Thankfully, the days of cookie-cutter houses built quickly to exactly the same design are on their way out. Even in places where the homes are all based on the same floor plan, individual home owners add and change things to suit themselves. One of the easiest things to change in any home is the color of the exterior walls.
In most cases, we talk about thermal mass as something that absorbs and stores useful heat from the sun's light, releasing it when your home gets colder to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature. However, it is possible to use thermal mass as an effective cooling mechanism.
Thermal walls, or Trombe walls, are the single most flexible passive solar option: they work in any climate and on any home, providing extra heat throughout the night after gathering heat during the day.
There are two types of cooling for passive solar homes: stuff that cools the house and stuff that cools the people inside the house. Humans do not react to heat in the same way as building materials, after all! There are two main ways of cooling a home's inhabitants:
The foundations are an important part of your home, for the obvious reason that they support everything else. But they are also a major source of energy loss unless they are properly insulated, since they are in constant contact with the cold, often damp surrounding earth.
The situation is made worse by the fact that concrete is an excellent heat conductor. Although this is a benefit in a concrete radiant floor slab, for example, it's a real concern in a home's foundations.
The glazing isn't the only part of a window that transfers heat: the sash and frame make up about 25% of an average window's surface area, so choosing energy-efficient materials and designs is important.
Traditionally, wooden sashes and frames are the most common, and this still holds true today. In fact, wooden windows are the number-one selling item in construction in the US.
The foundations are an important part of your home, for the obvious reason that they support everything else. But they are also a major source of energy loss unless they are properly insulated, since they are in constant contact with the cold, often damp surrounding earth.
The situation is made worse by the fact that concrete is an excellent heat conductor. Although this is a benefit in a concrete radiant floor slab, for example, it's a real concern in a home's foundations.
When you go shopping for windows, it's easy to get confused by all the ratings and figures. Until recently, window manufacturers could rate their products almost any way they wished, which made comparisons a nightmare. Thankfully, they realized this and, in 1989, formed the non-profit National Fenestration Rating Council (NFRC) to standardize testing and rating for windows, doors and skylights.
