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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study natural convective fluid flow and heat transfer inside a cubical cavity having a local heat source of constant temperature. Design/methodology/approach The cubical cavity is cooled from two vertical opposite walls and heated from the local heater mounted on the bottom wall, while the rest walls are adiabatic. The governing equations formulated in dimensionless vector potential functions and vorticity vector have been solved using implicit finite difference method of the second-order accuracy. The effects of the Rayleigh number (Ra = 1e+04 – 1e+06), heat source position (l/L = 0.05 – 0.35) and dimensionless time (0 < tau < 100) on velocity and temperature fields, streamlines, isotherms and average Nusselt number at the heat source surface have been analyzed. Findings It is found that the extreme left position of the heater (l/L = 0.05) illustrates more essential cooling of the cavity where the thermal plume over the heat source is suppressed by low temperature waves from the cold vertical walls.