qualify for tax credits.
“A duct system equipped with a small fan draws air from inside Avery’s home near Santa Fe and funnels it up to a solar collector on her roof. The air flows through the collector, passing between a black-painted aluminum sheet and a special thermal glass, and is warmed by the sun. Then the air is blown by the system back into the house. Dampers control the air flow and a thermostat controls the temperature. ” Shame. You’d think tax credits could be scaled against system efficacy.
Comments:
No arguments there.
Eldorado, where I live, was one of the first ‘solar communities’ ... there are some original passive designs here that are so efficient, they have to open their windows on sunny days in the dead of winter to manage the heat.
Yet even these good ideas (that could have been made even better, more convenient) were overcome by cheap housing designs. There are some *really* bizarre layout choices among the subsequent frame-and-stucco homes (no passive solar) ... I’ve photographed many of them for local real estate folks.
It’s one of the reasons I’d like to sentence architects to living in their own bright ideas.
I still maintain, real adobe or rammed earth remain the best building choices for this climate. Metal pitch roofs. I’d like to shoot the guy who came up with the idea of flat asphalt roofs in NM ...
Next entry: Search Engine Roundtable: Google says, XML Sitemaps Not Necessary For Small Web Sites. >>
Over at cr4.globalspec dot com, where engineers hang out to discuss things like “How economics impacts the engineering solutions available” 8-) this was just one of many hazards of incentive plans.
We had one German pitching a fit as his country laid in huge PV arrays, and created tax subsidized incentives for homeowners to install their own, yet he couldn’t get an incentive to insulate and as Americans call it, winterize his home.
Generally incentives are targeted to ”Things that can be installed since they are easy to inspect, package, define, and are designed to stimulate some sector of the industry.
The more passive the energy efficiency of your home, the fewer incentives you qualify for. Excellence in design is then beside the point except for ambiguous things like LEEDS ratings.
And if you have a heart-to-heart with a real estate agent you will find that the last thing a prospective homeowner looks at is the string of energy bills.
All well and good except; good design and good materials cost good money you will never recover when you sell; so you need to recover it while you live there. Yet the average I last heard for Americans was about 5 years of residence in any given house.
So financially you are better off living in a tent near a cheap source of heat than building your home around energy costs.
Until energy costs become a lot more of a homeowner’s budget.