Look Ma, No Trombe Wall

Reader Contribution by John Kosmer
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Black, brown, dark grey or any another dark color ceramic floor tile will absorb heat/light faster than light color tiles. The dark tiles transfer more heat faster to the thermal mass slab. The thermal mass & tiles then slowly release the heat in the cooler evening.

When we first began building our passive solar house, I was taken aback when I found out that our 12″-thick concrete slab weighed about 100 tons! I was even more surprised to learn that the rest of the house’s building materials weighed only 25 tons. That news would have been shocking enough by itself. Its importance, however, becomes evident when you consider that the 125-ton thermal mass encased in a super insulated container can store and slowly release a tremendous amount of heat. The super insulation shell also keeps most of that heat inside the box that is your house, so the total mass that is trapped by it has no place to release the heat but inside the house, and only very slowly dissipating it to the outside.

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