|
Grex > Agora41 > #52: Summertime energy efficent homes. | |
|
| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 103 responses total. |
other
|
|
response 25 of 103:
| 
Apr 4 17:39 UTC 2002 |
A nice, simple, if inelegant way to sleep better in hot and humid
conditions without A/C is to sprinkle the bed with talc before you get
in. It is surprisingly effective.
|
rcurl
|
|
response 26 of 103:
|
Apr 4 18:00 UTC 2002 |
Sounds messy. Do you do this?
|
other
|
|
response 27 of 103:
|
Apr 4 18:02 UTC 2002 |
Yes. That's how I know how surprising it is that it works. It's only messy
if you use way too much talc.
|
keesan
|
|
response 28 of 103:
|
Apr 4 19:35 UTC 2002 |
I have never known it to be 95 at night, or over about 80 in the late evening.
If you put a fan in a window in another room (open) and also open a bedroom
window and blow the air out, outside air will come into the bedroom which is
cooler than what is probably inside the bedroom, and it will also be moving,
which makes it feel cooler (the air heated by your body is blown away).
|
gull
|
|
response 29 of 103:
|
Apr 4 20:18 UTC 2002 |
It's only partly the sticky feeling that bothers me; there's also the
fact that when it's really humid I always feel like breathing is a
major effort.
|
janc
|
|
response 30 of 103:
|
Apr 4 23:48 UTC 2002 |
For reasons difficult to make sound sensible, I spent two summers in
Texas without any A/C in my apartment. Summer in that part of Texas
means three months of 90 degrees Fahrenheit, 90 percent humidity.
Nights only marginally cooler. I don't know what the indoor
temparature was. Higher.
I used keesan's method - wear nothing; keep a fan pointed at you.
Anywhere I went in my house, I carried my fan with me. We developed a
deep and meaningful relationship, my fan and I. Perfectly comfortable,
though it works best if you don't entertain too much. If you do
entertain a lot, I guess you need more fans and remarkably tolerant
friends.
|
fitz
|
|
response 31 of 103:
|
Apr 5 00:11 UTC 2002 |
As a third shifter, I get to nap in bedroom facing west. I get the full heat
and sun. I use keesan's method also. A fan is quite energy efficient.
|
jp2
|
|
response 32 of 103:
|
Apr 5 03:00 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
|
russ
|
|
response 33 of 103:
|
Apr 5 05:11 UTC 2002 |
It has irked me for some time that we spend a fair amount of effort
getting rid of snow in the winter, and then suffer with heat in the
summer. It would be so... *trivial* to just shove that snow into an
insulated pit in the ground in the winter, and melt it in the summer
for cooling. I know it's been done before, yet almost nobody seems
to be doing it. WTF is wrong with people in this country?!
|
rcurl
|
|
response 34 of 103:
|
Apr 5 05:28 UTC 2002 |
Many years ago I "invented" the idea to connect winter in the Northern
Hemisphere with summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and vica versa,
as a source of almost unlimited power. Although there are some technical
difficulties, it still should have generated more enthusiasm than
occurred.
|
other
|
|
response 35 of 103:
|
Apr 5 06:47 UTC 2002 |
a twist on geothermal energy, eh?
|
keesan
|
|
response 36 of 103:
|
Apr 5 14:34 UTC 2002 |
Russ, we just found our post-hole digger which you are welcome to dig your
pit with. It might be simpler just to run piping down into a deep well and
use the ground-temperature water to cool with.
|
danr
|
|
response 37 of 103:
|
Apr 5 17:01 UTC 2002 |
I think the costs of moving and storing the snow would not make up for
the energy savings. It may in the future, but not at this point.
|
keesan
|
|
response 38 of 103:
|
Apr 5 20:01 UTC 2002 |
People used to cut up blocks of ice and store them under a lot of sawdust over
the summer, to cool food with.
|
janc
|
|
response 39 of 103:
|
Apr 5 20:36 UTC 2002 |
I don't know. When you get blizzards in metropolitan areas, you start
running out of places to pile up the snow, so they get some loaders and
start piling the snow into dump trucks to haul away. Once you get to
that point, you've done half the job. Just dump it in Russ's pit.
|
keesan
|
|
response 40 of 103:
|
Apr 5 22:23 UTC 2002 |
Another method used in dry climates is to run some ducts through the ground
and circulate air between them and the house to bring ground-temperature air
into the house. This works in climates with seasons.
|
russ
|
|
response 41 of 103:
|
Apr 6 03:07 UTC 2002 |
Re #36: Sorry, that's too small. Do you have a backhoe? The hole
needs to be about the size of a swimming pool. I'll also need a
double liner and about six inches of urethane or styrene foam all
around; maybe you have something like that put aside from your
recycling efforts.
