I appreciate the perspective—sometimes the simplest tools are indeed the best. You’re right about the remote control, it made us lazy.
However, I didn’t just drill a hole. Drilling 50cm stone walls for every new cable run eventually turns a old heritage home into a Swiss cheese of conduits. My goal was to hide the 21st century inside the 20th, not plaster it on the outside.
I agree on the washing machine—it’s fluff. But high-speed data isn’t a kettle you visit. In 2026, it’s the nervous system of the house. Whether it’s for professional sovereign servers or just ensuring the thick stone doesn’t kill your signal, it’s about reliability, not 60 extra wash programs .
You see a sow’s ear, I see a high-performance shell that just needed a modern kernel to be viable for the next 100 years.
I’m not building a smart house to be fancy; I’m building it so I never have to think about the tech again. It just works, while keeping the foibles and charm intact.
I love the Trombe wall theory, it’s a classic. But applying it to a 1910+ stone house is like trying to fix a vintage mechanical watch with a sledgehammer.
You’re worried about being tied to regular bills? Ironic, because a Trombe retrofit involves: massive glass structural costs, an insurance premium that would double the second they see ‘custom passive solar’ on a heritage building, the loss of the facade’s resale value (unless you find a buyer who specifically wants to live in a solar oven).
My ‘Mainstream’ approach? It uses about 5 Watts of power—roughly what your fridge’s lightbulb consumes—to tell the house when to breathe and when to hold its heat. I’m not selling HVAC, I’m using a tiny digital brain to make sure I don’t have to buy a massive, ugly furnace. Sometimes, the smartest low-Tech solution is just a thin layer of code that understands the physics better than a heavy sheet of glass ever could. But hey, if you prefer the solar oven look, I won’t stop you!
@PP-86..when the code alerts you to allow the building to adapt to environmental change, what happens next please?…do sensors automatically open and close vents and window or something else?
I remember visiting buildings years back with all manner of building management controls and systems and really liked the use of passive energy combined with smart controls. (This was before the use of handheld devices connected to a server).
Excellent question. In a that kind of structure (with 50cm stone walls), the environmental adaptation isn’t about motorized windows or sci-fi gadgets but inertia managemnt
The code doesn’t open a vent but calculates the thermal lag. It tells you exactly when to trap the cool night air and when to seal the thermal envelope based on predictive weather data. It’s only about becision support, not mechanical automation that breaks after two years. Think of it as a flight director for the house. It uses the massive stone mass as a thermal battery. The sensors simply ensure that you’re playing with the physics of the building, not against it. No handheld gimmicks required, just optimized thermodynamics.
That’s the trick though it doesn’t have to be glass and if it had been used extensively no one would bat an eyelid. The solar oven, it’s just a more efficient way of heating the solar battery than you are attempting as you get drafts on the outside of the wall you are still losing heat? Also by opening the top vents in summer you can achieve a cooling effect. How if it’s cooler outside (as is usual in winter) You won’t get much warmth moving to the inside, unless you can explain better how you are countering this effect?
The analogy is simple: A sledgehammer is a crude, destructive tool. A Trombe wall on a period facade is a crude, destructive architectural choice.
To answer your technical confusion, You’re thinking in terms of air temperature (convection). I’m working with thermal mass (Radiance). A 50cm stone wall has a phase shift of about 10–12 hours. By the time the cold outside reaches the inner face, the sun is already back up. My system doesn’t counter the cold outside; it uses the wall’s internal caloric storage.
Why don’t we see Trombe walls on every 1900s house? Because the ROI is negative when you factor in the cost of the structural glass, the maintenance of the vents, and the fact that it makes the house look like a laboratory. I’m optimizing a 1912 asset, not building a prototype for a 1970s commune. But I’ll let the Technical Ledger explain the math. It’s more precise than words.
