Internal brick wall for thermal mass

An important part of a passive solar house is to have thermal mass in the building that can "soak" up the hot air during the day and release this heat during the evening. In our house we will have one such wall in between the living room and one bedroom, and also under the kitchen bench that divides the kitchen from the dining area.

Barry Lance -the father of a good friend of ours - came to Tasmania to do the south coat walk and popped by to see us a the end of January. Having offered to give us a hand with work, we decided to use his brain and help getting started with the brick wall between the living room and the bedroom. And boy, are we glad we did, as we are quite sure we would have made some bad mistakes had he not been around. So we are very happy indeed that he could give us some good instructions on how this should be done.

The wall itself is built out of concrete besser blocks. The dimension of the blocks are 390mm x 190mm x 90mm. As such they are the same size as the ones we use below the first layer of straw bales, but these are solid in order to have as much thermal mass as possible.

The bricks were laid in a mortar mix (fat sand and cement) and between every course of bales we put a strip of chicken wire, as well as brick veneer ties at either end:

As can be seen from this picture, the chicken wire is fixed to the stud on the side, under the 200mm long brick veneer tie.

As for the wall, we used 4 days to finalise it. The first day we lay down 3 courses of bricks, the second, another 4 courses, the third day saw another 4 courses done, and the fourth day completed the wall by installing one course of full size bricks, one course of half size bricks and one course of quarter size bricks.

Barry helping us getting started with the brick laying

Result after two days

Result after two days, seen from the bedroom

Wall completed

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008