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Solar Passive Design
Hundreds of years ago designers, through experience, understood how to make a building thermally comfortable. This was referred to as 'building conditioning'.
With the invention of air-conditioning, the art of designing was virtually lost. Air-conditioning has become both acceptable and a readily accessible way of achieving thermal comfort. Today, there is indisputable evidence that air-conditioning has had and is having a disastrous impact on our environment. Thankfully there has been a resurgence in building design that reduces or eliminates the need for artificial heating and cooling. This is known as solar passive design and incorporates four key design strategies:
- Orientation
- Thermal Mass
- Ventilation
- Insulation
Clay bricks are one of the very few building materials which have 'thermal mass' properties.
To date there have been very few resources available to architectural students and practitioners and what is available is very old or very complicated to decipher. This is why Think Brick Australia created the online Climate Design Wizard.
The wizard merges decades of climate data from the Bureau of Meteorology with insights gained from Think Brick’s research into Australian building styles ( carried out with the University of Newcastle). It presents the data in an easy to understand and accessible form that covers different climatic conditions in 27 locations across Australia, and suggests ways in which thermal comfort can be gained by taking advantage of the local climate.
By using the wizard, it’s possible to design buildings which take advantage of Solar Passive Design
