Heat Waves and triple digit temperatures

I know most of the Heat Waves and triple digit temperatures are starting to subside, I was interested in ways to combat temperatures that go extreme. Looking down the pipe as we are getting record temperatures that are getting higher each year all over the world (no global warming topics) I was wondering was around combating the oven style heat environments with temperatures at night time of 98 degrees and triple digits in the day. I know the use of light, loose cloths (like they use in the desert is a start and water laced headbands, or wet rice in bandannas) So the question arises, What are some ways of combating a heat environment with no AC available and limited water sources (no mist fans). Remember you will need sleep at night (like being in a oven)so light cloths won't affect you at night compared to the days when the sun is out.

One long term solution could be subterranean living, no kidding. Dig a deep hole in the ground or into cliffs.
Example here: http://graymonk.mu.nu/archives/2007/12/living_undergro_1.html

Terracotta, build high structures of bricks in buckets or similar, the bricks should be soaked in water, when the water evaporates it will cool the air. (Just how clay wine coolers work) make sure there is a free flow of air.

Short term, like tents, double-layered roofs (tarps or similar) with free flowing air in between. 1/2-1 foot in between.
Stay off the ground.

from a historical standpoint... when I moved to Florida in 1955 home a/c was not common, and "cracker" homes were still around, typically identified as having...wood frame construction..two story thermal chimney height to provide up draft convection cooling, wide "dog trot" main hallway oriented to prevlent breeze NNW..I've seen one that had about 2ft open space at top walls for cross flow vent.... wide 8ft or so covered veranda porch typically on S,E,and W sides....cooking done in a separate out building connected by breeze way... double sash drop windows at corners of rooms, sheet steel roof 4/12 or better pitch (usually connected to cistern), and house was built on pillars 2ft off the ground. Large oak trees for shade. In the concrete block homes of the time most of the floors were terazzo (concrete and colored stone which was ground smooth)which acted as a thermal sink... took time to absorb heat which cooled during day and released at night...

In the Philippines my place down town was not air conditioned, but had a bed and pillow made of thin strips of bamboo that allowed air flow. That and a ceiling fan with a lot of windows worked.... some of the transit barracks at Clark AFB had open screened siding (both floor and ceiling level) with overhanging awnings. regards Les

Good ideas BorkBorkBork, I had new about underground living, even basements help some in the USA, but one thing you reminded me that what I did as a kid growing up was digging underground tunnels and playing in them. This is where my portable sand bag shovel would come in handy I bought years back. http://www.angelguardproducts.com/industrial/ezbagger/ezbagger.htm
I could either go underground or the double tarp idea would be a good start. When my AC went out awhile back I was going in and out of the lake all the time to stay cool, the house was 5 degrees hotter than outside with the windows open. The sun was brutal so I swam and hung out at the lake quite a bit till I got a new compressor. I should have stayed in the tent, it would have been cooler than the house. Anyway good ideas, thanks.

LesSnyder, I know what you are saying, I have one of those cracker houses with the terrazzo floor, louver windows, 10 degree pitch roof and even with the chimney and all the windows open (no insulation in these houses plus shingled roof) it was still 5 degrees hotter. I was in subic bay PI and lived there for awhile and would live most of my time in the jungle where the trees and creek would make life very pleasant. Where I'm at now doesn't have many trees for blocking the sun. On the go however I definitely would stay in the shade as much as possible and try to keep cool with any type of water I could find. I miss those days in the jungles of PI for sure and the third eye near clark great input, thanks.

How about Passive Air conditioning using the buried pipe technique.

http://www.airconditioningrepaircompanies.com/passive-air-conditioning-using-buried-pipe

I hear once upon a time people didn't have air conditioning. That must have been back during the ice age.

:-)

Most American homes are designed and built to impress, not to deal with heat (and sometimes, not to deal with cold, either).

Thermal convection can help, but you would probably have to make some changes in your house. Have intake vents near the floor on the shady side of the house, have cooling shrubbery (preferably kept damp -- use greywater) always shading them. Have high vents near the ceiling on the opposite side of the house.

The more the sun shines, the faster the air in the house/room heats up and rises, escaping out the upper vents, and pulling in more cool air from the lower vents. It stops when the sun goes down.

Many homes in the tropics are built off the ground. If you live in a place that is routinely hot in summer, build a deck off the ground, add an overhanging roof and screening. Or build a treehouse.

The more concrete and asphalt you have around you, the hotter it will be.

