Cob: Thermal Mass

[Amanda Peck]

Really comfortable for the whole day?  Uh, probably not.  Give one an edge 
so that the house is OK until, say, 10:30 or 11:00, then bearable until 2:00 
in the afternoon?  Entirely possible.  May not even depend much on thermal 
mass, just the air in the house.  Time-tested strategy for Southern homes 
before air conditioning became standard.

>From 2 until you could open up the house again to let the slightly cooler 
air in, you sat under a tree in the yard and pulled the strings off beans.

I've lived in uninsulated with nasty air conditioner houses in the south in 
HOT summers.  I don't think that the dogs suffered, and by the time I got 
home from work, the house was semi-bearable, didn't use the AC more than 
three or four times during the hottest summer on record in that area.  I 
just left the exhaust fan going all the time--unless I turned the AC on.  Of 
course that summer I worked in an un-airconditioned building, car not only 
didn't have AC, the heat was permanently connected.  Fan going all the time 
at least kept the temperature not much higher than the outside (100 degrees 
plus).  And I'm not sure that I could do that now.

.........
Darel--now the Buckaroo?--wrote:
So Chandra's strategy would not be good for a  low thermal mass home.   You 
would be simply making yourself uncomfortable trying to charge the 
insignificant mass which has a very low capacity. She should follow the 
rules for keeping a house warm or cool that are applicable for low thermal 
mass, i.e., standard homes, which is what she described.    Why on earth do 
you say people should be doing something which makes them uncomfortable and 
has absolutely no effect on storing heat or acting as a sink to any 
signifigant degree over a period of a couple of hours, I'd say.



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