"Jason" wrote in message news:umhjg.370878

Jason, you've had me searching the house for a favourite book - Elizabeth
David's Harvest of the Cold Months (Penguin 1996).

This is a scholarly but readable account of the history of ice making and
storage over the world, including India, Persia, the Levant and other hot
and dry places. If you can get a copy (Amazon have some used ones) it
won't solve your immediate problem but would be worth reading, it might
give you some ideas :-)

I suspect with changing climate (and bigger extremes in the South East)
that idea may be something that could be rejuvanated. Imagine every new
home being built with an ice-house :-)

Bliss! But it's not just about ice houses :-)

Mary

-- JJ

Does anyone have any tips on where I can look for details on how to go about
designing/specifying/building a passively-cooled larder for a kitchen? We
are having some structural work done, and being able to incorporate
something like this would be great.
I've done a little search, but not really come up with anywhere good to
start.

Not a lot of use, I know, but I saw something on TV a while ago where
they went through the "mechanics" of a passive larder / cooler - I think
it had an opening to the outside, and IIRC there was a specific
combination of rock types for the interior surfaces.

Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article ,
Derek ^ writes:

I only started thinking about it at 23-30pm last night when my little
Chinese weather station told me it was 26c inside the house and 16.6c
outside. Thinking at the time that running a ventilation system
overnight might result in the house starting the day cooler, bearing
in mind that hot clear sunny days tend to be followed by clear cool
nights.

Not passive but a fan and a "smartbox" of electronics could make a
worthwhile improvement and be better for the environment than air
conditioning. On a smaller scale it could be applied to a larder
where most probably the whole lot could be solar powered.

I have an alternate loft hatch cover which gets put in place in the
summer, which has a rather large fan in it to draw air through the
house and expel it through the loft (also cooling the very hot loft).
It is under the control of my home automation system. I haven't
actually spent much time working out the optimum rule for switching
it on, but it currently switches on when the loft reaches 25C.
I often switch it on manually in the evening too to draw in the
cooler nighttime air.

Do you have any measurements that show how effective this is? And what size
fan is it?
Ta.