How to Heat Your Home With the Sun

As winter's chill comes and the air grows cold, homeowners are forced to turn up the heat. Unfortunately, staying warm and paying for heating is often expensive. To cut back on the expense of heating a home, many families are looking for alternative, budget-friendly ways to heat their houses. Rather than installing costly solar panels, homeowners design and create houses that use passive solar heating to harness the energy of the sun and help heat their home while saving money.

Instructions

- 1
  Build the home so that it faces south. If building or renovating, designing a home so that it faces the south allows the sun's warmest rays to enter the front of the home in the winter.
- 2
  Add windows to the southern side of the home or the side that faces the equator. Large windows let in the sunlight, which helps heat the house. Calculate 5 to 12 percent of the home's square footage, then cover the southern wall in that amount of square feet in windows.
- 3
  Reduce the number of windows found throughout the rest of the house. While it is important to keep some windows to let in some natural light, avoid installing additional windows or skylights, which lose heat from inside the house.
- 4
  Use materials that have a high thermal mass and retain heat for longer periods of time. Building materials like ceramic tile, stone, concrete and brick soak up the sun's warmth and store it, helping to keep the house heated longer.

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