The lofty goal of stable temperatures

Having had a very sick daughter and caught the virus myself the last couple of days, one of the things I'm very much looking forward to testing out with this new house is the temperature stability.

In the house we're renting presently all the bedrooms are upstairs and living is downstairs, and upstairs gets extremely hot in summer - up to 30 degrees celsius during the day. That's with a ducted ventilation system turned on full. By the time we put the kids to bed, it's still pretty hot in their rooms so we dress them for bed accordingly, but as the night goes on and the temperature drops between 6-8 degrees, in the early hours they can get really cold. I think that contributes to them getting ill, and it certainly contributes to us being woken up by their crying to go in and put more covers on!

The floors, roof insulation and walls we have selected in this new house are all supposed to work together to keep the house temperature very stable - cool in summer and warm in winter, with not much temperature change from the start of the night til the next morning. Stability and warmth in winter with only heating from the sun are both so important to us, we had it modeled by an eco modeling expert based on the materials we selected to check it would work before we locked them in.

Our walls are quite unusual, they're made with a natural clay brick called porotherm which has waffle-like air holes all through it acting as insulation. So they're a thick, well insulated wall but it also traps the sun's warmth because of the clay.

I really hope it works!

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