The AC haters might like the “Swamp Air” (Evaporation) system that many older houses use in New Mexico. It does a pretty good job of cooling unless the humidity gets above ~30%. Then it just ain’t making it. I’m not a fan but the history of it’s development is interesting.
Yeah, when I go outside at night to take the trash out and the temperature is still 88F with oppressive humidity, I don’t begrudge my AC at all. I do leave the AC set at 79 to try to conserve power, but there is no way in hell I’m going to open the windows back up when the heat index is over 105 during the day and the nights are so hot the house doesn’t cool down.
I’ve lived without AC before and using every trick in the book doesn’t help when the low is 85 with 80% humidity and the high is in the upper 90s. You’re going to be uncomfortable and sweating regardless of what you do, and you’re going to wake up in a puddle of your own sweat every morning.
Almost all of those suggestions are about how to avoid letting the sun shine in, which is great when the air isn’t too hot and your big problem is solar heating, but if it’s hot in the shade none of that is sufficient.
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Swamp Coolers work alright if you live somewhere with low humidity, but places with low humidity can get a lot of gains out of the suggestions mentioned in this article. The fact that the air cools down at night in more arid area helps a ton, as it lets you vent the heat from your house and then makes it a job of just avoiding letting the sun heat it up too much during the day.
If you live somewhere hot and humid, they’re of no use at all.
There are also dehumidifiers, which are basically smallish A/C systems that vent the heat into your room instead of outside. Theoretically they can make the place more comfortable, but in practice I’ve never found them to work very well. You have to leave your windows closed to make them work at all and you end up with the worst of both words. You do get a ton of water out of them though. My aunt used one of these (she lives in Minnesota), and I hated visiting her house in the summer as a kid because the dehumidifier was just not sufficient. She was constantly having to empty the bucket on the stupid thing too, because it would fill up astoundingly fast.
Another good way to reduce energy waste is to live in a smaller place. I can keep my <400sq ft condo at 70 degrees in Washington DC and my electric bill only goes up by the price of a couple beers each month during the summer (same with my heat in the winter). Also helps to share building infrastructure with other people (6 condo units in my converted row house) instead of having a free standing home to deal with.
A shame most of these tips boil down to “Live in a house that you can modify, and not an apartment”, so I’ll add my top strategies for surviving without air conditioning (A/C isn’t really much of an option for me due to electrical setup issues):
Fan
Cold showers for immediate relief, but hot showers for psychological well-being. Stand in a shower that’s about the hottest you can stand for a while, and when you come out, the surrounding air will feel a lot cooler and you can function without the heat blahs for a while.
But if you need cold relief: Run cold water in a sink. Put as much of your arms and hands in the cold water as possible and keep it there as long as you can stand. You’ve got lots of blood near the surface there, so cooling yourself there circulates around and cools your whole body.
A 2L empty bottle of pop, filled (not completely) with water, put in the freezer all day can be a lifesaver on sweltering nights, wrap it in a towel or old t-shirt and you can hug it close to you like a baby.
Drink plenty of water, maybe juice occasionally, but not pop. Ice of course, helps.
Some of these may be part placebo but they keep me alive until the day we can finally realize Mankind’s oldest dream, destroying the sun.
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Most of the two and three flats on my block are probably from around 1890/1900. You can still see marks from where many of them had awnings and such.
Anyway, as others said, it’s pretty tough when you live somewhere that it doesn’t really cool off at night. At 1am last night (this morning) it was about 85/86 inside. You just can’t get relief from that. I have a window unit for the bedroom so there’s at least one oasis from that kind of oppression, but the rest of the apartment is miserable. I generally think those were all good tips though, especially if you own your home and have the freedom to implement those kinds of changes.
Having said that, I hate the places that abuse AC. I really noticed this when I was down South, places with the AC so cold that windows would be fogged up and dripping with condensation. You weren’t comfortable inside in just a t-shirt. Ridiculous. Same goes for people who run the heat so you can lounge around inside in a t-shirt when it’s 20 degrees outside. Just such a waste…
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When the going gets hot, I fire up my redneck A/C: a wet T-shirt plus a fan under my desk blowing up across it. I keep a wet hand-towel in a container of water for refreshing the moisture in my shirt. It is surprisingly effective.
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Don’t worry, ad-servers consume no energy, and any energy they do consume comes from sustainably harvested happy-unicorn thoughts.
I saw a homeless man in Ipoh, Malaysia rubbing ice along the insides of his arms, for some relief from the heat. It must be hard in those places if you never have access to air con at all, though part of the problem with the climate there is is that airconditioners pump heat out into ther environment, while concrete stores and releases heat and you don’t get the advantage of the cooler micro climate in a tropical forest.