Get a copy of Art Ludwig's Create an Oasis with Greywaterfor ideas on how to direct greywater where you need it. The NEW edition contains his branched drains system. Greywater can help cool as well as grow things.

Sue

This is an interesting website covering a wide gamut of passive cooling and solar active air conditioning.

http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Cooling/passive_cooling.htm#Other

What is really annoying is that many folks are now going for so called low maintenance gardens (folks too lazy to push a lawn mower around) consisting of paving stones and gravel chips and concrete slabs, all of which increase local flooding risk and raise the overall temperature of the surrounding environment due to the heat island effect. All this material radiates back IR at night time causing night time temperatures to be much higher making sleep that much more uncomfortable.

All the heat being produced by the air conditioners pumping hot air outside also raises the ambient temperature for everyone else. The localised heat island effect may raise average temperatures throughout the year by 3-5 degrees C.

With appropriate shading from garden trees (natural air conditioners) and passive air conditioning such as buried heat pipe installations regulating internal building temperatures without costly and expensive to run conventional air conditioning systems it should be able to have zero running costs except of course for the initial installation costs.

Also worth mentioning is reducing the overall electricity load of lighting, entertainment, communications, cooking and refrigeration appliances. All these loads eventually produce heat which needs to be removed from the home. So LED lighting, modern low powered computers, TV and A++ rated refrigeration appliances etc will help considerably with cooling. Even electrical cooking such as using modern induction type hobs will reduce the electricity consumption and subsequent heating internally.

Is it getting warmer during the summer or are folks just surrounding themselves with ever more convenient electrical appliances and covering up gardens with paving slabs and cutting down tress for property speculators to build their poorly designed energy inefficient homes. What happens when antiquated energy grid can't take the load anymore during a really hot spell of weather?

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovat...s&wom=false

Thanks Susan and Am_Fear_Liath_Mor, those links are some interesting ideas, and one of the studies from Lakeland, Fla is interesting as well as it is not very far from where I am at. After the AC loss and having to buy a new one, I'm a little beat down for cash for awhile but I have been trying to combat very high energy bills for this 50 year old non efficient house. The attic has virtually no access to it to put insulation in it since it is almost flat, the walls are all concrete block with no insulation in them and are a heat storage. The terrazzo floors help some in remaining a little cool but as you walk around the house barefooted you can feel the heat from the ground. I have been experimenting with energy curtains and solar tint which has made significant gains in lowering the AC cycle and there are so many louver windows in this house it will cost a mint to replace all. I would eventually like to put a solar system on the roof and have been trying to replace out windows when money comes available. What's kind of messed up is my neighbors house is more efficient than mine and his power consumption (KWPH-Kilowatts per hour) has been the same for 10 years and he was paying $80 per month for electricity a few years back and now it is $230 with no power use change. The electric company keeps claiming that he needs to turn off lights in the day time to save cost, which is a joke because the Kilowatts are the same and the numbers do not lie. Plus they claim the new power meters are reading a more accurate readings and in the old days you were getting away with more because of an analog meter that was inefficient and your new bill reflects your true and accurate use. Man I want to git off the grid so bad but the money factor is keeping me down. In the meantime I just do little things I can to fight it down, but it seams like I do something and it knocks $30 off the bill, the next bill comes and it's back up to the same price.

Painting the concrete walls with an IR reflective masonry paint such as TEX•COTE® SUPER•COTE™ COOLWALL Systems® or EnerG H.R. Architectural might be worthwhile looking into.

http://www.texcotehomes.com/

http://www.dwellsmart.com/Products/Paint-Stains-Sealers-Wall-Coverings/EnerG-Heat-Reflective-Paint

A combined roof hot water and PV solar installation would also shade and put to use the excess solar heat absorbed by the building, reducing internal temperatures and reduce your electricity load for domestic water heating (solar water) and lighting (PV). A water sprinkler system for the very hottest days fitted to the roof for evaporative cooling would be a pretty cost effective solution.

Shading windows by the use of planted trees will have a double effect by shading the amount of IR radiation being absorbed by the windows and you could even have a crop of cherries, oranges etc within a few years.

With your new AC system (actually a good investment) you should also find the efficiency will be better than the previous one. It might well be possible using some of the energy efficiency methods to reduce your AC load by more than 50%.

After lighting (use of CF and LED lighting) the next biggest energy saving appliances to replace in my experience would be for refrigeration and computer appliances (of course depending on how efficient your current appliances are). I have replaced an 20 year of chest freezer with a A++ rated Vestfrost SE255 this year at a cost of around $600 - this was after I realised that the old chest freezer was costing over $150 a year to run by using a power meter. The Vestfrost SE255 is now estimated to be costing around $40 a year to run. As you can see the newer larger capacity chest freezer will pay for itself within 5 years.

