Opaque curtains everywhere.
And a large tank of water inside it.
But, what is the point of a conservatory in summer anyway?
They are there to maximise solar gains in summer and autumn,In summer, sit outside!
No., you are not.
You yourself said fans aren't often used in a domestic contexct. Guess why. They do f*ck all.
A while back I was chatting to an electrician from Oz. He said that increasing numbers of people are using evaporative cooling systems. A bit like the porous-pot butter and milk coolers that campers used to use before electricity on sites. He said that a central system in his house can reduce temperatures by as much as 12 degrees celsius. This is in a very hot part of the country. The benefit is that it uses very much less energy than air con. I'm sure that he said 300 watt. This would power a fan which is why I mention it in this thread. If anyones interested I'll try to find out more. Seems to me it ought to be in this Wiki.
Peter Scott
If I screwed up 1 out of 100 articles, and I've surely exceeded that, then I'd better spend the rest of my like begging forgiveness. Hint: its how wikis work.
NT
Evaporative cooling systems are available here, but as anyone who's tried one will tell you, they do nothing to make you feel cooler. They work very well in hot dry environments, but when it gets hot here, it's nearly always humid too, and evaporative cooling systems are useless when humid.
What actually matters from the human comfort point of view in the heat is the wet-bulb temperature, and this is why evaporative coolers don't work. Whilst they do reduce the temperature, they don't reduce the wet-bulb temperature, so they don't feel like they make any difference. Just to emphasise the point, it makes far more difference to your comfort [in this country] to reduce the humidity than it does to reduce the temperature, if you're feeling hot.
Oz is a dry country so (water permitting -- they often have a shortage(but too much ATM)) so evapourative cooling works. It doesn't work to anywhere the same extent in the UK. My aircin hardly reduces the temperature, but improves comfort by removing bucketfuls of glaggy moisture from the air.
Andrew Gabriel coughed up some electrons that declared:
So a whole house de-humidifier then?
I do agree from first hand experience though...
SWMBO comes from northern China near Mongolia, and whilst it can get hotter there (a bit, not massively) than here, it's usually *much* dryer so to me it felt most comfortable. Most people don't have air con, except the posher restaurants and hotels.
cf: here in 2003 - man that was yuk. Hot and relatively humid. Don't know how people can live in jungles...
Thats half the story. If you release the water vapour outdoors, but harvest the coolth for indoors, you can get a bit of benefit from evaporation here, nothing big though. I toyed with adding a section on this in the article, but I think really it deserves its own article, and the fan cooling one's quite big enough as it is, both in terms of size and number of concepts involved.
BTW evaporative cooling is especially effective on flat roofs, where it can quickly reduce a sizzling roof to just warm, and requires nothing more than a hosepipe for its most basic incarnation.
NT
Trouble is they pump out hot air. Works nicely if you cool that down, but then you just invented air conditioning.
I've seen evaporative coolers working quite well in California in work colleagues' homes, but proper aircon is very common. However, in the areas of California I visit, whilst it gets very hot, it's also very dry (so much so, I usually end up with cracked lips, if I forget to use a lip balm).
The other variant of evaporative cooler I've seen out there which works quite well is a patio cooler, which is an attachement which goes on the end of a hosepipe, and generates an extremely fine mist, which is quite pleasently cooling, but again, I would not expect that to work as well in high humidity.
Not many do, but plenty of people live in rural areas of the world with not disssimilar atmosphere, where aircon is regarded as pretty essential.
Aha! So how do I make something to cool multiple cans of beer when having BBQ parties?
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "ARWadsworth" saying something like:
Bugger.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Thomas Prufer saying something like:
Good Evans, it was in plenty of trash 60s movies, surely it's true? I recall it in The Man from Bonkle and The Poisoner series, right enough.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember geoff saying something like:
The slightly worrying thing I find is the prospect that some less-than-bright crim type will take it upon himself to try it and kill someone.
Remove solar gain...
1 - Insulate loft - reduces bedroom bakethrough 2 - Insulate walls - reduces rate of thermal store charging 3 - Blind windows - internal blinds reduce room heating quite a bit 4 - Shutter windows - external blinds quite a lotWall insulation is not perfect - after weeks of prolonged south facing solar gain the inner leaf will rise in temperature, UK rarely gets such drought environments.
Take advantage of low overnight temperatures...
- Permanent - xpelair/ventaxia extractor in a bedroom window/ceiling
- Brute force - 18" floor fan by patio/backdoor & 18" floor fan pointed at hall ceiling
The problem with the brute force approach is the window of
Australia is hot *and* dry. Evaporateive systems worlk well there.
It feels hotter at 38C at Chichen Itza than 55C in Death Valley, because you can sweat in Death Valley.
If you dont run out of water...
Slowly. Fat people don't last. Thin people do better. Lazy people do best.
Wusses.
Aircon is only really *necessary* above about 30C full humidity or 50C dry.
I am not saying that you can do hard physical labour in those temps, but you don't NEED aircon.
A couple of years ago, a neighbour standing about 6' from mine asked me how loud mine was when it's on. I pointed out that it was on.
It doesn't work because...
a) the wet-bulb temperature is too close to the dry-bulb temperature when it's humid for you to get much cooling, b) reducing the temperature of the humid air actually increases the humidity, unless you are also taking out moisture as an aircon unit does.
So by example, if it's 80% RH at 30C, the wet-bulb temperature will be 27C, so you get at best, 3C cooling assuming perfect coupling in the heat exchanger, but in practice you'd be lucky to see even a fraction of this at such small temperature differential, without a gigantic heat exchanger.
However, let's pretend for the moment we did get a 3C drop. We haven't removed any water, so cooling the air will have increased the humidity. 80% RH at 30C is about 24.3g/m3 of water. If we reduce the air temperature to 27C at the same moisture content, the RH raises to about 94% RH.
Remember, humans feel the wet-bulb temperature (because you're wet at this temp/humidity). The wet-bulb temperature of 94% RH @ 27C is about 26.5C, which is only 0.5C less than the wet-bulb temperature without attempting any cooling, which you aren't going to notice.
You aren't going to achieve anything like this 0.5C drop anyway, because you won't get the 3C drop to start with, and the raise in RH almost cancels out the effect of any temperature drop, so you really are wasting your time trying.
That's a different effect from trying to cool the air.
You could start with some large unglazed terra-cotta plant-pots.
Or rig up something involving a generator and an old fridge. The advertising gained from fridge-magnets would probably pay for the diesel.
Owain
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