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An Architect's No-Fail Methods for Cooling Your House in Summer

An architect explains the infallible logic of passive shading your home for maximum comfort during summer

Bridget Puszka
Bridget PuszkaDecember 7, 2017
Houzz Australia Contributor. Principal Architect at BP Architects, an award-winning Melbourne-based architectural consultancy that designs healthy, sustainable homes. Certified Passive House Designer.
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Did you know that passive solar principles for keeping your home cool can be applied worldwide? They are logical and make common sense, you just have to adapt them for your hemisphere, where you are located, and for your climate zone. Using the localities of Melbourne and Sydney as an example for Australia, this article explains what you can do to keep your home cooler in summer forever more.
Luigi Rosselli Architects
Climate
Australia has eight climate zones as defined in the National Construction Code (NCC). The NCC sets the minimum requirements for design construction and performance of buildings throughout Australia. You can see what your climate zone is here. Within these eight climate zones are numerous sub-zones.

Melbourne is a mild temperate climate zone, and Sydney falls under warm temperate. As the recurring word ‘temperate’ implies, we enjoy pleasant and agreeable temperatures in both Melbourne and Sydney. However, using passive solar techniques, you can ensure a comfortable and cool home during the hot months of summer, no matter where you are.

10 Fixes for Homes That Face the Wrong Way
BP Architects
Shading
Shading your home from the summer sun is the best way to approach a cooler home. This is because once sunlight has entered your house through your windows, this sunlight transforms into radiant heat, and is absorbed then re-radiated as long-wave radiation.

This long-wave radiation cannot pass back out through the glass, which leads to a build-up of heat in your home. This is a situation similar to a glasshouse, greenhouse or your car on a hot day, when temperatures can steadily increase.

Shading can block up to 90 per cent of the warmth before the sun heats up your home, so stopping the sunlight before it radiates into your home makes sense.
BP Architects
North, east and west shading
The sun travels high overhead in the middle of a summer day. Therefore, if you have eaves or horizontal shading this will shade your windows from the high summer sun. Horizontal shading can include shade sails and pergolas with louvres.

On the east and the west sides of your home the sun will be at a lower angle, as that’s where the sun rises and sets. Vertical shading works well on these sides of your house. Vertical shading can include deciduous trees or vines, deep verandahs or adjustable vertical screens such as awnings or external blinds. Deciduous vines and trees, other plants, shadecloth and screens can all be utilised to provide seasonal shading.

Temperatures can be up to 10 degrees cooler in the shade, so it also helps to shade the wall surfaces that will get the full brunt of the summer sun in the east and west.

Dulux Paint
Roof
With a high overhead sun at midday, the roof is the surface of your house most exposed to the summer sun. A white roof will reflect the heat from the high summer sun overhead and help keep your home cool. Whirly birds or vents in your roof attic space will help exhaust the build-up of heat in your roof, and keep your home cooler.
Itsuka Studio
Windows and skylights
If you are planning to build a new home, keeping windows on the east and west to a minimum will also help reduce the summer heat. If you cannot shade the outside of your windows, you might want to use a reflective internal shade, which can reflect the sunlight before it enters into your home.

Or on east- and west-facing windows you could use glazing with a low solar-heat gain coefficient (SHGC), particularly if the windows are large. These windows use toned glass or tinted films to reduce the amount of solar heat transmitted through them. A low solar-heat gain coefficient will allow less solar heat to be transmitted through the window. This will also block the winter sun, however, so it is better to use adjustable external shading if possible.

There is little solar heat gain from south-facing windows so there is no need for these to be low SHGC. Skylights, on the other hand, will often be exposed to the sun all through the day. They can be protected with reflective blinds or external blinds or louvres.

Browse homes with sunny skylights
Mountford Williamson Architecture
Air flow
A cooling breeze can make the difference between a room that feels overly warm and one that is comfortable. This works by facilitating evaporation of perspiration, thereby cooling you in the process. This makes it much more pleasant to be in a room with a breeze than one that does not have any air movement. Fans can help facilitate this air movement, and make a room more comfortable during the hotter months.

The types of windows your home has also makes a big difference, as they can either block or help direct air flow through a home. A casement window that opens into the path of a cooling breeze can direct air through a home. An awning window in the same location may block the flow of air, and reduce the amount of cooling breeze that can enter the home.

Tip: Having a larger window on the side of the house that is down wind or sheltered from the wind, and a smaller opening on the side facing the wind, will increase the breezes through the home. This happens because of the pressure differentials in the house as the wind is sucked towards the area of lower pressure.
Dulux Paint
Night time cooling and the stack effect
You can rely on night time cooling, when air temperatures drop at night time, or if there is a change in weather with cooling breezes, to exhaust the hot air out of your home. As the air temperature cools, the heat which has been absorbed into your home’s thermal mass, whether that is a concrete slab, stone or bricks, will release this heat and cool down.

The stack effect is the movement of air in and out of a building using air temperature and the natural flow of heated air. Hot air rises, so placing an openable window high on the wall or in the roof will allow you to exhaust hot air. You can draw in cool air at lower levels to help move this warm rising air.

The size of a room also matters in terms of comfort. A small room will heat up quickly unless the heat can be released. If you can open up areas in your house to increase the internal volume of your home this will help disperse the hot air throughout.
California Waterscapes
Natural evaporative coolers
Plants naturally transpire and when placed in the location of breezes, can help cool down the air temperature of a breeze before it enters a home.

The same effect can be achieved with water evaporating from ponds and water features drawing the breeze across these water bodies into the home. In humid climates, however, this will not cool down the breeze as the air is already saturated.


How to Select Garden Shades and Shelters
Dulux Paint
Thermal mass
Thermal mass in a house is heavy weight materials such as bricks, stone, tiles or concrete. This thermal mass can help store heat during the hottest part of the day, and help keep the indoor air temperature lower. At night time, when air temperatures drop, this heat will be released from the thermal mass and can be exhausted from the house through high windows or night time cooling.
Davis Architects
For the swotter: the sun’s path
Here, we can use Melbourne and Sydney as examples, to help you determine the sun’s path throughout the day and at different times of the year; Melbourne’s latitude is approximately 38° and Sydney’s latitude is approximately 34°.

Equinoxes occur twice a year when day and night are of equal length. This is when the earth’s axis in neither tilted towards nor away from the sun, resulting in nearly equal amounts of daylight and darkness. To find out the high angle of the sun at noon, you can work it out for solstices and equinoxes.

Equinox = 90° minus latitude.

Summer solstices = equinox + 23.5° (the tilt of the earth is 23.5° through the north and south poles).

For Melbourne the angle of the sun at noon at the equinox is 90° minus 38°, which equals 52°. For Sydney the angle is slightly higher at 56°. So at the summer solstice, the sun will be highest in the sky in Melbourne at 75.5° and again slightly higher in the sky in Sydney at 79.5°. The summer solstice is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky at noon and is marked by the longest day.

Geoscience Australia allows you to find the latitude of more than 250,000 place names in Australia and calculate the sun angle at any time of the day, on any day of the year.
Carlsen & Frank Architects
Summer cooling
These summer cooling principles can be applied to houses in Melbourne and Sydney. Careful consideration of passive solar cooling during the summer should also take into account the winter months, to ensure that you have thermal warmth in winter when you want it.

In our temperate climate, if you do not allow for summer shading, cross-ventilation, night time cooling, insulation and catching the cooling breezes, you may find your home uncomfortably warm in summer. These simple techniques work surprisingly well, and are worth implementing to make your home more comfortable throughout the year.


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