Houzz Tour: An Energy-Efficient Home for 3 Generations (15 photos)

You can’t tell from this photo, but that lush-looking lawn is hiding a secret weapon in the home’s environmental sustainability arsenal. Ten feet below the surface is a looped pipe, an “earth tube” cooling system. It uses energy-efficient fans to draw warm air out of the home and underground, where the soil stays at about 64 degrees Fahrenheit. The lower temperature of the ground chills the air, which is then returned to the house.

A greywater recycling system, which helps keep the lawn green, also increases the conduction of heat from the earth tube. This cooling system was one of the biggest challenges of the project.

“As there is no such thing as an off-the-shelf earth tube cooling system, it needed to be designed from the ground up, using logic, common sense, Internet trawling and a fair bit of try-it-and-see,” Lu says. “Fortunately it has been successful.”

from Houzz http://ift.tt/1Se82SB

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