Been advised it might be good to get this in my house at it’s freezing during Winter. But it’s such a hot house in Summer. So will it make it even hotter in Summer?
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The surface has a bunch of temperature that varies depending upon whether the sun is up or not, what season it is, etc.
Get a few feet underground a few feet and we don’t have direct radiation from the sun, or convection from moving air–conduction dominates. It just so happens that conduction is the slowest form of heat transfer. It’s slow enough that underground the temperature maintains a constant steady state temperature that doesn’t vary much (if all) from day to night and/or from summer to winter. Underground you get a temperature that is approximately the yearly average of temperatures on the surface.
Let’s look at Quito since it is near the equator so it has a rather constant high and low temperature each day. Day and night are about the same length as well. It has an average high of around 67F and an average low of around 48F. Taking the average we get 57.5. According to a web page I found, the ground temperature in Quito is around 60F–pretty close to 57.5.
Since the temperature underground is roughly constant AND approximates the average over the entire year, it will most likely be colder than the surface temperature on a hot summer day. This means that heat would tend to flow from the house into the ground. If you insulate your floor from the ground you prevent this transfer of heat into the ground leaving the house warmer than if you’d allowed the heat to flow into the ground.
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