When my wife and I married, she already owned a house in Long Beach Mississippi. It started as a shack and was added on to piecemeal by previous owners that were a little too DIY iffn you know what I mean. That dern place was impossible to heat and cool. We put a lot of money into trying to make it something other than what it was.
This far South, heating really isn't that big a deal. On the few cold days we do get every year, living in that impossible-to-heat house simply meant we did lots of cooking, wore thick socks and donned long-handled underwear. Make those fewer minor adjustments and all was good.
Summers were a beast.
Cooking a meal meant you were destined to swelter for the rest of the day. Being the permaculturalists-in-waiting that we were at the time, we solved the problem by being forced to cook outside or die. We did everything we could that we thought might even have the slimmest possibility of providing relief. We had doubled paned, argon filled windows installed and paid WAY too much for them. We vented the roof. We had additional insulation blown into the attic. I would go outside in the hottest part of the day and hose the roof hoping the cooling effect of the water evaporating might help. And there was no amount of tree planting that would have helped since the house was set in the middle of a half acre lot and was completely encircled by several massive live oaks, several massive water oaks, three pecans and a magnolia. What's even crazier, our air conditioner was massive in its capacity relative to the smallish 1300 square foot house. We sold that oven-for-a-house after eight long years of struggle. We never did manage to cool that thing sufficiently to allow us to cook lunch inside during the late spring, summer and early autumn months.
The only redeeming qualities were those massive trees and all that beautiful St. Augustine grass. But 6 weeks after we sold it, Hurricane Katrina ripped through our beautiful state and that yard was no more. All of the monster water oaks were gone, the live oaks . . . unrecognizable.
The house we moved into next was everything that the first house wasn't.
At one time, The Bennett House as it is known, was considered the pride of the town in which we now live. It was an antebellum home built in 1850 and there we were living when Katrina cut its swath of destruction through God's Country.
We were without electricity from August 29 until September 8. During that time, living in a home built prior to the luxury of central heating and air conditioning, we learned some valuable lessons about architecture as it relates to passive cooling.
The more I learn about permaculture, the more I see it as a revival of the Old Ways with a modern twist.
My parents, who lived through the aftermath of The Great Depression, also suffered through the aftermath of Katrina. However, our experiences were quite different. The house that I was born into and in which they lived during the (for them) 14-day power outage is a typical ranch-style, 1600ish square foot house that features:
- All red brick exterior construction
- Minimal attic space
- Standard 8' ceilings,
- Wall-to-wall carpet,
- Central heat and air,
- Mostly large windows situated on the east and west
- All tiny windows on the north and South
- No tree cover to the east, and moderate tree cover to the west.
That is to say, their house was built with the intent of having central heat and air perpetually.
Several days after the storm was over, the roads were finally clear enough to make the 10 mile drive to check on them. They were obviously suffering. Their lack of sleep was painfully obvious. They had obtained a generator by the time I was able to get to them but its capacity was reserved exclusively to run deep freezers which were full of beef my daddy had just had processed. Because of the radiant heat from the bricks keeping the inside of their house oppressively hot, they were unable to go to sleep before 4 a.m. Because the mosquitos and love bugs were like a biblical plague that year, they couldn't sleep outside. They were truly miserable. They couldn't leave because thefts of generators were rampant and they had not yet eaten a single mess of beef from their just butchered steer and were not about to leave such an investment to the whims of passers-by. They were stuck.
Our situation was much different. Remember, our house was built prior to central heat and air. There were relatively few east and west windows and all but one of those was shaded by an awning or a screened porch. All exit doors opened onto the two screened in porches. The house had vintage but mostly serviceable double hung sash windows and the house had two stories. When the electricity went down, we simply opened every door and almost all of the windows and the draft created by doing so would have been sufficient to fly a kite had the ceiling been a bit taller than the 11' they actually were. The house was oriented due South. Massive trees shielded it from the sun to the west, north and east. The house was built up off the ground as much as 8' in some areas. Being in the above ground basement felt akin to being in a cave; always about 72 degrees.
For security, my oldest son and I slept crossways the two porch doors, heavily armed. Trouble makers would have had to step on one of us to gain entrance.
We did all of our cooking outside. Dutch oven, roasted hot dogs, roasted steak . . . it was great.
Most impressive of all though, during the height of the storm's rage, was that then-155-year-old house never uttered a groan, not a creak . . . nothing. It stood like stone through 100+ mph winds and never uttered the first syllable of complaint. Every board, every nail, every window, every door, every brick on that thing is original as far as anyone within living memory knows and the only damage was that we lost a few shingles. Folks back when sure knew how to build em.
I purposely raise my kids hard so that when/if times get hard, they will be able to cope. This instance proved the method behind my mother-in-law perceived madness because for 10 days, all of my little ones (expect the 6-week old baby) had an extended camping-ish trip and true to form, had a blast the whole time. Their mother, whom I can't force to take hikes long enough to impart leg-cramps to, didn't fare quite so well without running water and her kids had to pull her through the ordeal.
Time marched on, the world returned to normal and all was eventually good. Then fate intervened and we were forced out of that grand old house and from there, moved into one remarkably similar to the house I first described that was impossible to cool. AC bill the first month was ~$500.00. Living there drove the lessons home with fierce force.
The worm turned. We built our dream home.
Unfortunately we did so immediately prior to learning about permaculture for there are things that I would have done differently given the opportunity. Fortunately, we had lived in that antebellum home, learned much from doing so and carried the lessons forward. When we spoke with the contractor, while describing our vision, we told him that what we were after was an "old house built out of new materials."
This is what we wound up with:
The house is designed so that if the electricity were to go out, we have a built-in generator fueled via a subterranean propane tank to keep our freezers going but not the heater/air-conditioner. The reason the AC is not connected to the generator is because the house is designed to be passively cooled just like the 1850s house. It's features include:
- Two stories to minimize the size of solar catchment relative to total living area and to facilitate venting of heated air out of the second story which pulls relatively cool air into the first floor to provide convective cooling
- 9' ceilings to allow heated air to travel above head height
- Faces due South
- Shaded to the west
- Planting trees like mad on the east
- Row of live oaks ~ 100' to the South
- 4 windows to the east, 2 of which are tiny
- No windows to the west
- All south facing windows not under a porch will be under awnings shortly
- Working shutters (the price of which (along with cabinetry) was one of the larger shocks received during the whole process)
- No faux windows or doors
- All windows double hung
- All south and west doors under porches (none to the east)
- MANY windows and mostly glass doors on the north to facilitate natural lighting without heat
- Built up off the ground
- Cellar (probably the only house in Mississippi with one) with a reenforced panic room
- Reflective metal roof
- Exterior walls painted white to reflect heat
- Cutsey little flower box right outside the kitchen window (this doesn't actually help with the cooling but it is cool so I thought I would mention it.)
- Blown foam insulation which turns the whole structure into one giant styrofoam cooler and improves the structural integrity such that we can supposedly withstand a direct hit from an F5 tornado/300 mph winds (and I hope like H.E.Double Hockey Sticks that little feature remains untested).
So if the construction of a new home lies in your future, you could probably do a lot worse than finding really old homes in your part of the world and copying them in every relevant, material principle of design. That's what I did albeit accidentally. And the more I study up on permacultural design principles, the more impressed I am by many of the methods of those that came before.