I tried cooling today.
Yesterday, the house stayed around 22.7°C, helped by good solar shading and low g-value triple glazing. Today it was around 20.6°C with the underfloor heating system running in cooling mode.
We still haven’t moved in yet. The hot water cylinder contains stored hot water, but there are no fridges running and no occupants in the house, so internal heat gains are currently minimal. Even so, the initial results are encouraging.
As you mentioned and I suspected, a fan directed at the floor will help mix the stratified air and distribute the cooler air more effectively.
I’ll do more testing once we move in. At this stage, it’s mainly about understanding how effectively heat can be removed from the house when external temperatures drop below internal levels, and how efficiently we can extract stored energy from the thermal mass to prepare for the following day.
I think the underfloor cooling will help, but the balance between effectively cooling the slab and avoiding condensation risk around the dew point will be the key challenge.
At night, the dew point will likely be lower, which helps, but the main goal should be to optimise for the estimated dew point for the following day.
