Australian Passive Solar Home

One of the interesting things about energy-efficient home design is the underlying heating/cooling philosophy – something it seems few people actually consider. Here’s an example.

The other day someone wrote in response to one of my posts that they “… just had dinner in a beautiful home that cost 5 times mine and took a mad dash to loo and the (lovely) bathroom was freezing. Like really cold.”

Now implicit in this statement is that the author felt the toilet room should have been warm; that is, a room unused for (perhaps) 99 percent of the time in a day should be heated the same as any other room.

Furthermore, the comment is couched in terms of room temperature, not the human comfort he felt within that room. This is not a semantic difference: what we’re interested in is human comfort, not the temperature of the room.

So, here’s my philosophy. First, it seems to me silly to be heating rooms that are used so little. Second, since we’re interested in human comfort not room air temperature, comfort could have been achieved in the toilet by the use of a radiant heat lamp or similar. Switch it on when you enter; switch it off when you leave.

Now I am quite happy that some people may disagree with that approach, and want the room air temperature in the toilet to be as high as everywhere else in the house. That’s fine – but that is a philosophical decision, not something that is self-evidently better.