[Greenbuilding] Q: Average thermal mass for furnishings?

[Keith Winston]

On 10/26/2010 1:13 PM, RT wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:22:43 -0400, Corwyn <corwyn at midcoast.com> wrote:
>
>> I am looking for an average value for thermal mass(of furniture,
>> possessions, appliances, etc)inside a home,
>
> I suspect that one could call up a moving company and ask them what the
> weight of the contents of a trailer or box is.
>
> They may even have some "average" numbers for the possessions of
> various family sizes.
>
> One would of course have to subtract the weight of the cardboard boxes,
> newspaper wrap etc.
> but I suspect that moving companies would also have a pretty good idea
> of how many boxes would be required for the various family sizes.

I know that UHaul has different size trucks they recommend for 
different moves: single-person apartment, 4-5 person household, etc. 
That would be more a volume thing, and you'd have to correct for 
packing inefficiency, I'd expect 50% or so. There's probably a better 
estimate out there.

It might not actually take too long to simply run through a house and 
estimate, perhaps lumping things into different categories for the heat 
capacity of their materials, though I suspect an estimate of weight 
would suffice.

It's sorta like counting the jellybeans in the jar: I'm gonna say that 
my household (5 adults, 1 child) has (including cabinets etc and all 
furniture) has around 10k lbs of stuff: furniture, clothes, etc.

I'm 99.999% certain that that's just a wild guess, but that it's no 
more than 3 orders of magnitude off in either direction ;-)

I would imagine these numbers would vary A LOT from family to family 
and especially country to country... what are the estimates of building 
materials, and what proportion are inside vs. outside the building 
envelope? I would expect that to vary wildly depending on building 
type/construction, at least.

Keith