This is what I don’t get. A well insulated home that is built correctly does not overheat in the summer. That insulation keeps the heat out just as well as it keeps it in. Do Austrailian/European/ NZ houses not have any thermal mass whatsoever? Are basements atypical? Is the ground temperature much higher that the 54F we have here year round?
I can’t speak for all states, but basements are largely non-existent in SA. My aunt had her house built with one; I’ve never seen one other than that. My house is single brick, timber frame, with wall and ceiling insulation. Provided the temperature remains beneath about 35C-ish, and non-humid, the aircon copes just fine.
Once things get above 35, it starts to get a bit wonky.
I’ve never known it to get cold enough that the heater doesn’t cope, so I guess that’s something… :dubious:
What are you doing up at this hour? 
(me, I’m up with crook guts. Yay)
I’ve lived in a few states and the only house I’ve known with a basement actually had more of a “root cellar” that was out the back and separate to the main house.
We just don’t do basements over here.
Brick veneer is the most common house configuration in SA at least. Some places you luck out and get double brick, some you’re stuck with fibro the whole way. I’ve personally got brick veneer. We think there’s insulation in the roof (probably not the walls, as it’s a house built in the 1960s and a duplex to boot), but that only remains effective for a short period.
What people with insulation don’t always realise is that it traps heat as well as keeping it out. So when you have a run of hot days (e.g. a 14 day heatwave), and your roof cavity fills and remains filled with hot air, your insulation starts to heat up as well. So you end up with a house that’s just as hot (if not hotter in some unlucky circumstances) as one without insulation.
WRT the ground temperature, I’m not sure what ours is. But don’t forget, a lot of areas in Australia have been in a drought situation for a few years now. All of the moisture has been baked right out of the soil (and of the foundations of the houses). When it gets hot, it’s like heating up dry sand. It gets pretty danged hot. It doesn’t retain any cool at all.
Many Australian homes are not well insulated, so they can get quite cold in winter as well as hot in summer. That’s partly because in most of Australia you don’t need to cope with very cold winters. Basements are rare, though in much of Queensland and parts of northern New South Wales it’s common for houses to be built about 3 metres above ground level like this one. Note that house is made of timber and fibrous cement panels – not much thermal insulation there – but you stay cool by spending time under the house in summer and letting the breeze come through. (The other advantage of this kind of construction is that you can have a flood and have relatively little damage to the house).
What ‘summer’ are we talking about? Your pussy-ass summer or the absolute frying that is happening is SE Australia now? Please re-read the thread and take a look at the temperatures that are occurring on a contiguous daily basis in the parts of South East Australia . Use a converter if you have to.
Great! Why didn’t you tell us all sooner? You could have saved many lives, but instead you held that secret wisdom all to yourself. Shame on you!
Oh, but wait, how does that insulation work when the ambient heat is sustained long enough to transfer itself from the insulation layer into inner house air layer? I was hoping you could answer that for us. How is the insulation going to help now? Surely you should know. Maybe it will keep the heat in. That might be bad. I don’t know because I’m not a scientist like you.
No, we don’t. Good pick up. We’ll try to fix that.
Well, that will teach him not to ask questions…:rolleyes:
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The name is up there, in blue, at the top.
Goddamnit, I have to protest. Flagstaff, Arizona gets more snowfall per year than Buffalo (cite). But, no, always with the Buffalo jokes. :mad:
Asking questions is fine. Great, even. But if the questions are obviously simplistic and are asked by people who show no enthusiasm for finding out the answers on their own, then the askers are at the mercy of the court jester. It has always been so.
Isamu: Calm the fuck down!
I understand that your summers are hotter than ours. Yay you! You won the dick waggling contest that I wasn’t even competing in. Just special for you, I’ll work in celcius. Here our summers get around 40C, but only for a week or two. Your summers are hotter and for a longer period. But all that is completely irrelevant.
At acertain level under ground, the temperature does not change significantly throughout the year. Here, it is about 12C at around 1- 1.5M. If you have a large thermal mass below that level, it tends to stay at that temperature. If it’s hot here, the basement is always cool. It would take years of sustained temperatures well hotter than anything you ever see to significantly change the heat of the ground below this level.
I asked an honest question. I have no idea how deep one would have to go in outside of North America to use this principle, but I suspect it is not terribly deep.
Thank you for answering my question, Bites When Provoked, Sierra Indigo, and Giles.
Basements are not usual in urban Sydney.
But we’re in the city, and specifically the older part of the city. My house is 110 years old, which, for Sydney, is bloody ancient. It’s a double brick terrace house, in a row of five houses. It has a tin roof, and no insulation beyond the brick that I am aware of (it’s not that renovated, I’ll be correcting that later on.) Many, many of the houses in the area are just like mine.
