Climetric Comfort reads

Climetric Comfort reads

Our monthly-ish inspiration - March 2021

This is Climetric's monthly-ish inspiration; here we share interesting software tool, sustainable products, some of our innovation and inspiring projects!

Green School South Africa
Completed project - Feb 2021
Paarl, Western Cape, South Africa
 
Green School South Africa welcomed its first batch of kindergarten and primary school students in February this year. The design pushed the boundaries of what is possible in Paarl's climate, with daytime temperatures in February regularly exceeding 37°C.  
 
Thermally massive triple skin walls and clay floors, made from raw materials a stone's throw away from the site, are balanced with large windows to keep students connected to their surroundings.  
The classroom floors themselves are chilled by cold water generated by solar-powered heat pumps, providing comfort throughout the day. 
Feedback from teachers at the school is that the children love playing on the cool floor during breaks. 
 
More images
Climetric is honoured to have been part, from early design stages onwards, of this truly inspiring project!

Gismo - 
Free, quick and easy 3D landscape
Interesting tools we use
 
While working on an outdoor comfort analysis, we encountered this free landscaping tool that saved us much time: Gismo.
 
When using Gismo, it is a breeze to create a 3D-model of landscape simply by entering GPS-coordinates. This tool is useful for us and for architects or any other designer engineer who needs a more 3D landscape model. 
 
We used the model we generated in Gismo for an extensive outdoor comfort analysis. We added the buildings and some trees, after which we performed multiple CFD-analysis, solar analysis, and we added a conversion for the comfort experience. In our model, we can, for any hour of the year, place our little 3D comfort man anywhere we like; he then tells us how comfortable he experiences the space. Using this tool enabled the design team to ensure that the inside spaces and outside spaces will be comfortable.

Chips Roodehek
Under construction, completion mid 2021 
Cape Town, South Africa
 
For a Cape Town office refurbishment, we effectively turned the single clear glass into high-performance double glazing while retaining the view and reducing costs. 
 
For this co-working office refurbishment, the challenge was to retain the large, south-west and south-east facing single glazed facades without compromising the building's comfort and energy performance. 
The solution - low emissivity blinds, which automatically deploy when the sun hits the facade, coupled with local air extraction to remove heat that gets trapped between the blinds and the glazing. 

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