Cooling a home?

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Swing

Porch Lover
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I read and reread etc the "Going Home" Series by Angery American.

In one of them the people are so hot in the summer with no air conditioning. They ask the main guy - Morgan, if he had some idea of how to cool the houses some.

He said he had read of taking 2 liter plastic bottles and inserting them into a framework with bottoms to outside and necks in the house. Sounded as if the bottom of the bottles was removed. So, the framework would go in a window similar to a window a/c unit. The hot air would blow across the larger opening on the outside and would be cooler air going inside.

In the book, it would drop the inside temp by about 10 degrees.

Has anyone heard of such a thing? Has anyone even tried to build one?
 
That could work if you sat right in front of the bottles as it would move the air through the neck of the bottle faster though there would be less of it..

A simple swamp cooler works well if there is low humidity. a fan would improve the results but it is not necessary.
 
If water is not an issue (not for desert folks) you can place a sprinkler hose on the roof and it will act like a giant swamp cooler. Worked for a place my folks rented.

At an old ice rink that was here for many years, there was going to be an ice skating event but the ice could not stay cold enough due to heat radiating from the roof. They sprinkled the roof over the ice area a lot that day.
 
If there is a breeze you could make a DIY swamp cooler by hanging a burlap cloth over the open window and keeping it wet.
I blew insulation into my attic space and that help a lot with heating and cooling and it didn't cost all that much.
Home Depot let me use their insulation blower free because I bought 10 bundles of insulation.
I got my young, slim to do the work.
 
My cousin has a swamp cooler on the outside of the house. He opens the bedroom window to allow the cool air to be pushed into the house. It uses no electricity but by putting a fan in front of the window you would improve the effectiveness of the system. The cloth wicks draw adequate water to drop the house about 20*F. Taller wicks and a water pump would improve the results but would require electricity.

Much like a wood stove circulates heat more efficiently with a fan but it still works well without one a swamp cooler doesn't necessarily need electricity.
 
I talked my cousin into putting a white metal roof on his home and this dropped the interior temperature notably. In the Med entire villages are painted white to reduce heat. A high gloss white surface will reflect more energy than a mirror.
 
My cousin has a swamp cooler on the outside of the house. He opens the bedroom window to allow the cool air to be pushed into the house. It uses no electricity but by putting a fan in front of the window you would improve the effectiveness of the system. The cloth wicks draw adequate water to drop the house about 20*F. Taller wicks and a water pump would improve the results but would require electricity.

Much like a wood stove circulates heat more efficiently with a fan but it still works well without one a swamp cooler doesn't necessarily need electricity.
It is one of the hottest summers I ever remember. It is such a contrast to the lovely summer we had last year.

I have a swamp cooler, but it is electrical. It cools the house down really well, especially on really hot days. I have fans in two windows to help with circulation of air. The turbine fan in a swamp cooler moves a lot of air. A swamp cooler uses little power and is basically a large fan and water circulating over pads where the moving air evaporates it and moves it around.

I think if I was in a situation with no power, hanging wet cloths in front of open windows would help, especially if there is a breeze. I saw the stuff from a church from before 1900. Hand fans were part of the stuff from the church, probably kept in the same slot as bibles are kept. Getting all wet with your clothes on will help cool you down.
 
Swamp coolers do not work if the dew point gets above 55*.
Moving air always feels cooler.
Having a slab house (where your floor is a solid cement slab) keeps your house cooler in the summer no matter where you live (and warmer in the winter).
The bottles in the window thing makes no sense for me. It cannot cool the air.
Though we live in Arizona, we do not own an air conditioner. Instead we just have our house at 7500 foot elevation. It is always cool inside.
 
It is one of the hottest summers I ever remember. It is such a contrast to the lovely summer we had last year.

I have a swamp cooler, but it is electrical. It cools the house down really well, especially on really hot days. I have fans in two windows to help with circulation of air. The turbine fan in a swamp cooler moves a lot of air. A swamp cooler uses little power and is basically a large fan and water circulating over pads where the moving air evaporates it and moves it around.

I think if I was in a situation with no power, hanging wet cloths in front of open windows would help, especially if there is a breeze. I saw the stuff from a church from before 1900. Hand fans were part of the stuff from the church, probably kept in the same slot as bibles are kept. Getting all wet with your clothes on will help cool you down.
My grandparents had a swamp cooler like you describe with the fans. My cousins swamp cooler is essentially a series of cloths, with the bottoms in a tray of water, that the wind passes through. The summer breeze normally comes from that direction and blows the cool air into the bedroom.
 
Many old houses had attic fans that pulled the air through the house, of course they were electric but what a difference it made inside.
Solar would work fine for one of those, low amps in comparison to AC.
I installed a fan in the attic right after we moved in.
It is set to come on when the attic temperature reaches 100.
It helps.
 
If you have electricity and a basement, one of the easiest ways I've found is to keep your furnace/air handler fan blowing constantly.

It'll pull the cold air from the basement and mix it with the warmer air upstairs and balance the temps. Running the fan constantly also helps keep the humidity down in the basement and the fan on your furnace is much cheaper to run than a dehumidifier. I did the math and running a 1/4 HP furnace fan 24 hours per day for 30 days uses about $15 in electricity. A dehumidifier is about triple that amount.
 
