Passive, Active and Simple

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MY WIFE, OUR TWO CHILDREN AND I came to Aotearoa New Zealand in January 2019. We quickly found a beautiful, stand-alone, rental house in Saint Heliers. It is a typical weatherboard-clad, single-glazed, timber-framed home from the 1950s. We found the interior of the house became very hot in summer and very cold in winter, except for one place: the kitchen pantry. In summer, the small pantry was cooler than the rest of the house was and, in winter, it was warmer. My family commented on how often I was disappearing into our small pantry to warm up or to cool down. The house was reconfigured in the 1990s; the original main house entrance, a solid concrete stair landing, became the supporting floor for the pantry. The reason for the thermal comfort in the pantry appears to be the following:

In summer, a broad-leafed tree shades the pantry’s concrete base from direct solar heat gain (see Fig. 1). The concrete base is passively cooled by the lower night temperatures. During the daytime heat, with the benefit of the tree’s solar shading, this stored passive cooling is released hours later into the interior of the pantry.