Beat The Heat If You Want A Cool House Celebrate Thermal Mass

Another in our series on how to design with climate in mind.

Many parts of the world, from China to Iran to Texas and Arizona, have a " high diurnal swing", where it is really hot in the daytime and cool at night. Larry Speck, a principal at PageSoutherlandPage wonders if there isn’t a better way of designing in such conditions than our current standard practice of insulating and air conditioning. He writes:

When hired to do a small office building for an engineering firm, he proposed walls of high thermal mass.

The building isn’t finished and the air conditioning hasn’t been installed, but Larry says that " the building interior is surprisingly cool."

This is a really remarkable wall section for the 21st century: no interior finish, no exterior finish, no reinforcing bars, nothing but a big honking 18" thick wall of concrete. It will be really interesting to find out how this works out. More at Larry Speck Thinking

Eden Project Rammed Earth Wall/ Wikipedia/CC BY 2.0

I have described this form of construction as a thermal rechargeable battery, charging up with heat in the daytime and releasing it at night, and vice versa; Wikipedia calls it “the thermal flywheel effect”. Not usually being a fan of concrete, I show my students rammed earth installations like this one at the Eden Project. Really, you can get thermal mass out of almost anything, even water.

In Australia, RainwaterHog offers the GroundHog, which you can build into your floors. Really, you don’t have to go to church to celebrate mass.