Found a good link to a recently completed net zero house in Kamloops, Bc, built and designed by students and faculty at the local School of environmental science, what blew me away was how complicated and no doubt expensive the roof was, with all those brackets for supporting the PV panels, and the openings for wiring, hot water pipes, you name it, and how many potential places for leaks does that create?

This really brings to mind my longstanding idea to do solar renos on bungelows by replacing the existing roof with a transparent polycarbonate roof, just like a sundeck or sunroom, but out of the way with better solar access.

Now inside that upper sunroom one can start seedlings, and behind the racks you can put up PV panels that double as solar thermal collectors, in fact you can start putting up simple hollow metal boxes painted black behind the seedlings, the heat  can be extracted with a car radiator and sent to a watertank below the plant bench for cold nights, and when it getss too hot inside, open up the ceiling vents, and as the heat exits by natural convection, that heat can be scavenged too by radiators in that airflow!

This vent stays open all summer to extract heat from under the roof, i am working on a cupola with built in heat scavenger, that can use your existing roof as a solar collector, and the heat gets extracted and piped to a tank in the basement upstream of the existing waterheater.


http://www.greendreamhome.ca/thehome.htm