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A renewed interest in bioclimatic strategies for building retrofitting is noticed due to the fact that more than 40% of the total annual world energy consumption is used in buildings. In Chile, existing social housing stock is composed of more than 5,5 million units built with government subsidies. Thermal regulations improvement started in 2000, but solar passive strategies are still not present on the immediate retrofitting agenda. The Bioclimatic Prosthesis Project aims designing and developing prefabricated small scale passive solar systems to reduce energy use in social housing. The systems should moreover be affordable and easy to build and install. This paper focuses on one of these systems: an adaptable and low-cost prefabricated Trombe Wall (TW) with a vertical storage system. Also testing mobile insulation during winter nights and external shading during summer. The system was built and installed in a test cell designed to represent the most used area of a social housing unit in the region. Thermal efficiency of the TW was monitored using sensors and compared to a similar test cell situated on the same site without the component. Two different microclimate scenarios in a coastal city and in the interior valley were tested.The study shows that this addable TW can reduce energy demands and winter firewood consumption by nearly 33%, increasing indoor temperature with 5℃ in the better cases measured. It was moreover noticed that the developed component also reduces cooling demands during summer, overheating problems can be solved completely adding optimized external shading element.

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