Go to MajRoj's Sidebar
- Add a comment
- Go to Keeping it cool (Rant Against The Heat)
Benzinha, I look at all the "alternative energy" schemes of the Seventies..
and shake my head. Most were illogcial extensions of high school physics, but some were really dangeous. 
They tried building a big self-contained structure with massive concrete construction acting as a "thermal flywheel". Unlike adobe, and in the hermatically closed environment, they found out that concrete absorbs oxygen as it cures, and thick concrete takes years to cure. They were suffocating.
High ceiling make sense with fans and windows and heat, somewhat with A/C, but not with heating in cold times. Directing a floor level fan in the coldest corner towards the ceiling, with consideration to orderly air flow and currents, could act to mix the hottest and coldest air to good effect. A local restaurant with a high ceiling has a heavy firepoofed drape they pull across to essentially (not perfectly) lower the ceiling from thirty to fifteen feet. It absorbs sound, too.
posted by
majroj
on May 23, 2008 at 7:26 AM
| link to this | reply
maj, the Old Pueblo that we tore down to build our TCCC convention
center, thus forever destroying all character in town by erasing the barrio, was full of doors right on the sidewalks which, when opened, opened into an inner courtyard. There you would be soothed with the sound of water in a fountain to cool the spirits, greenery to shade the face and tiled porches circling it which led into separate adobe rooms with windows and doors which were opened and closed scientifically for greatest cooling or heating effect.
Ovens were in a kitchen indoors, kitchens large enough to live in in the winter and in the garden outdoors for summer cooking, to keep the house cool.
Now we have silly chicken wire houses which heat and cool according to the temp outside, we have huge windows which do the opposite of scientific studies, we have huge vaulted ceilings for maximum inefficiency of heating and cooling. I could go on.
The kids cement the whole back yard around the pool in their postage stamped gardens and have no greenery to care for, so the heat is reflected back onto the property endlessly and kept in the cement for release all night long.
Somebody stop me. We have one neighborhood in town dedicating itself to getting itself off of the electric grid and they are succeeding. My children think of them as kooks. These people buy small houses and do not expand them, do not update and reconstruct them, but rather improve what is there and expand themselves into the outdoors by making the outdoors part of their homes.....lovely outdoor areas, so flowered and beautiful and shaded and cool.
They teach each other and new neighbors and now are expanding their classes and get togethers to include the whole city, if they want to come and learn.
posted by
benzinha
on May 22, 2008 at 12:06 AM
| link to this | reply
McNab, thanks
posted by
majroj
on May 20, 2008 at 6:55 PM
| link to this | reply
Benzinha, You can write your own post on this too!
My mom remembers a stage station in Camp Verde with three foot thick adobe walls that never got too hot.
The California missions, if they reached their maturity (some were faltering enterprises at best) used tricks from the Old World, which were in turn adapted largely from the Moorish invaders...long overhanging tile roofs on adobe walls, arranged in a single layer of rooms around a courtyard with plants and sometimes a fountain, and dark rough pavers.
posted by
majroj
on May 20, 2008 at 6:46 PM
| link to this | reply
Azur, yes, it cooled my heels...
but I'm also using it on the CERT LA website and submitted to my local CERT for thier newsletter (CERT LA doesn't mind).
posted by
majroj
on May 20, 2008 at 6:42 PM
| link to this | reply
maj, your advice was really useful about fan placement. I did it right
before and then forgot. I shall re-arrange all of my little fans. I usually put one under my work table blowing at my legs. It doesn't dry my clay or paint on the work table but cools me down immensely. That and cold water, not ice, like you said not to.....you the man.
Yup, we need this on MAJTV @ MOGULUS.com, especially for those poor folks back east who will find their summers hotter and their resources limited.....maybe CNN would pick up your show on MAJTV, especially if I emailed them a link to it.....Call your show The Man with The ( Cooling ) or ( Heating ) or (Emergency ) Plan and teach us all, oh wise elder. Point out the pathways.
posted by
benzinha
on May 20, 2008 at 3:11 PM
| link to this | reply
yup, maj, just turned on the cooler for the first time today, for me.
When we have about twenty days of 80 to 90 defrees, then it gets hot enough for me to use the cooler. I say that God opens the oven door for the summer baking season. You can tell the difference, living in heat an entire life, from the sweet, chilled shade to the warmer shade of the twentieth day. We are also getting the URBAN night time heat rising syndrome like Phoenix, which Tucson never had, but has this year and last.....we used to drop 20 to 30 degrees every night all summer except in the rains of July, yummy. No more.
I do open windows at night and close them in the a.m. keeping in the cooler night air. I am watering trees and plants to keep the house shaded, satellite photos show a green property here in a brown neighborhood, I have TREES. I also rent adobe homes in this desert, never chicken wire tract boxes.
The floors are tile and the dogs and I nap on them when it's really hot. The doggie pool is for evaporative cooling of wet furry creatures. The birds use it, too, so I put bricks and stones in the pool for them to rescue themselves upon if they fall in while drinking or find it too full.
I also, self employed, sleep late in the heat and do much at night....including yard work and laundry, etc. and I have stopped the oven entirely. Some people turn off their water heater all summer.
And, it is funny as some people reading this still hav winter or snow or cold and Arizona is already much muy hot.
I always wear long sleeves and long pants or skirts, loose clothing of natural fibers as they do form evaporative coolers around you as you sweat. We also keep Jean Nate', etc, in the fridge for a cooling refreshing squirt and we make sun tea in 30 minutes and have real lemonade or limeade in the fridge until October, I think.
I have begun waving down the ice cream lady and she now drives by my house Verrrrrry slowly.....I give the dogs frozen beef bones as their popsicles all summer.
posted by
benzinha
on May 20, 2008 at 3:02 PM
| link to this | reply
majroj
I am very, very impressed, majroj. Take a bow. We're going to print this post off and browse around the house and garden to see where we can put your informed advice into effect..
posted by
johnmacnab
on May 20, 2008 at 6:24 AM
| link to this | reply
All this work must have raised your temperature
mind you it cooled your heels
posted by
Azur
on May 18, 2008 at 6:01 PM
| link to this | reply
Vogue, that's the best solution I think.
Our southern hemisphere bretheren and sisteren (?) must wonder at this when they are having winter now.
posted by
majroj
on May 18, 2008 at 10:13 AM
| link to this | reply
Very interesting story from you, majroj.
posted by
Kayzzaman
on May 18, 2008 at 10:02 AM
| link to this | reply
I think I'll just travel to a cooler country. Seems much easier to me!
posted by
vogue
on May 18, 2008 at 8:12 AM
| link to this | reply