- Winter period The winter period of this kind of climate is affected by very low temperatures that reaches also values of -40 °C during the colder nights, while a bit lower than 0 °C during daytime. This means that the need of heating would basically be required continuously during the cold season; however, some measures might and should be adopted in order to optimize these needs and to avoid an excessive waste of energy and an overproduction of CO2. During the winter period, the main concerns are obviously the increasing of heat gains and the reduction of heat losses; we will now try to understand how this aim will influence our design strategies for the different kinds of energy transfers.
Conduction/Convection One of the most important aspects that needs to be cured about conduction and convection heat transfers is the improvement of the heat storage, when available, in order to increase the heat gains during cold periods. The biggest heat capacity storage that can be used in nature is, of course, the soil: the advantage of soil is mainly due to the fact that, having the possibility to go very deep (depending of course from site characteristics) below ground level, we can have a very large mass to be used as storage.