I strongly believe that this should be the standard everywhere. Unfortunately most governments won’t tell you this, because a few of them are busy building golden temples for their authoritarian leaders, and blowing half of it on cocaine while pretending it’s the immigrants’ faults
This is a poor take, a few to vote is not the easy to go about this. Even owing taxes shouldn’t bar someone from voting as voting is about being represented and everyone deserves representation. Even hardened criminals.
Not only this, I think this should be selectable by taxpayers before they pay taxes so they can customize the amount that goes to each category. This would be the true democratic way of doing it. So, for example, based on your salary you need to pay 20k in taxes. You’d then select how much you want to go into Transportation, Healthcare, defense, education, etc.
This would quickly force the government agencies to work for their money.
This wouldn’t be truely democratic. It would rather be just like donations. Government spending works, because it’s all out into the same basket. If it weren’t, then rich taxpayers would move the movey to projects they want - and as would have very little old-age welfare, because they don’t pay much taxes anymk6and every group in society would put the money into their projects.
This is but one of many sites which show a breakdown of where our money in the US goes. Having one that breaks down each person’s personal contribution would be especially interesting, but a percent is a percent so if 20% of our money collectively goes to X, then 20% of what your paid as an individual will also go to X.
sometimes accessibility and user experience is more important than "its available if you look for it.: 99% of people don’t really have time, they have families, jobs, some leisure, cooking, paying bills, visiting family. etc. etc. So it should be easy and the FACT that it isn’t easy is purposeful whereas the Australian system is purposefully easy.
I don’t disagree with your sentiment, but again, it IS easy. It took me less than 10 seconds to find the link I provided. Sure, make it even easier still by including it with every tax return, but let’s not kid ourselves - this shit is incredibly easy but average taxpayers just don’t want to bother.
I would argue average taxpayers don’t know it exists and a ton of them, particularly older ones have a very hard time with technology. I’ve had to show my mother in law how to get a url from her phone to her desk top, I’ve explained what the read mode means in Firefox, and numerous other things. Easy for you doesn’t mean easy for everyone.
So this is interesting… if you see a bunch of bananas, you’re not allowed to break one off? Here in the United States, it’s totally acceptable to do this. You can straight up go around and pull one banans off of 7 different bunches, and nobody will even look at you funny.
Make a salt water solution, lots of salt in water. Then use a brush to brush on the solution to every leaf. Keep doing that for several days and it should die off. We did that one summer and it came back the next summer, did the same steps and has not returned since.
I think that the Eastgate Mall in Zimbabwe makes usage of a similar principle, but their inspiration came from Termite Mounds www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP8DSdfoiZw
Wikipedia claims “greater than 15 °C.” Besides, even if you supplement it with air conditioning, that’s 15 °C less ΔT worth of electricity you have to pay for.
A modern home ACs can only cool about 20f below the outside temperature. 50c to 35c is 27 degrees so that’s pretty damn good for a fancy unpowered swamp cooler
I’m in Florida and it’s routinely 95-98F outside. My AC is set to 65F.
Did you mean 20C? Either way, that’s also false. AC units are limited to their rating and BTU. Many may not cool below 60F, but there’s no delta limit.
Heat pump doesn’t do that for us. We set it at 78-79f in the summer and it feels cool enough & keeps the house from molding.
Evaporative systems like the one pictured only work in the desert though. So if you have lots of water, it’s humid and you can’t use evaporation to cool, but in places you can use evaporative cooling, water is scarce. It’s still very cool tech, and everywhere can benefit from more intentional design of buildings.
Your heat pump will definitely do it, it’ll just take a long time.
The 20 degree figure everyone is throwing around is actually supposed to be the difference between the return air temperature and the supply air inside your home
If you have 80 degree air in your house, 60 degree air should be coming out of your vents. Once the 60 degree air has cooled down the house to 70 degrees or so, 50 degree air should be coming out of your vents. And that’s about the theoretical limit for home air conditioning, as anything lower means the cooling coil is below freezing and will get damaged by ice, there’s usually a safety switch that prevents things from getting too cold.
Now the outside coil needs to be hotter than the surrounding air to actually push that heat out of the coil and cool off. Most places around me are designed for a 95 degree summer day, so will have a refrigerant temperature of about 120 degrees, in order to move that heat. Your compressor needs to be able to compress the refrigerant from your cooling coil until it’s about 30 degrees F hotter than the outside air. The hotter it is outside, the harder it is on the compressor. But it will eventually do it if you let it run long enough. Whether or not you want to pay for all that electricity is another thing entirely.
AC really doesn’t consume that much if designed and sized properly. It’s nothing like the energy consumption of standard heating. The problem is all these people going out and buying the cheapest floor unit or undersized window unit they can find, then the wheezing thing just sits there chugging 100% of the time because it can’t keep up with their space. That’s super wasteful.
well technically it is powered, just directly by wind and water kinetic energy, probably(?) much more efficiently than if it had been converted to electricity first
No, I’m being genuine. It’s theoretical and all, but if you were to put up a windmill in the same spot instead of a tower, it’s possible traditional air conditioners would be able to cool the building to the same degree while also providing surplus electricity. It’s also possible that you wouldn’t, and I don’t know the answer. It would also be interesting to compare it in different ways as well, like rather than asking “If a windmill was here” we could ask “The energy removed from the wind by the tower”, because that would indicate scalability problems if one windmill was indeed able to cool one building, but maybe 100 wouldn’t be able to cool 100. All hypothetical, but air conditioners/heat pumps are actually very efficient, so it’s possible an active design could be more efficient than a passive one in this situation. At least, until someone does the math
Another thing to note, to your point, is that a windmill breaks down and requires energy to repair. These wind towers in Yazd are still there and doing the same thing from hundreds of years ago
But don’t “swamp cooling” systems like the one in the OP not work well in humid environments? Sure, I have running water at home, but I also live in an incredibly humid climate.
