Discussion
The original part of our house was built for passive solar heating & cooling.
There's a ~1m ledge on the south, a bank of six double-glazed sliding-glass door windows, and a huge solar mass on the ground floor, soapstone over concrete over gravel.
It works fabulously well. In high summer/winter you're lookin' at a 5-12c differential between inside and outside.
But sometimes, in spring, we'll get several cool rainy days in a row, then the sun will come out and start warming everything up.
So the humidity is, technical term here, "swimmable". And the solar mass is quite cool.
And the air gets cooled, can't hold its water any more, and the stone floor becomes wet and slick.
If it gets bad enough, we have to put down towels to make it safe to walk on. Usually, tho, as now, it just gives one clammy bare feet. :)
It's a great deal, tho, cold clammy feet for a few days in exchange for +-5-12c of free thermal power, I'll take it, and tho I'm unlikely to ever build again, I would certainly build around a passive solar plan. Our addition was *not* built that way, cuz of engineering constraints, and it is way less pleasant.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