When they were built it was to imitate England, without much thought to heat or cold. There are people with proper heat reducing houses with verandahs or built up a bit from the ground, but not in these neighborhoods.
Mine stays coolish in summer and is freezing in winter, but that’s an accident of luck having to do with orientation of the place and placement of trees. Many of the old terraced houses are boiling in summer.
I’m familiar with the basement principle, but it’s not in much use here. OTOH, Sydney is normally very temperate - mild summers with a very few hot days and mild winters with no cold days at all.
Queenslanders are waaaay overrated. I live in one. It’s a piece of crap compared to a modern house. No insulation in the walls, internal walls you can hear a whisper through, steel roof with no insulation (originally) etc. It irritates me severely when I hear some wally (not you) start waxing lyrical about how great these old designs were, what geniuses our forefathers were to have built them so cleverly, we shouldn’t mess with them, yadda yadda.
The internal surface of the western wall of our house gets so hot it’s uncomfortable to touch in midsummer in the afternoon. All this stuff about great ventilation might work well in the country where you have heaps of space and verandahs all around, but in cities there is limited space between houses. The bedrooms are like ovens. They have poor ventilation. The plan of the house tends to be such that they have no crossflow.
Our heat tends to be constant. It doesn’t drop in the evenings. The first few days of a hot period the most well insulated areas are cool, but gradually the heat creeps through. Insulation and thermal mass works well in areas where there is a cool period overnight so that there is an opportunity to dump heat.
Our soil temperatures would be way above yours. The whole year average temperature here is nearly 70F so I suspect the soil temp would be similar.
Princhester, I tend to disagree regarding Queenslanders or Colonials. I think the design worked well for the times (certainly not a genius masterpiece). But to compare what was available then, or known, to people who came from largely a lot colder climate is rather difficult.
Masterofnone, my house is over 70 years old and doesn’t have a basement (or cellar). I don’t know of any that do. It was designed to have air flowing freely underneath to keep things cool.
Just out of interest…I have a rammed earth house in an area which is generally a few degrees cooler than the city. It’s “eco-built” which means it’s well insulated and north-facing in order to take advantage of passive solar heating and cooling. It has slate floors and the window and door placement enables cool evening winds to blow directly through the house once opened up. We have a rainwater tank and pump so I do have a reasonable garden and trees shading the house and reducing radiant heat.
However.
While it’s cooler than outside it’s still uncomfortably warm*. There’s only so much good design will do. In 43C heat, underground is the only place to be.
- OTOH I don’t think any-one would die without air-conditioning in here though
Okay - UPDATE: 35.1 degrees and it’s 9.00am. The weatherman hasn’t revised the temperature max for today - so it looks like we’ll be having the predicted 46 insane degrees predicted. I live in a house built in the 50s which was designed to cope with our hot summers. It’s on stumps ensuring air flow under the house and has 12 foot ceilings. We usually get by just on ceiling fans and the air con on for for a few hours a day and usually never needed at night. The drought has has done its worst to a lot of homes. Because they’re built on mallee sands, as moisture is removed, the ground compacts and cracks appear in walls and around doors and windows. We have about $3000 worth of paving that has sunk and shifted. If we get drought breaking rains, as the earth moistens up, those cracks will reduce and hopefully our pavers will be returned to almost normal. Rumour has it that if we reach the max today - along with parts of southern NSW, we’ll actually be the hottest place on the planet. Extreme weather, whether our snowed in cousins in the northern hemisphere or relentless heat is just something that generations have had to deal with. I’m not whining about the heat, just sharing the fact that I’ll be able to say to people, ‘yeah, it was hot that summer’. It appears that both hemispheres are experiencing record-breakers in extremes.
36.2c @ 0900 Central Daylight Savings Time here.
Looks like we’re only going to get a top of 41 though.
Plus a cool change coming late in the evening means we’ll have an (almost) overnight drop to 26 degrees tomorrow. I better break out the blankets!
Great, just as the cool change is coming through Adelaide I’m about to go to Melbourne. I hope it cools down there too.
Yeah, I’ve never lived in one, I’d thought they were better than you describe though.
In Coober Pedy the early residents built into the rock which maintains the temperature at about 24-26 C. We stayed there for a night in an underground hotel and it wasn’t too bad, a little warm for me to sleep comfortably but pleasantly cool compared to above ground.
Are we counting? Because it’s 1000 CDST and 39.7C. (And no, I don’t have anything better to do today).
Here in Melbourne we’ve hit 38C at 10:38am, well on our way to the predicted top of 44.
40.4C in Adelaide at 10:24
But DellieM- did your cat eat the ice cream?