Passive solar houses in Northern Nigeria: The west African sub-region

Abstract

The habitant bill of rights, defined the qualitative issues connected with design of houses and their groupings into new communities as a supplement to other codes and regulations which have attempted to define qualitative issues relating to the building industry. In Birnin-Kebbi, a town in Sokoto State in Northern Nigeria, there are evidences of low quality in design and planning of houses, relative to environmental influences, like weather and regular seasons. It has been observed that the weather condition in this part of the country is prone to dry and hot climate from early February to June. This period gives residents in the area a perpetual experience of living amid extreme dryness and exhaustive heat as from midday to midnight throughout the period. It needs, therefore, the refreshing coolness of people's habitat and surroundings. From the end of June to September, the planting and harvesting season respectively, the weather is fairly good with intermittent rains and showers sometimes accompanied by strong winds and storms. In early October, when the heat varies, powdered dust particles are brought from the Sahara by the Harmattan winds. The Harmattan period extends as far as January when an ambient temperature within the interior could go as low as between 8 and 10°C thereby requiring heating. From the above observations, the inhabitants of this area are definitely faced with problems of designing and constructing suitable houses that will cope with this varying climatic condition such that the minimum hardship is suffered during both the hot and Hamattan periods while employing minimal mechanical cooling and heating devices, respectively. Hence research is undertaken into exploring the design and construction of a passive solar house to meet, or at least to give, solutions to the problems of the inhabitants in relation to the ever changing yearly weather conditions. The research takes note of the characteristics of a typical one-bedroom house, simple to construct with 75% local input value. It also takes note of the performance of the house, all typical features of a modern day residential house with all amenities powered by renewable sources of energy, particularly solar. The house is relatively cheap, simple to construct and above all the running cost, in terms of energy needed, is very low.