I can make measurements and make estimates of electrical energy supply costs using a Costcurrent energy monitor hooked up to a low powered dual core Atom media PC (which itself only consumes around 25W compared to an old Athlon XP machine which consumed around 170W). If you have a large LCD TV you can save a considerable amount of energy by just adjusting the back light down and adjusting the contrast and brightness settings. I saved around 80W yet no-one else noticed the difference in TV picture quality.

What is really surprising is the fact that solar energy is so abundant in places like Florida and the southern states and combined with the fact that the USA is a modern high technological society that the USA should be at the very forefront of implementing alternative energy such as solar power. At the end of the day its not really rocket science.

Can you get a government grant for a combined solar water/PV installation which helps towards the cost of an installation?

.

The effectiveness, especially the long term effectiveness, of IR reflective paints and their cost-effectiveness compared to other methods remains in question.

The same is true of metalized radiant heat barriers in that if they get dust or crud on them, or there is no space to radiate to, their effectiveness drops. Doesn't mean they aren't useful or can't be used. It means you have to employ them carefully, maintain reasonable expectations, and take the marketing hype with a grain of salt.

The military uses some IR paint that runs north of $100 a gallon that works quite well. But it has to be applied quite thick to meet specs so it takes a lot of paint to do any job.

It has been noted that something as simple as painting a wall exposed to direct sunshine with any good quality white paint drops its thermal uptake. This can be seen on a hot summer day when the blacktop will take the skin off your feet but you can walk on the white lines without serious damage.

http://www.colormatters.com/energymatters.html

Point being that while high-tech paints may gain you a few extra percentage pints you can get most of their benefits, at a fraction of their cost, with common paint you can buy at the local hardware store without sending big bucks.

The same is true of roofing. White shingles absorb a fraction of the energy that dark ones do. Problem is that dark shingles make the roof look smaller, and by comparison the house larger and more valuable. A dark roof increases the sales price while increasing the energy use.

"... the USA is a modern high technological society that the USA should be at the very forefront of implementing alternative energy such as solar power. At the end of the day its not really rocket science."

Do you have lobbyists in Britain?

We do not have common sense here, we have lobbyists. Big Business hires lobbyists to pay off politicians so Big Business can make even more money than they do. Power and oil companies are Big Business; solar and wind power, organic and permaculture are Small Business. Money talks and common sense walks, every time.

Sue

Not only trees will help, but so will trellises and vines, and they tend to be quicker to do it. Site your trellises near, but not against, the walls (and roof, if possible), leaving a space between the two. Use strong trellises that will last, not those wimpy little things you see so often.

Find out what vining plants grow well there. Many are fruiting vines, and that would be an asset, too.

Maybe you could even sell the fruit to the neighbors to offset part of your electric bill...

Sue

AFLM, this is perhaps a nit and a bit of a thread hijack, but it bothers me that you labeled many of my neighbors lazy because of their garden choices. I feel compelled to respond in their defense. You wrote:

"What is really annoying is that many folks are now going for so called low maintenance gardens (folks too lazy to push a lawn mower around) consisting of paving stones and gravel chips and concrete slabs...."

Where I live (El Paso, Texas -- in the Chihuahuan Desert) a large percentage of front yards are "xeriscaped" to save water. Our water utility structures our rates so that using water for landscaping -- which would keep the house cooler -- is cost prohibitive for many homeowners. On top of that, the utility used to pay homeowners something like $1 for each square foot of lawn they removed and replaced with decorative rocks or approved drought-tolerant plants. I will add that it actually rained 0.75" this afternoon and so I can turn off my sprinkler system for a couple of days and save about $5 off my next water bill.

These folks would love to have lush gardens inspired by Capability Brown but don't want the $200+ summer water bills and the city wants to have drinking water through the next 100 years.

David, if your house has a 1000sqft footprint, about 450 GALLONS of water fell on your roof today. What did you do with it? What did your xeriscaping neighbors do?

Did you collect any of it, divert it to a swale or basin around a shade or fruit tree, or just watch it run down the driveway and into the street gutters?

Lawns are water and nutrient hogs, I'm certainly not advising them.

I've got to agree with the Big Grey Man, laziness probably has something to do with it. All that concrete, rock and gravel, along with the paved sidewalks and streets are nothing but heat storage units. Texas isn't hot enough, raise the thermostat?

