Solar-heated Dwellings

Early in the 1930s, the US has started to conduct the research and experiment on solar house, and built a batch of pilot solar house in successive. In the 1970s, some industrial countries listed the solar house into their research programme. Until the 1980s, the built solar houses exceeded thousands in the world. In the later stage of the 1990s, a surge of solar rooftop was raised in the world resulting in series of programme proposed in some countries such as 10,000 rooftop, 100,000 rooftop and million rooftop programme which promoted the development of solar dwellings into a new stage.

The solar dwellings have 3 basic types:

a.        Passive solar house, which is simple in structure, low in cost and not required any replenished energy, can obtain solar energy in a way of natural heat exchanging if the construction direction is configured rationally and the building member are treated in place. Since the 1970s, it has been the trends to develop the solar house in a long time span.

b.        Active solar house is complex in structure, high in cost and required the electricity as replenished energy. It is composed of solar concentrator, turbine, pump, radiator and heat reservoir.

c.        Zero-energy house, of which energy required by the house is provided by solar rooftop, is installed with 2 to 4kW solar cells in rooftop and connected to the grid. When the climate is sunny with enough sunlight, solar cells can satisfy all the energy needs of a household, and affluence electricity can be transmitted to the grid; when the climate is cloudy with insufficient sunlight, the grid can supply electricity. Some of dwellings are installed with solar concentrator for thermal supply for the house. Due to the high price of solar cells at present, it is still difficult to popularize the zero-energy house.

The Chinese first passive solar house was built in Ganxu in 1977. During the period from 1977 to 1987, variable passive solar houses were built in China, which have exceeded 400 houses with the construction area of 100,000 m². Until the end of 1996, diverse type of passive solar house was built accounting for 15,000 houses with the construction area of exceeding 4.55million m².