A Chinese kang, normally serving as the heated bed and the heat recovery of a cooking stove, is widespread in northern rural China and generally regarded as an energy-efficient heating system. However, major drawbacks of the system, including high levels of indoor pollution emissions and the great deal of effort required for solid fuel loading and re-loading, need to be alleviated. Thus, we developed a new kang system that integrates a low-cost, easily maintained solar air collector into the convectional Chinese kang system. Based on the thermal process, a heat transfer model is developed to simulate its dynamic characteristics. And then, by using the model validation, we found that the model could present the kang's transient behavior correctly, and therefore serve for the design proposals or check analysis in the future research, such as the thermal storage design of the Rang plates, appropriate solar collecting area design, indoor thermal impact prediction, etc. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.