Look Ma, No Trombe Wall

Reader Contribution by John Kosmer
Published on April 27, 2011
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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.

With that kind of 125-ton mass to store and release heat, the need for a Trombe wallhas always been a mystery to me. Invented by Edward Morse in 1964, its almost as if it was heating strategy from a bygone era before they were insulating many homes and well before the notion of super insulated hoes was around. That’s a freestanding vertical concrete wall connected to the floor and ceiling inside the house that stores and releases heat. Simply put, with 125 tons of super insulated thermal mass, who needs it? I have seen two versions of a Trombe wall on a ranch style house. One is at the north side of the house where it picks up heated air, instead of direct sunlight falling on the wall, which would be much more efficient. A variant of this idea is to have clerestory windows mounted towards the top of a south-facing sloped roof, letting in the sun. The light can fall directly on the upper part of the Trombe wall. Direct sunlight will give you greater solar gain than ambient sunlight that first heats the air, which, in turn, will be absorbed by the Trombe wall.

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