Well that’s a real subjective argument. I love improving things, the clever part is to integrate well. Too many students of architecture just follow their course and tutors. The earth and it’s over population are causing issues we are told so better ways of doing things that strangely date back a thousand years and were part of the architecture at the time became forgotten as students studying architecture changed things, often for the worse.
Boeing, Walmart, NASA, Toyota, FedEx, Bombardier have all used this on their buildings because it’s saves huge amounts of energy. Shopping centres also being designed around the same principle.
I will look at you docs later but are you sure you can get sufficient calories into the wall to create sufficient radiance? And convection is just a natural part of circulation. A radiator is only radiating to a few feet, forced convection can heat the room far quicker?
So in effect, this code and its associated sensors is an electronic way of telling me what I already know based on experience and the France Meteo forecast.
You see I already know how to manage a summer heatwave with windows and shutters, and also how to combat the cold of winter.
What I also know from practical experience is that thick stone walls are excellent at absorbing interior heat and conveying it rapidly to the outside in winter, resulting in large heating bills and a not very warm house. Do I really need an electronic system to tell me that I need to insulate the walls I wonder.
Please know that I’m not being negative for the sake of it, but rather trying to make you aware of something that you may have overlooked regarding resale of your property.
My son went down the fancy electronics road when renovating his house in Southampton. He could adjust the heating, switch on lights, see who was at the front door, and even control the volume on the sound system, and all of these things from 50 miles away. There was also super high speed internet in every room.
Then came the time to sell the house, and buyer after buyer looked at the array of pretty lights on the bank of control equipment in the cupboard under the stairs and just walked away. Far too complicated. They wanted to buy a home — not an electronics laboratory.
So if you are going to be doing all this installation work on your forever home, then I wish you well, but it certainly will substantially reduce the number of possible buyers should you ever wish to sell the property.
Please don’t become absorbed in the AI bubble. It’s just Artificial Investment after all.
Is this based in fact though? Perhaps in your specific case it is, but generally I mean? This isn’t a leading question, i genuinely don’t know but various people here perhaps do. I see so much saying “insulate, insulate, insulate!” but then a whole load of other people saying that the thick stone walls are doing the job of the insulation, that once they warm up they stay warm longer and so keep rooms warm longer. None of which is a reason not to insulate necessarily, just as @JaneJones mentioned about her old house, if done correctly they’re perhaps not as bad as we think.
They will never do that no matter what people imagine. If they did, the Passiv house standards would be based around that idea. They are a thermal mass so once warm they will take longer to cool but they will be cooling and I believe granite walls are the worst. The amount of energy required to actually heat them up is way more as it permanently losing that heat to the colder outside. Heat moves to cold that’s an unequivocal fact.
The difference as I was mentioning earlier in the thread is the Trombe wall where using the south facing wall as a heat battery and insulating the north side of the building is a very good idea.
I can’t give you technical data about heat transmission through stone walls, but what I can do is give you information based on personal experience.
From the economic point of view I can say that when the last part of the external stone wall is insulated in any room, one can notice the effect immediately in that the room becomes a lot warmer using far less heat production. My external stone walls are insulated internally. One starts off wearing a sweater while installing the insulation, and just a T shirt when doing the painting.
My heating bill has been reduced by around 50%.
As a gardener, I can attest that placing plants outside against an uninsulated wall that has a lot of heat the other side of it, raises the night time temperature sufficiently to promote early growth and flowering.
We are next door to the village bakery that has a substantial bakehouse bordering onto the yard. The bakehouse is so hot inside that the bakers just wear a T shirt, even in the coldest weather, so placing potted plants against the wall is a real bonus as they enjoy the warmth that comes out through the wall.
I currently have Geraniums in flower against said wall.
There is no doubt in my mind that uninsulated external walls pass heat out of the building very effectively. The more one insulates, then the lower one’s bills become.
.
In a that kind of structure (with 50cm stone walls), the environmental adaptation isn’t about motorized windows or sci-fi gadgets but inertia managemnt