The students designed and built a passive solar house to maximize energy absorption from the sun. They brainstormed ideas to focus, absorb, and maintain solar energy. Experiments tested reflecting light with CDs, maintaining heat with insulation layers, and absorbing more energy with black surfaces. The final house design incorporated these lessons, focusing sunlight through a hole into a dark, insulated container to trap heat overnight.

1. Passive Solar House
Creation
Aaron Bernhard, Braydon Hall, Izzi Durham and Vibhu Iyer

2. HMW Questions
• How might we design a structure that takes in
as much energy from the sun as possible?
• How might we utilize the building materials in
the class to build a powerful solar house?
• How might we build our house as time
efficient as possible?
• How might we maintain the heat throughout
the night?
• How might we focus the energy of the sun into
the house?
• How might we absorb as much energy from the
sun as possible?
• How might we use light?

3. Brainstorming
• For each and every HMW
question, my group would sit
down for a period of 15 minutes
and draw any idea that came to
mind.

4. How might we use light?
• Mirrors
• Windows
• CDs
We held up CDs so they reflected light onto a thermometer or
our hands – the increase in temperature was quite significant
and noticeable.

5. How might we maintain the heat?
• Water
• Insulation
• Double paned/two walls
To test various methods of insulation, we put two identical cups
of hot water underneath plastic and cardboard boxes. The cup in
the plastic box stayed slightly warmer, though it was
smaller, which may have skewed our results. But when we had
two layers on one of the boxes, it kept its heat far better than
the single box.

6. HMW absorb as much energy from the
sun as possible?
We tested a clear water bottle and a black water bottle under a
lamp. The black water bottle was slightly warmer at the end.

7. The Plans
• After much consideration we cut down the ideas to its most
rudimentary form.

8. The Breakdown
What we had learned in our
experimentation was that we
could focus the heat through a
single hole. Then we could
absorb it through something
with a high heat capacity that
was relatively dark. Finally we
learned that in order to be
successful we needed
something that was both air
tight and had a lot of insulation.
All of these became key in our
final design.

9. Final Product

10. Additional Images

15. The End…