Or maybe it's just ignorance, which can be fixed. But Texas has made more information available on rainwater collection than virtually any other state. So why aren't more people doing it? And I'm not talking just about a bunch of rain barrels in the front yard, there are all kinds of ways to store water, even if it's just in the ground.

As it is, I would suspect that most of the rain that falls in urban areas of Texas just runs into the Gulf. I wonder how many millions of gallons that is?

Sue

just as a side note,back in the 30's during a major heat wave people in Minneapolis and St Paul went outside and slept on the boulevards,in mass!!the problem here is having a house that works both summer and winter and is affordable.in the Midwest a real stucco home seems to fit the bill.

Am_Fear_Liath_Mor I had remembered you had brought up that energy monitoring device awhile back and was looking into it, they had a similar one for us in the US for the 220V 60 HZ and I think that will be an investment coming up. They do give a few breaks on solar but you still have to fork out quite a bit cash. I have been trying to monitor the progress of the thin film technology to see if the prices would start coming down. They are making cells they can print out almost like a printer, they have them in shingles and like banners to be hung from the sides of houses as well but the price is still more than I can afford right now. I'm putting a water heater timer on the heater now and will try to convert it over to solar down the pipe as well. I'm also tinting the sun face windows with black out curtains behind them as something to try and slow down the loss until I can use other means. I do have shrubs on one side that helps but not where I need them most.

What is messed up was I geared a lot of my survival equipment on cold and floods with equipment capability of 300 feet underwater and 60 below zero for cold. Ironically now it's the heat I neglected thinking the temps would stay semi what normal but these past years have shown a continuing rise into the triple digits and heat waves pounding a lot of normally cold environments. As I am trying to get my house and energy bills under control I wonder what we can do to prepare for a future worst case scenarios of extreme heat, I know Australia has been kind of the watching grounds for everything, the increase in box jellyfish in the waters due to warmer oceans (like what is going on in key west)to nights than can reach either cold or oven temperatures. Even as stated in the past we have followed the animals and went underground, it may be another history repeats itself in the future. Should get interesting. With us we have killer amoebas in our water in the summer, pythons and gators in the swamps, jelly fish and sharks in the oceans, cruise ships turning coco beach into a land fill and add a little oil in the water and wallah you have Florida..

The CostCurrent monitor is available in the USA from,

http://www.currentcost.net/buynowmain.html#Extra

What looks interesting is also the Google Power Meter and the Current Cost Bridge device which allows you to record your power consumption 24/7 without having your own PC on all the time as the data is recorded with the online Google Power Meter server.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/28/google-powermeter-home-energy-monitor

I may have to look at getting the CostCurrent bridge device!

I should of perhaps been a little more specific as where I live in the east coast of Scotland, the water supply isn't metered and if gardens are left unattended for a few months during the summer you would be waist or neck high in vegetation. The last time I used a garden water hose would have been around 6-7 years ago.

Awesome thanks Am_Fear_Liath_Mor, I wish we had that much abundance of water. I have to rely on lakes and oceans as backups. The rain in my location is not abundant enough to rely on for a steady water source and the aquifer is being worked way to hard with Fla's population.

Here where i live, sometimes in the summer temperatures reach from 115 to 120 degrees. People that live in some parts of the Mexicali Valley doesn't have electricity or even running water, so what they do to live in these conditions is:

1.- Built their house (usually made of Adobe and wood) beside a big tree (Usually Mezquite and another variety they call "Pino Salado"), in a way that the tree gives them shadow to their house from 12:00 to at least 4:00 p.m.

2.- No pavement or cement floors, that means at least a couple degrees less heat reflected.

3.- At night (it is still hot outside)they sleep on the roof of the house, they have mosquito nets and they have a bucket filled with water that they use to damp a cotton sheet and cover themselves with it.

In the city, you couldn't withstand a single week without a/c , concrete block houses radiate heat from the wall hours after the sun has disapeared, pavement streets have the same effect.

When i changed houses 2 years ago, summer kicked in and we didnt had the a/c installations ready, so (stubborn me) I decided not to seek asylum with my family and ride it out until the a/c where ready. Needless to say, it was the worst idea ever.

Well those temperatures are getting up there. What makes me think is if your temperatures are that hot now, think of when the temperatures will be if the temperatures rise even more globally. At what point does it become unlivable.

Moscow and Pakistan are almost there now.
QJS

>At what point does it become unlivable.