The Beale Solar-Heated Subterranean Guest House

Enlarge Image Image Gallery

Everyone knows that passive solar heating is a viable means of keeping a house warm in Arizona, New Mexico, or California. Not everyone knows that simple passive solar heating can also be used to "cozy up" a dwelling in Athens, Ohio . . . as William T. Beale just proved during the "worst winter in over a century"!

Imagine a solar-heated cottage with no collectors, no pumps, no storage tanks, no thermostats, no heat exchangers . . . none of the trappings of conventional "active" solar heating installations. Then imagine that same dwelling recessed into the side of a hill . . . and you've got a pretty good idea of what William T. Beale's $6,000 solar-heated guest house is all about.

Last summer, Beale (a heat transfer engineer of 25 years' experience) set out to design and build a small guest house on his Athens, Ohio farm . . . a dwelling that would use the sun's energy for heating, but without the aid of pumps, temperature sensors, and similar high-technology devices. ("I'd helped install an 'active' solar heating system on a house in this area some time before," Beale explains, "and I knew from that experience that a complex, water-carrying system was not the way to go.")

What Beale ended up building was a 16' X 30' one-room (plus lavatory) cottage that [1] absorbs Ole Sol's radiant energy directly (like a black car sitting in the sun) and [2] uses the earth itself as the major regulator of its temperature. Beale's guest cottage is—in effect—a live-in solar collector built into the side of a hill.

And darned if the little "lithospheric solar collector" hasn't turned out to be quite a comfortable abode! Beale says that there were days last winter when the outside air temperature was a nippy 0°F and the ground was blanketed with snow . . . while the tiny guest house was so warm inside that—in William Beale's own words—"we actually had to worry about keeping the place cool!"

THE SECRETS) OF BEALE'S SUCCESS

Beale's solar-heated guest house is as cozy inside as it is for several (darn good) reasons.

First of all, the house's walls and ceiling contain a full six inches of fiberglass insulation. ("Somebody—I forget who once said that if you could insulate a dwelling as thoroughly as it ought to be insulated, you could keep the place warm with a toaster," Beale points out. "I operate on that assumption.")