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The main environmental problem for people living in Iraq is the long hot dry summer. Basements were used in the past by the people to solve part of the problem. Recently older solutions have been bypassed in favor of air conditioning. The consequent electric loads are very high. In this paper the basement is evaluated thermally for summer use and tested for cooling loads. Climate factors were measured outside a building, inside it and in the basement. The measurements lasted from early spring to late autumn. The basement was by far the best of the measured spaces thermally. For most of the summer they were only slightly off reasonable thermal comfort readings for sedentary activities. However it did peak at around 35 o C for two weeks. Calculations show that a relatively small cooling load would improve the interior to a comfortable temperature. By comparison a cooling load several times more would be required to reach similar conditions in an above ground space.

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