Green building design with Energy3D: How big should south-facing windows be?

Many people know that south-facing windows can help to heat a house in the winter because they let a lot of sunlight in. Exactly how much of the south-facing wall should we allocate to windows? What are the downsides? How can we avoid them? Our Energy3D software allows students to explore the problems and find the solutions.

Figure 1

Suppose we have a simple house like the one shown in Figure 1 and we are in the Boston area. Energy3D supports students to try a design choice, run a simulation, collect the data, analyze the result, and evaluate the solution -- all in real time as is shown in the video in this post. Energy3D's powerful simulation and analysis tools provide instantaneous feedback to students so that their design processes can be guided and informed by the scientific and engineering principles built in the software. Let's use the investigation of south-facing windows described above as an example.

Figure 2 (Excel graph)

Suppose a student follows the design trajectory as shown in Figure 1. A challenge is to keep the yearly energy cost needed to maintain the temperature of the house at 20℃ to be as low as possible. The student begins with adding a small window to the south side of the house. By running the seasonal energy analysis tool in Energy3D, she immediately discovers that, by adding a small window, she can cut the energy cost a bit. Then she enlarges the window and finds that more energy can be saved. So she goes on to increase the size of the window. However, she finds that, at some point, larger windows on the south side start to cost more energy. After she adds two large windows, the energy cost increases over 15%, compared with the case of no window at all. Figure 2 shows the energy cost, broken down to heater and AC, as a function of the window area. That doesn't quite make sense to her. So she has to stop and think about why.

Figure 3 (Energy3D graph)

The trend in Figure 2 suggests that, with the enlargement of windows on the south side, the cooling cost continues to rise while the heating cost levels off. A monthly breakdown in Figure 3 reveals this trend more clearly. As shown by the golden dashed line in Figure 2, the solar heating through the windows increases rapidly when their total area gets enlarged.

Figure 4 (Energy3D graph)

Figure 5 (Energy3D graph)

If she wants to keep the large window area in the south side (for natural lighting and sanity of the occupants!), she has to reduce the solar heating effect through the windows in the summer. One way to do this is to plant tall deciduous trees in front of the windows as shown in Figure 1. The trees provide shading for the windows in the summer but let sunlight shine through to the windows in the winter (in Energy3D, deciduous trees have leaves from May 1st to November 30th). Figure 4 shows the effect of the two deciduous trees on the solar gain through the two south-facing windows. From the graph, she can see that the trees cut down the solar heating in the summer. As a result, the AC cost is reduced, as shown in Figure 5, whereas the heating cost is almost unchanged.

She concludes that, with the trees planted to the south of the house, the net energy cost over a year can be decreased to lower than the case of no window at all, providing an acceptable solution that takes care of view, lighting, and landscaping.

The Energy3D graphs in this blog post show that students can keep the results of previous runs (the curve of each run is labeled by a number) and superimpose new data on top of them. As the data view can get quite complex, Energy3D provides options to turn on/off data types and runs. The embedded video shows how those features work for visualizing and analyzing the simulation results.

PS: Some readers may notice that our calculations predict higher AC cost in September than in August or July. This is because when those calculations were done, the house had no window on the east or west side. Adding windows to those sides, the AC cost will peak around July or August -- even when the trees are not present.