Keep Your Cool This Summer with a Vertical Garden
Sourced from TechXplore
With Australians facing skyrocketing energy bills, and a long hot summer ahead, many households are turning their attention to a range of passive cooling measures.
Double glazing, insulation, tree shading and rooftop sprinklers are all contenders, but there's a relatively new concept that is fast gaining popularity—living walls.
Also known as vertical gardens, living walls are covered completely in vegetation, housed in pots, felt pockets or planter boxes, and irrigated on structures attached to the wall.
University of South Australia research has already demonstrated their effectiveness in reducing household temperatures by up to 12 degrees on scorching summer days, but a new UniSA study has taken this a step further.
UniSA Sustainable Water Resources Emeritus Professor Simon Beecham says that experiments comparing the cooling effect of living walls with porous concrete pavement systems show the latter are, at best, just 15% as effective as green walls—and only 4% as effective in the worst cases.
Along with UniSA and Universiti Malaysia Sarawak colleagues, Prof Beecham compared the evapotranspiration rates of plants mounted on a living wall to the evaporation rates of permeable pavements, which also cool the surrounding environment.
Unlike conventional impermeable concrete or asphalt pavements, porous concrete absorbs stormwater and acts as a non-vegetated water sensitive urban design system.
"However, compared to living walls, permeable pavements are 85% less effective in terms of their evaporative cooling effect," Prof Beecham says.
"Both living walls and porous concrete roads are now being investigated for their ability to cool the urban environment.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