If you want to cool a house you have to start with cool air. Air conditioners, swamp coolers and heat pumps all produce cool air but in doing so add warm air to the outside. They cost money to run and use chemicals that are not best for the environment. Even a swamp cooler adds to the humidity in the house which can decrease the effective cooling.
Where can you find cool air to circulate through your house? Dig a trench ten feet deep around your home. Place an ABS heat exchanger in the trench an bury it. Pull air from the outside, through a filter, down through the heat exchanger and into the home. You will get air that is 65 to 50F circulating through your home. You can use a fan (like a bathroom fan) to circulate the air or you can use a length of single wall flue pipe on the south side of your house to siphon air through your home. The pipe heats the air inside and it rises pulling the hot air in the house out and the cooler air in.
The "heat exchanger" is just a home made manifold of small ABS pipes between two larger ABS pipes that connect to the inlet for your heating ductwork. The earth supplies the cooling and you get whole house air conditioning for the cost of digging a ditch and some ABS pipe. There are no chemicals involved and no power required. During the winter you may want to shut off the outside heat tube and the cool air inlet so a couple of PVC ball valves might be required. Cheap and efficient but it will require a little cost and a lot of digging.
 
Angie,
If you don't own the land you are just a paying temporary guest. You still might be able to get the landlord to let you do it as it will raise the value of his property without increasing his taxes. He might be willing to help with the costs. Still, you can be asked to leave at any time.
 
Angie,
If you don't own the land you are just a paying temporary guest. You still might be able to get the landlord to let you do it as it will raise the value of his property without increasing his taxes. He might be willing to help with the costs. Still, you can be asked to leave at any time.

Yeah. That's the rub for many.
 
What I have done to help keep our home cooler is to build a cold roof. I pulled off all the three tab shingles and screwed 2"X4" s over the sheathing plywood where existing rafters are and then nailed 1/2" sheathing over them. The roof is double vented and solar heating is isolated from the lower sheathing as is the winter snows, so our home is also easier to keep warm when it's cold out, it's really easy to get our wood stove too warm but the plus side is we only burn about one cord of wood per winter for just over 1,300 sq. ft. .
 
I'll have to remember that Viking! I used two layers of R-30 fiberglass bat in the ceiling and that works very well with the ridge and soffit vent system.
 
I saw a show where they dug a big hole and filled it with huge boulders.
They covered the hole but I don't remember how
Then they ran ducting to it and pumped air from the hole to the house in the summer and then from a sun room, with a black concrete floor, into the hole in the winter.
At night they would reverse the air to take the warmed air back into the house.
Heated and cooled their house with a 120v fan.
 
I'll have to remember that Viking! I used two layers of R-30 fiberglass bat in the ceiling and that works very well with the ridge and soffit vent system.
We have ridge vents, it's the best way to vent being as we have a Ridge-loc metal roof. We had an attic fan but it was way to noisy
 
Investigating DIY swamp coolers today, I found a good 6 minute video on youtube. Looks easy enough. Apparently mold on the inside of the drum/bucket filtering material is a thing that can happen so you have to be sure to clean it regularly.
A friend here in TX made his own swamp cooler and they don't use AC.
Friends in Vermont would open their attic windows and leave the rest of the house closed up, except for one window downstairs maybe.
If you live where it is very dry and very hot and cools down at night, I imagine you can benefit from that somehow.
We always tried to make-do without turning on the AC. In the a.m. and early afternoon we were okay, but by late afternoon we'd be cooking. This was in the mid-Atlantic area, high 80s for summer temps with high humidity.
I don't know if I'd like the boulders in a pit idea. What about radon? I remember the odor of old basements made of stone with dirt floors. Bleh.
 
Swamp coolers and humidity, wife and I have been there and it wasn't fun, we ran a Conoco gas station in Pampa, Texas and on the hottest day of the year the swamp cooler broke, 114 degrees, but half the time with the moisture coming up from the Gulf of Mexico the swamp cooler would only make things worse by adding more moisture to the already damp air. If the air around you is dry they work like a charm.
 
Before we bought our present house, we looked at one that had a whole house fan in the attic. A friend lived there. That thing worked really well. And while it didn't really "cool" like an air conditioner would, it was able to pull in cooler air from areas that were shaded and keep the air moving, which really did help to keep things way more comfortable. I can imagine such a fan could work pretty decently running off of a few solar panels if there were no electricity.

If someone wants to be a little more elaborate, I can see how they might run a very small window type air conditioner off of solar to maybe have a cool room somewhere in the house. A whole house would take quite a lot of energy to cool but one small room may take surprisingly little if it's decently insulated.

There are some pretty warm areas of the world that don't bother with air conditioning. I have a friend in Panama that doesn't have air conditioning, or heating for that matter. Says he doesn't need either. He lives in a stone/concrete home and I suspect that helps to moderate the temps keeping things cooler during the hot part of the day and warmer in the cool part of the day. There may be value in looking towards mass if building for efficiency but maybe not so much with already existing structures.
 
There are plenty of ways to help cool houses. Awnings over all the windows except the north facing ones ( this keeps our house 20 cooler in the summer). Deep porches with roofs to shade the houses. Strategically place trees to shade the house. Down south they used large walkthru windows and transoms above doors to draw the heat out the rooms. Those with cellars left the door ajar to have the cooler air move up the stairs.
Some built the houses up off the ground so air could circulate under them.
Open windows at night to cool the house then close and cover with heavy drapes to keep the heat out.
Hand fans and wet wash rags
I think I remember reading about ceiling fans that you had to wind up and then they would slowly unwind and move the fan slowly to move the air ( sort of like those toy airplanes with the rubber bands to move them but in a slower motion). I can't remember when or where I read about them
 
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