Importance of Traditional Building Materials & Construction Techniques to Design Zero-Energy Homes in Hot Climates

“A study on Traditional Nomadic Sedentary House in Fentale Woreda of Ethiopia”

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-940-7_29How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Zeemb Bet; Traditional construction materials and techniques use; Sustainable design; Zero-energy home; Hot climates zones

Abstract

Geographically, the Ethiopian climate is quite diverse, due to its equatorial positioning and varied topography. The country’s climate traditionally classified into five zones from high cold area to highly hot climate zones based on the altitude and temperature variation. Hot desert regions, like Fentale district in Ethiopia is very challenging to inhabitant. Climate of this area traditionally known as “Kola” and it covers about 52.94% of the country land. This region is very challenging in terms of building energy consumption. The energy consumption in Fentale area is critical as it accounts for half of the total national electricity consumption. Hence the application of sustainable energy concepts is very essential in this sector and the application of “Zero-Energy Homes” (ZEH) could be an appropriate option for it. In Zero-Energy Homes, the demand of energy needs to be reduced significantly before employing any renewable energy and a way to achieve that is through application of native construction materials and techniques. This research paper aims to investigate the role traditional nomadic sedentary house well known as “Zeemb Bet” which was design and build with native constructional materials and techniques for the development of Zero-Energy Homes in Kolla climatic zones represented one of the Gola Village in Fentale woreda at East Shewa in Oromia of Ethiopia. Right now, there’s a popular modern house called ‘Korkoro-Bet’ that was built using modern materials. This house was designed, modeled, and compared with actual electricity usage by calculating the heat gain in buildings using the formulas QC = A x U x ΔT and QV = 1300 x V x ΔT. At the same time, there’s another well-known house called ‘Zeemb-Bet’ that was built using traditional local materials and techniques and was also designed, modeled, and compared with actual electricity usage using the same heat gain formulas. The comparison between Korkoro-Bet and Zeemb-Bet was based on the yearly electricity needed and the peak power demand. The results show that Korkoro-Bet can lower these by 6% to 10%, while Zeemb-Bet can cut them by 15% and 25%. The study found that traditional sedentary nomadic houses are better at saving energy.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Eswara Rao Petta
AU  - G. Viswanadha Kumar
AU  - T. Subba Rao
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - Importance of Traditional Building Materials & Construction Techniques to Design Zero-Energy Homes in Hot Climates
BT  - Proceedings of the Conference on Social and Sustainable Innovation in Technology & Engineering (SASI-ITE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 386
EP  - 405
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-940-7_29
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-940-7_29
ID  - Petta2025
ER  -