Design for Climate Change

4Designing for Thermal Comfort: Controlling Heat Gains

Low-energy building design is a balancing act. On the one hand, we must minimise heat loss and exploit any incidental heat gains in winter, while excluding unnecessary gains in summer and allowing unwanted gains to escape. The aim is that the building does the majority of the work of providing comfort, leaving as little as possible to be done by supplementary mechanical heating or cooling systems.

In our relatively cool northern-European climate, our focus has been on minimising energy consumption during the heating season. It is now possible to design new buildings that are so well insulated and airtight that we can use solar and internal incidental gains to provide most of the heat we ...