CHINESE KANG

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 millionChinese kangs used by 43.64 million rural families and 174 million people. Chinese kang is potentiallyan energy-saving heating system, which uses high thermal mass to store surplus heat from stoveduring cooking and releases it during the rest time for home and bed heating. Such a widely used ruraldomestic heating system is rarely mentioned in the open research literature. Understanding kangs isnot only important for developing new effective home heating systems in Northern China, but alsomeaningful 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 mathematicalmodeling investigation of Chinese kangs and research needs, followed by discussion on its future andthe perspective of rural sustainable energy technologies in Northern China.