You are having a laugh of course. A high thermal mass building with heavy to super insulation and appropriate eves overhangs to keep the sun off windows and the walls, with adequate ventilation will be "very" cool in summer time. There is NO need for a/c in the UK if the house is designed right
All he has to do is put fans in the windows.
It is quite possible to design houses for natural ventilation, there are quite a few in the Middle East. However, to work effectively natural ventilation needs a sufficiently high building and high rooms. IT also requires space. Without adequate height the natural draw is minimal. Current planning rules force low ceilings and high density occupation. These are not conducive to either efficient nor pleasant living.
Some can. It helps if you have someone with nothing else to do with their time than go around all day opening and closing windows and curtains. Most however can't.
I've seen hundreds of various ages in very hot countries. The best that can be said is that they work a bit.
Ventilation serves two primary purposes. Firstly it prevents condensation and rot. Very little air flow is required to achieve this and a house which becomes unbearably hot may still have quite sufficient ventilation to prevent either.
Secondly an air flow through the house creates wind chill so people feel cooler. The air is still at a high temperature - ventilation cannot cool a house to below ambient.
It is possible to have passive cooling to below ambient but only by utilising a passing lake or deep buried ventilation chambers. Neither are very practical for 33b Acacia Avenue.
Absolute rubbish. Houses are often unoccupied during the day, that means windows and doors are closed (or you have no insurance). Amazingly not many people consider steel grills on all their doors and windows to allow them to be left open to be "good design".
Most people also don't consider heat generating devices such as refrigerators and freezers to be "bad design". Modern building regulations go overboard on keeping heat in but totally ignore cooling. The net result is an increasing number of houses which are uncomfortably hot in the summer and the inevitable consequence that people fit air conditioning to remain comfortable.
Near here are a collection of up-market "apartments" each supplied with an electric Aga (I agree, an entirely idiotic device). These are less than two year old yet I'd guess about a quarter are now sprouting air conditioners.
Secondly, some houses are used for work. This involves heat producing devices such as computers and lights. Home offices are often in a spare bedroom so the heat contribution makes the second floor (which is always going to be warmer than the ground floor) even more uncomfortable.
However, you do have a point - many houses are not adequately designed. However they exist and peoples lives are tied up with them. What do you propose should be done with all these badly designed houses?
Of course, I am amazed you have never heard of them as they regularly appear in greeny propaganda leaflets.
It won't make any difference whatsoever. To prevent rot requires nothing more than trickle ventilation. Your claim that if the loft is hot there is a risk of rot is fatuous.
It is quite possible to design a house to use Mechanical Heat and Vent using a 40w fan motor. Have high thermal mass (masonry), superinuslation all around that, eves overhangs for shading of windows and walls and forced air coming in from the north side. It makes a nice cool house in a UK climate. No need for expensive to buy and run a/c units.
For new builds one could put 4" pipes under the floor slab & insulation and fan air in via those in summer. This would cool one floor a fair bit. Or perhaps air could be drawn through the rubble horizontally, no piping.
Drivel's input aside, a deciduous climber up the south side can take a fair heat load off. So can a white roof.
I've also wondered about retrofitting a wall cavity fan to cool the wall down at night time. It would need an effective filter to avoid clogging the cavity with muck over the years. And of course it only works with cavity walls that cant be CWIed, which is a minority, but still a significant number of buildings.
NT
The message from snipped-for-privacy@care2.com contains these words:
Floor in here is below outdoor air temperature, so it'd only make things worse.
You cool the floor overnight with cool air. Then it absorbs heat during the day. Called air-core slabs. Popular in the USA.
Oh, to be in my parents house right now. It's built of of cob - mud/clay, straw and flint stones with a thatched roof. There is no damp course. Not least because if the cob dries out it starts to crumble.
So it has a high thermal mass, external insulation and evaporative water cooling!
