Homes That Use Thermal Inertia to Maintain Comfortable Temperatures

By harnessing the ability of materials to store heat and give it off slowly, “Enertia” houses maintain a relatively fixed and comfortable temperature

Enertia is a brand name for homes designed and sold in kits by North Carolina-based Enertia Building Systems (EBS). The idea essentially marries the concepts of geothermal and passive solar heating/cooling into what amounts to a highly energy efficient hybrid system. Architectural inventor Michael Sykes coined the term “Enertia” in the 1980s to describe the innovative homes he was designing that would store solar and geothermal energy and make use of it for most if not all heating and cooling needs.

Under such a system, solid wood walls replace siding, framing, insulation and paneling, while an air flow channel—or “envelope”—runs around the building inside the walls, creating what Sykes terms a miniature biosphere. Inside the envelope, solar heated air circulates, pumping and boosting geothermal energy from beneath the house and storing it within the wood mass of the walls, where it is doled out gradually.

By harnessing the properties of thermal inertia—the ability of materials to store heat and give it off slowly—an “Enertia” house maintains a relatively fixed and comfortable temperature throughout the warmer day (when solar heat is collected and stored) and cooler night (when the wood walls give off heat to keep things toasty as the mercury dips).

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Tags: enertia house, geothermal energy, hybrid system, michael sykes, passive solar heating, solar greenhouse, solar heat, thermal inertia

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Innovation, Project Energy, Scientific American, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.