Chinese kang

Abstract

Chinese kang, an ancient home heating system, is an integrated system for cooking, sleeping, domestic heating and ventilation. It is estimated that in 2004 there were all together 66.85 million Chinese kangs used by 43.64 million rural families and 174 million people. Chinese kang is potentially an energy-saving heating system, which uses high thermal mass to store surplus heat from stove during cooking and releases it during the rest time for home and bed heating. Such a widely used rural domestic heating system is rarely mentioned in the open research literature. Understanding kangs is not only important for developing new effective home heating systems in Northern China, but also meaningful for developing sustainable building technologies in other rural parts of China. In this paper, we present the current status, preliminary results from our recent field measurement and mathematical modeling investigation of Chinese kangs and research needs, followed by discussion on its future and the perspective of rural sustainable energy technologies in Northern China.