Living at 6,300 feet, in the high desert of New Mexico, where the 24 hour temperature can vary 40 degrees or more per day and where the seasonal changes can be extreme, being a friend with the sun becomes an important component of your life.
In our small adobe home, we befriend the sun in as many ways as we can. Our home is oriented 10 degrees off of direct south, following instructions that this would give us the best solar gain. The southern side has three large double pane windows and a small two story sun room. An 18" overhang sits above all windows. Because of the sun's height in the summer, the overhang shades the home's interior. As the sun path lowers, more sun is allowed into the interior, as the overhang now provides no shading. Perfect! In the summer, you can sit in the cool shade inside the sun room. In the winter, you can snuggle up and enjoy its warmth.
Because winter nights are the time you want to "hold" the heat provided by the sun during the day, we've done a few extra things. Double-celled insular blinds are lowered as the sun lowers. And, our fabulous mud floors hold the heat and disperse it at night.
Our mud floors are beautiful! We trucked the dirt ourselves from the rich red soil a few miles from our rural home, shoveling under full moons. Neighbors in our fully off-grid community came to help mix and pour the mud, which had to be poured in one session and allowed to dry for many weeks. As the mud dried, it cracked and we filled in the cracks with more mud. After many weeks, we put a thin coat of linseed over the hardened mud. The result: a rich mahogany-like surface.
As I sit here writing, I can see three large mulen plants, which have decided to grow taller than myself, outside our southern windows. In the last few days I have noticed how they are perky towards the east in the morning, and at night have followed the sun across the sky to point in a westwardly direction, just like our solar panels (photovoltaic). We have one large set of panels on a tracker which acts exactly like the mulens' flower heads. The eastern sun heats a fluid in the tracker and weights the tracker towards the east. Gradually, during the day the liquid is heated and slowly weights the tracker towards the west.
Even when the temperature rises to over 100 degrees, I can enjoy the cool of my adobe walls and mud floors, as the sunlight is indirect, not entering the home and raising the temperatures. I can still love the southwest sun!
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I'd like to know more about how you made your mud floors. How did you know what dirt / clay to use? How did you mix it up -- did you use a cement mixer? To what consistency? I've heard that ox-blood was the traditional sealer for mud floors -- do you know anything about this, whether it works better than linseed oil or even whether you could obtain it? I don't suppose such a floor would hold up outside, although I've used stabilized adobes for the paving of an outside patio area and after 3 years, they seem to be enduring quite well here in the southwest.