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


Edited by Am_Fear_Liath_Mor (08/11/10 01:20 AM)