3 ms·

cooling down the apartment to 20°C with open windows all night This sounds like mainly the air cooled down while a lot of heat was still trapped in the buildin

by stinos 9y ago

cooling down the apartment to 20°C with open windows all night This sounds like mainly the air cooled down while a lot of heat was still trapped in the building itself. There are ways to make this better though. So you could say that particular building is not overly well designed. 28°C is just too much. Though no matter what you try, unless you're under ground, if you have 10 or more consecutive days with temperatures rising well over 30°C, you won't really be able to stop that. Anyway it's been a while I looked into this but some things I recall: a lot of mass on the roof, like a garden, will keep much of the heat out there. More mass in general as well IIRC becasue it just takes longer to heat (but again, once all heat is in and it's too much, you're going to have to wait before it is all gone again). Avoiding direct sunlight on the walls also helps. Reflecting glass, outer blinds (blinds inside doesn't do all that much, that's basically too late because sunlight has entered the interior already).

tenukitime 9y ago
ICF (Insulated Concrete Form) construction takes this approach tempering the indoor temperature. My brother just moved into a brand new ICF house in Salt Lake City (relatively cold winters and hot summers) and it is remarkably efficient.
saeranv 9y ago
One more cool idea: setting translucent Phase Change Materials (PCM) directly against your windows. PCMs are wax-like material that have a high latent heat of fusion (energy it takes to change the phase of material i.e solid -> liquid). Because latent heat change occurs at a constant temperature, the PCM acts as a thermal storage when solar energy or ambient temperature increases, and then releases the heat during the evenings. At my (architecture/research) office, my colleague coded a 3D FEM to model the way this interacts with different geometries so we could investigate how to regulate the thermal storage capacity of a PCM surface. I'm fascinated by PCMs, although he seems to think that the resulting temperature dampening is too little[1] to have broad application in architecture... [1] Liquid -> gas phase change has a higher latent heat of fusion and might be a way to solve this I think. It would require larger volumes, or a way to safely contain higher pressure, but similar to fridge or AC systems, this should provide a couple of orders of magnitude greater heat storage.

by stinos 9y ago

tenukitime 9y ago

ICF (Insulated Concrete Form) construction takes this approach tempering the indoor temperature. My brother just moved into a brand new ICF house in Salt Lake City (relatively cold winters and hot summers) and it is remarkably efficient.

saeranv 9y ago

One more cool idea: setting translucent Phase Change Materials (PCM) directly against your windows. PCMs are wax-like material that have a high latent heat of fusion (energy it takes to change the phase of material i.e solid -> liquid). Because latent heat change occurs at a constant temperature, the PCM acts as a thermal storage when solar energy or ambient temperature increases, and then releases the heat during the evenings. At my (architecture/research) office, my colleague coded a 3D FEM to model the way this interacts with different geometries so we could investigate how to regulate the thermal storage capacity of a PCM surface. I'm fascinated by PCMs, although he seems to think that the resulting temperature dampening is too little[1] to have broad application in architecture... [1] Liquid -> gas phase change has a higher latent heat of fusion and might be a way to solve this I think. It would require larger volumes, or a way to safely contain higher pressure, but similar to fridge or AC systems, this should provide a couple of orders of magnitude greater heat storage.