44 Ways #03: Naturally Heat + Cool Your Home

About this episode

This episode discusses how to naturally heat and cool your home using passive solar design principles.

Hello! This is Episode 403. This is Way #3 of the 44 Ways to Create Your Sustainable Home series. Over the last two episodes, we have discussed designing for your site’s orientation, and considering how your home is positioned to work with the movement of the sun and prevailing breezes, and how your home is designed to maximise natural ventilation, whilst protecting you from harsher wind events on your site. In this Episode, those two design considerations come together into something larger. [For all resources mentioned in this podcast and a free, downloadable PDF transcript, head to www.undercoverarchitect.com/403 ]  This is where passive solar design becomes a whole-of-home strategy. Where orientation, breezes, shading, thermal mass, and the building envelope work, not as separate decisions, but as an integrated system, designed to keep your home comfortable across the seasons without relying on mechanical or artificial heating and cooling. From a sustainability point of view, understanding your home as a building system is incredibly powerful. And what I consistently find is that, when these principles are applied well, the result is a home that feels different the…

People in this episode

Host: Amelia Lee

Topics covered

• sustainable home
• passive solar design
• natural heating
• natural cooling
• thermal mass
• home design

Keywords

• sustainable home
• passive solar design
• natural ventilation
• thermal mass
• home comfort

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Undercover Architect

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• 44 Ways #05: Design a Smaller (Smarter) Home · June 1, 2026 · 18 min
• 44 Ways #04: Know Your Climate Zone · May 28, 2026 · 16 min
• 44 Ways #02: Design for the Breezes + Wind at Your Site · May 21, 2026 · 15 min