Enertia Homes
Youngsville, NC-based Enertia® Building Systems, Inc. is a designer and manufacturer of Geo-Solar Homes. Their Passive Solar House is designed to be used year-round with no supplemental heating or cooling in mild climates, and minimal supplemental heating and cooling in more extreme climates.
The houses make use of two main passive heating and cooling principles.
First, Enertia homes are designed with a south-facing “solar space”, which generates heat that circulates through an outer envelope surrounding the house. Air is free to move from the solar space up to the roof, down the opposite side of the house, through the basement, and back up to the solar space.
Second, the walls of the houses have a very high thermal inertia. They are built of thick planks of solid engineered wood, which itself has interesting properties. The wood - engineered southern yellow pine - contains a resin embedded with nano-particles which cause the resin to undergo phase change at around 72 degrees F. A large amount of energy is required to trigger the phase change from solid to liquid and vice versa. The walls effectively become an energy storage bank, allowing them to moderate and regulate a comfortable indoor temperature.
Enertia movie [YouTube - Energy Without Oil]:
Enertia - Designers and Manufacturers of Geo-Solar Homes
