Chinese kangs and building energy consumption

Chinese kangs are an integrated system for cooking, sleeping and heating in rural Northern China with more than 2000 years history. In 2004 there were 67 million Chinese kangs used by 44 million rural families or 174 million people. Chinese kangs store surplus heat from stove during cooking and releases it later for both home heating and localized bed heating. Such a widely used heating system has been rarely studied. Understanding kangs is important for developing new effective home heating systems for better energy efficiency and improving indoor air quality in Northern China. In this paper, we review and present some preliminary results from our field measurement and mathematical modeling, and discuss the development of Chinese kangs as related to future energy consumption in rural homes, and building energy consumption in China in general. We suggest that transition and new technologies for rural home heating in Northern China, i.e. the future of Chinese kangs, should be considered as the top priority in managing future building energy consumption in China. Supported by the grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Grant No. HKU 7154/05E) and National Natural Science Foundation of China 2007 Young Researcher Award (Grant No. 50729803) The work is also a part of the International Energy Agency Annex 44 project on Integrating Environmentally Responsive Elements in Buildings.