Once I was on a tour of the botanical gardens in Penang. We went through a small area of natural forest and the climate there was a great relief, for a minute or so.
I may just be embittered by weeks of relentless heat and humidity; but all these suggestions sound suspiciously like ‘Good ideas for people who live in black boxes north of the arctic circle’. If an intake fan, at night, is blowing insufferably hot air on you, getting a bit more shade just won’t help much…
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I hate AC, with a blinding passion. I too live in MN, and I spend the whole winter cooped up inside. I want breezes and bird sounds in the summer. It helps that our house has a bunch of lovely Ironwood trees on the south side, and we’ve planted a birch on the west side. We usually do better to keep our house closed downstairs and on the east in the am, closed on the west but open on the east in the pm. Also, a little spritz bottle of rose water or lavender water by the bed plus a box fan on warm nights. We also go swimming on really hot evenings, in fact, Cedar point beach, here I come.
I just got back from Sonora California where it was 100 degrees during the day, cooling off to about 60 at night Felt great, because I’m now back in Houston where it’s 100 degrees and cools off to about 80 and it’s 90% humid. Crank that AC! I can always put on a jacket.
Can anyone figure out how to view the mobile version of the site?
Having grown up where hot weather = humid weather, I was amazed the first time I visited the American desert and discovered how much cooler shade is than sun. Shade is always more comfortable, but in humid places it just doesn’t seem as big a delta.
OK - then I guess I want a system that takes in warm air, mixes it internally with traditionally-generated A/C output, circulates that until the temp’s relatively homogeneous and at the desired level, and then pumps it back out into the living space.
Would take some huge working tanks in order to function well, I imagine. Maybe put 'em underground?
I really, really like our GSHP (Ground Source Heat Pump) system. While it is rather expensive to install, it is cheap to run, and we were lucky to get a 35% rebate from the MN Dept. of energy Security (funded by Fed stimulus dollars), and a 30% Fed tax credit, so in our case the out of pocket wasn’t much more than a conventional AC and furnace would have been. Ad in something like a Venmar air exchanger with HEPA filter, and it is an HVAC solution that provides fresh air (20 minutes of every hour it exchanges house air with pre-cooled or pre-heated air from outside–the other 40 minutes it circulates and filters), and we have comfortable, fresh air, year round. And less pollen in the house, which is nice for our allergy and asthma issues. I mention this so that people know you CAN install a GSHP in the city (I’m in Minneapolis, proper), and that there are ways to bring in fresh air efficiently. And also to suggest that more funding to promote green energy at the consumer level might be a good idea.
As for the ivy and tree planting ideas, be careful how it’s done.
My mom bought a “quaint” little house about 25 years ago, that had pre-planted ivy and trees, but the trees were planted far too close to the house and the ivy was planted without regard to proximity to the porch and front walk. Now I have to trim the tree branches from over the roof once every year – and the ivy from the seams in the concrete and out of the rain gutters every single warm-weather month.
A friend of mine lived in a big old house in Raleigh, NC with no air conditioning. The secrets were lots and lots of windows, on all sides of the house, that could be opened to allow cross-breezes, and a whole-house attic fan to pull in cooler air at night, plus big trees surrounding the place. In the worst depths of summer, it was survivable. Not pleasant. But survivable.
(I will note that her house was retrofitted for air conditioning a couple of years ago, though.)
Same friend also told me one good trick: Sleep naked with a wrung-out wet sheet covering you and a fan blowing on you. Keep a spray bottle of water by the bed, and re-wet the sheet every time you get hot again. I used that trick when my A/C conked out during a run of 100+ degree days. It helped some – I got a couple hours of sleep, instead of none at all.
But personally, I thank the air conditioning gods every time I come inside. North Carolina at mid-summer is why air conditioning was invented.
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It’s about 79.2 outside, and 96F in my third-floor bedroom. The wife and I will be sleeping in the tent in the back yard tonight again. Not everyone can have a back yard, but if you do, a tent can make the hot nights a bit easier for sleeping.
We lived in Tennessee last year. I really enjoyed the hot summers, but kept the air conditioning about 78F.
That’s the idea. It is basically what some commercial systems do. No tank, just 1 fan bringing in cold air from the coil and a second, much larger, fan bringing warm air from the space. The two mix and send a moderate temperature air into the space. Residential systems don’t typically do this because of the extra cost of the fans and ductwork.