It's lovely and cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
-- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Guy Dawson I.T. Manager Crossflight Ltd snipped-for-privacy@crossflight.co.uk
Yep. These factors are BEGINNING to be appreciated as we start to get too hot summers as well as dreary cold winters..
In fact the humidity outside was such that the air coming into the house via the windows the spouse keeps opening 'to cool the place' - despite the fact that the house interior is some 5 degrees less than outside air temperatures - cooled enough to set a humidity sensored extractor going..
Mass inside, insulation outside, and deep overhanging eaves is as good as it gets this weather. Now if ONLY the computers equipment wasn't so bloody lossy...
It would clearly make it better. Your floor slab is cold because the ground under it is cold. New builds have insulated slabs. Pipe cool air up from below and you'll get even more cooling.
NT
I am a bit skeptical of the curtains issue. Our upstairs living area was around 30 degrees yesterday, the loft was
40, but I haven't got any insulation at all up there since all the ceilings were replaced.... back to the curtains though :-Vertical thin off-white blinds were giving reading 30 degrees in direct sunlight, whereas hardwood roman blinds were at least 5 degrees hotter according to IR thermometer in the same living area on identical direction windows. Once the sun gets through the windows, it's still going to radiate into the room is it not?
Just to boast about 1970's architecture.... Downstairs semi-underground bedrooms were a relaxing 22 degrees at about 18:00 last night. :¬)
Water bed set to minimum temp of 18 degrees sucks away any unwanted body heat. cool enough to keep our summer/winter duvet on the bed!
On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 22:02:13 +0100 someone who may be Peter Parry wrote this:-
Two stories and a loft are sufficiently high.
An advantage, but low ceilings are not a great problem.
Where?
It might help slightly, but not much.
I didn't claim otherwise.
Many houses have fairly cold spaces underneath.
Excellent, another dogmatic statement.
Suitably designed vents. That doesn't involve leaving accessible windows or doors open, or covering them with grilles.
Feel free to use a search engine to find a post where I made such a claim.
I tend to agree. However, natural ventilation can deal with the heat from always on gadgets like freezers. All it takes is a good design and some understanding.
Debatable.
Indeed. I know several and none have air cooling units.
Learning from past mistakes and gradually modifying the mistakes.
Milton Keynes and Oxford are a long way away.
Excellent, another dogmatic statement. The reality is rather more complicated, as it depends on why the loft is hot.
Someone I know has rigged a beer cooler to their water bed to keep it at a habitable temperature!
On Tue, 04 Jul 2006 17:17:06 GMT someone who may be "Pet @
With the appropriate use of the various ventilation options my 1960s house remains at about 20-22C even in the warmest weather. That is true of the south facing public rooms and the north facing bedrooms. The walls and roof are reasonably reflective, both are insulated. However it does not have external shading. I do ensure it is cooled overnight, by ventilation. However, I do understand what is going on and how to get the building to behave as I want it.
On 4 Jul 2006 04:16:01 -0700 someone who may be snipped-for-privacy@care2.com wrote this:-
One of the things I sometimes wonder about is why so many UK houses are built without cellars. These are excellent at moderating summer temperatures.
On Tue, 4 Jul 2006 21:07:47 +0100, David Hansen wrote (in article ):
Simple. Are you willing to pay?
Actually I would be, but for two reasons.
- additional recreational area
- wine storage.
Unfortunately the proletariat does not seem to agree with this notion.
The message from David Hansen contains these words:
Cost.
I suppose with cellars, most UK houses would then be three-storey and have all those complicated fire regulations.
Germans et al seem to cope though.
Owain
On Tue, 4 Jul 2006 22:34:36 +0100, Owain wrote (in article ):
Apparently they seem to have gone off Italian pizzas, although I'm not sure what that's about.
However, they needn't worry. Dr Oetker comes to the rescue. If you have satellite TV, he is regularly there advertising his great products.
I have it on good authority that his next marketing masterpiece is the compact fluorescent light bulb.
The land price is so high because land is artificially kept high, they skimp on the house.
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