Summer in Australia is hot, humid and heavy. It can be challenging to get comfortable, sleep or get through your tasks for the day when the heat is making you drowsy and unfocused or sweaty and irritable. While air conditioning units are a life saver at such times, you ideally want to make their job easier – as this means they’re using less energy and keeping your bills low. So how can you keep your home cool during summer without flipping a switch? With passive cooling.
What Is Passive Cooling?
In financial and environmental terms, passive cooling is the least expensive method of keeping your home cool. It’s a design approach built around keeping the structure and its inhabitants cool. The design and construction of the exterior of the house – also known as the building envelope – needs to be built in a way that it optimizes airflow to lower temperatures and achieve cooling.
It’s a design approach built around keeping the structure and its inhabitants cool.
What Does Passive Cooling focus on?
Houses that are built using envelope construction have various common characteristics proven to maximise heat loss and keep cool air inside. These methods include:
- Including lighter coloured roofs to reflect heat from the sun
- Creating insulation and buffer zones to decrease conducted and radiated heat
- Adding shading to protect windows, walls, and roofs from direct sunlight
- Decreasing the use of thermal mass to avoid the house trapping heat at peak times
Why Is Air Movement Important?
One of the most important ways one can keep a home cool is by promoting effective air movement throughout the house and letting cooling breezes move the hot air out of the house to evaporate moisture, steam, humidity, and perspiration. This means that the house needs to be built with well-designed windows, doors, and vents which allow for unrestricted air movement.
Add to this fans and air conditioning units, and you get a home that will stay comfortable 24/7.
Hot, cold or anything in between with Actron air conditioning.
If you’re thinking about building a home in Australia, you need to consider how its proposed design will affect the indoor temperatures. Fortunately for you, Kaplan Homes includes cutting-edge, high-quality air conditioning with its Actron ducted units in every new home that we build. Add to this increased thickness of wall & ceiling insulation, the roof sarking, light colour choices for bricks and roofing plus effective ventilation and you’ll never have to dread the summer heat again!
