Crystal Mountain School — Designing the Thermal Array

Why this dataset

No longitudinal record exists of how real buildings perform thermally in Nepal's high-altitude climate zones. Mountain communities live in some of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, in buildings increasingly built to lowland concrete standards that fail in winter. The new hall at Crystal Mountain School — passive solar, built partly from material recycled out of the dismantled 2008 solar house — is the chance to measure what vernacular and passive solar construction actually do.

The array

DS18B20 1-Wire temperature probes embedded at several depths through the wall sections, plus interior and exterior air nodes — around fifty sensors in total. Logging is fully offline: there is no connectivity assumption at 4,000 m, and data is retrieved manually until a backhaul exists.

Why during construction

You cannot retrofit a sensor into the middle of a wall. The sensors go in as the masons work, which means the construction season is the installation window — and why this note is being written from a building site.

What we expect to learn

Temperature gradients through the wall sections, the phase lag between solar gain and interior warmth, and interior comfort against exterior extremes through a full winter. Numbers will appear here when the array is commissioned — not before.