Cooling a home?

[Caribou]

Location is going to be a defining factor on what works best for you. We have a week or three of hot, for us, weather each summer. When it cools at night we open the windows, place fans in the bedroom windows, open the kitchen window, at the other end of the house, and drop the house temperature to below a comfortable level so as to not let the inside high be unbearable.

Our situation is complicated in that the sun rises and sets while striking the north side of the house. We can have nineteen or twenty hours of sun on our home in the summer and a similar amount of darkness in the winter.

The adobe homes of the Southwest kept the homes warm at night and cool in the day as it took time for the sun heated walls to transfer the heat inside. Likewise, the heat had been dissipated by morning keeping the home warm in the day.

 

[SheepDog]

Thick adobe walls, earth berms or underground homes are easier to keep cool in the summer and stay warmer during the winter. If you have a standard above ground home blocking the sun with a curtain outside the windows with an air space between the curtain and the window will help a lot in keeping the heat from going through the windows but you need a curtain that will stop the IR from penetrating. Dark fiberglass material (like welding blankets) are excellent. The air space is critical because you want the convection to help get rid of the built up heat in the curtain. Double and triple glazed windows are good too because glass blocks about half of the IR (heat) from going through the window. Plastic films are mostly transparent to IR so they will let the heat in. (they are good for winter heat)
The geo-grid is an excellent way to cool as it has an almost endless coolant source. Properly shading all the windows on the North and West sides of the home will help a lot. It only takes about two days for the air in your basement to warm up if you circulate it throughout the home so this is a short term answer. A cold bath will not only cool you down but it will also cool the house slightly. Light indoor colors that reflect light are better than dark colors at keeping the indoors cool - think adobe white.

 

[Caribou]

I found myself in a hotel without a heating system while in Madrid. I turned the shower on as hot as it would go and left a gap on each side of the shower curtain for circulation. I used this with a cold shower in other motels without AC to varying degrees of success. This is not something I'd want to do with metered water or limited water resources.

 

[JAC]

A lot of people with cabins that live full time off grid run mini split systems off of solar.

 

[SheepDog]

That would be about 4800 watts, right? (that would be maximum so it is averaged to about 1/5 or about 1000 watts... Comparing it to my mini-split system which is about 27000 BTU. I use it to heat and cool my garage and shop. 2 buildings of just over 5500 cubic feet. I have no windows, 1 man door in each building and a 7x16 foot garage door on the garage and a 7x9folding door on the shop. The big doors are insulated to R16, the walls are R19 and the ceilings are R60. The foundations and floors are also insulated with 2 inch foam. The "man" doors are steel insulated fire doors.