Re #37: Most commercial outfits spend plenty of money moving snow
anyway; if it falls on pavement it has to be plowed or shovelled,
and if too much accumulates on the roof it has to be raked or
melted off. Having a chute running to a pit might even make it
easier and cheaper to manage the snow as well as saving energy.
An experiment at a Minnesota office building proved that you could
make enough snow (ice) with a snow gun to cool the building for the
next summer; all you need is an insulated pit and an insulated cover
to go over it once spring arrives.
I don't know exactly why this isn't done all over the place, but I'll
wager that at least part of it is due to depreciation rules for capital
equipment vs. energy as an expense which can be deducted immediately.
In other words, it's Congress's fault.
|
keesan
|
|
response 42 of 103:
|
Apr 6 17:54 UTC 2002 |
In Minnesota, if you designed your office building properly in the first
place, with no need for summertime artificial lighting and with west and east
windows shaded, and a way to ventilate at night, you should not need any air
conditioning in the first place.
|
other
|
|
response 43 of 103:
|
Apr 6 19:07 UTC 2002 |
#42 is not only patently absurd, it reflects total ignorance of reality
on the part of the author. "...no need for summertime artificial
lighting..."? No building code in any city in America would allow for a
multistory building which did not have rooms (like, say, STAIRWELLS)
which would *absolutely* require artificial lighting, and that's not even
to mention emergency exit lights.
|
keesan
|
|
response 44 of 103:
|
Apr 6 21:41 UTC 2002 |
But you don't need to leave the lights on in the rest of the building all day
long if you design it so desks are all near windows. Lighting generates a
lot of heat. (10 100-watt bulbs = one space heater).
|
mdw
|
|
response 45 of 103:
|
Apr 7 00:00 UTC 2002 |
The obvious alternative is big open windows, and buildings carefully
designed with a large portion of outside wall to indoor floor space. In
fact, such building designs were formerly quite common - it was
universal during the victorians, and even the empire state building in
the 1920's was designed with these constraints. Unfortunately, these
buildings are wasteful in other ways: including land use -- much more
land is required, and heating/cooling; those big windows let heat out in
the winter, and heat in during the summer.
All new commercial space uses florescent lighting, and most older
buildings have been retrofitted. It takes a *lot* of florescent
lighting to equal one tiny space heater.
|
russ
|
|
response 46 of 103:
|
Apr 7 14:45 UTC 2002 |
Re #44: Sindi, you need to think before you write. Modern office
buildings cannot place all desks near windows; they are too big. If
you made the ceilings high enough to get light 50 or 100 feet into a
building, you'd have to triple the height of the building. If you
did it with light shafts, you'd multiply the window area several
times; the heating and cooling requirements explode.
The cooling requirements of many buildings are currently set by the
equipment, not the lighting. One computer is equivalent to 3 or 4
people by itself. This gear needs cooling every month of the year.
The building doesn't have enough thermal mass to buffer the heat
from the people and computers and remain comfortable through the
day, even if you could cool it overnight without refrigeration.
Typical buildings place the lights above a dropped ceiling. The
area above the ceiling is not cooled (directly), so the lights on
the top floor send most of their heat up through the roof and don't
even present much of a cooling load.
|
gull
|
|
response 47 of 103:
|
Apr 8 14:52 UTC 2002 |
The server room where I work requires A/C year 'round to keep the
temperature inside it below 80 degrees. I suppose the obvious thing to
do would be to run a duct to the outside for winter cooling, but there
are a fair number of complications with that.
The most dramatic examples of equipment-created cooling loads are
probably TV studios. About ten years ago someone finally came up with
a fluorescent tube that can produce a light spectrum compatible with TV
cameras. Some studios that have converted from incandescent set
lighting to fluorescent have found that it cut their A/C load in half.
|
oval
|
|
response 48 of 103:
|
Apr 8 15:17 UTC 2002 |
flourescent lighting gives me migraines. i'd always wondered why so many
places use them, and why they don't really seem to bother anyone else.
|
keesan
|
|
response 49 of 103:
|
Apr 8 15:21 UTC 2002 |
The newer ones with electronic ballasts run at a different frequency, not 60
cycle which gives some people migraines. They also buzz and flicker less and
are more efficient. The electronic ballasts are still more costly than the
old electromagnetic ones but you can get them for $18 at Home Depot, and the
lamps (bulbs) are $2.50. The fixtures themselves cost more, if you don't know
how to replace the ballasts in existing fixtures.
|