I was more imagine something like the opposite of a district heating system and then using colling ponds or towers to disappate the heat from the system…
Modern plumbing uses pressurized pipes that are completely full of water, and can thus flow uphill, as long as the elevation gain doesn’t exceed the head pressure from the water tower or pumps. That makes such pipe systems relatively cheap and easy to build.
In contrast, qanats require large conduits with space above for the air to flow through, using open channel flow. That means the entire system needs to be designed with a gentle downhill monotonic slope. That’s doable (the wastewater and stormwater sewer systems are designed that way, for example), but it’s more expensive and would require a lot of re-work if you wanted to convert over the existing water distribution system.
You’ve got a lot of great replies on how you’re a wrong. But it is even simpler - your freezer works the same way as air con. And it’s at -18°C even if your room is at +35°. That’s all you need to know about air cons and their capabilities.
They’re full of it, that’s it. Maybe in their house which lacks sufficient insulation. Heat pumps (i.e. air conditioning) are/is extremely efficient at moving heat around, there’s not really a practical limit on it, particularly if you go geothermal.
We're talking celsius, I hope for your sake it doesn't routinely get to 100 C where you are. :)
Edit: The user actually said 20 F, I got confused by the mix of units. "50c to 35c is 27 degrees" didn't make sense to me, but I figured I'd let it slide. No idea what's going on here. :)
Yes, that sounds about right - the relative effect of the tower probably depends a lot on various factors like how windy it is, if extreme heat occurs only for a day or if it has been ongoing so that the water under ground is heated as well, etc.
These comments were in response to @Gangreless, who stated that a modern AC "can only cool about 20f below the outside temperature". I didn't catch that it was fahrenheit first, and now that I know I am happily backing off rather than having to think in terms of freedom units.
20 degrees is just a rule of thumb most ACs have a specific temperature change they’re designed to do. You can go past it, that’s just what the intented to do and it might not work as well or be able to do it. Fwiw I’d always heard 30 degrees farenheight for most window units. Had an hvac guy explain it to me years ago but fucked if I remember how it works
Oh man, I can’t believe ancient physics powered cooking techniques weren’t as efficient as the electrically powered cooling that we have today, those idiots
It’s the internet, you never know. In person, by how the person behaves, you know if he’s being sarcastic or not. On the internet, not so much. It’s just text and I’ve seen people who were quite serious.
Iran’s traditional desert architecture masterfully navigates extreme temperatures through a combination of smart design and local building materials like mud-brick or adobe, which possess low thermal conductivity similar to sand. The thick walls of these houses act as a thermal mass, absorbing the intense daytime heat and slowly releasing it during the cooler night, regulating temperature swings inside the dwelling. This principle, paired with the utilization of design features like wind towers and qanat systems, helps to maintain a comfortable indoor climate. Some structures are even partially or completely built underground, using the earth as a natural insulator and benefiting from the surrounding cool sand. Consequently, it’s this strategic interplay of materials, design, and the desert environment that enables these homes to remain cool during scorching days and warm during chilly desert nights. This is a gross oversimplification of thermal dynamics but it’s the gist of it. It would be quite comfortable inside is what I am getting at.
You can literally go there and witness these for yourself. It works. People live in Yazd right now in these old buildings. Newer constructions have air conditioning because building huge thermal mass retaining walls out of mud bricks is expensive. They keep ice all winter in buildings there from a thousand years ago cooled like this.
These days in Yazd the average warmest temperature in July is 40 degrees, so if what you're saying is correct they'd be able to cool it down to a liveable 30 degrees even in the warmest part of the day. And at night temperatures still dip to 26, so the indoors temperature probably wouldn't quite reach 40 even without this system. So it might make the difference between 40 degrees outdoors and high 20s indoors, which is fantastic.
Would be interesting to know if average temperatures got up to 40 in the summer around the time they were built as well, or if average temperatures in the region have been rising.
I do wonder what the humidity is. The drawing shows that the new air is mixed with air coming from the water canals below which I assume is very humid.
Looks like its essentially a swamp cooler.
So I wonder how the 30 with humidity feels compared to 40 without.
Im now at a 32 but with the current humidity it feels like fucking 38!
Thanks for pointing that out. My immediate thought upon reading the headline was how a/c could be implemented without electricity. I wondered if a compressor could be beast powered somehow. @FlyingSquid should correct the title.
Cool, but that’s not what we mean when we say AC. The meanings of words change over time and AC is used almost exclusively to refer to a specific type of device so unambiguous that I don’t usually have to explain which exact type of device I mean.
Otherwise literally just putting up a fan next to your window is technically AC. The term AC will lose all meaning.
I came across this exact thing when researching air conditioning. And since I was interested in a good soltution for the tropics these Yak’chals as they’re called are basically useless. The tropics regularly have dew points of 26°C and above.
It can kinda work with an elaborate setup and a (liquid) desiccant cycle but in the end you still want the evaporation cooling outside, especially in the tropics where you have legionella practically instantly if you humidify anything indoors. And that will tank the efficiency. But it kinda works. The more humid the weather the hotter the regeneration of the desiccant has to be to work.
I assume the water here is doing the work. I didn’t say anything about a closed system, just passive. Maybe that doesn’t count as passive, I don’t know physics all that well.
I do not think you’re trying to say the water “does work” in the physics sense, but to clarify, the water is just a large heat sink that has a much higher heat capacity than air. You can heat the water with air (which in turn cools the air), and that water can hold MANY times the heat (per unit mass) that the air can. Water also has a higher thermal conductivity than air. Allowing it to absorb and pass heat very well. This water is in the ground which also acts as a massive heatsink.
The air passes heat to the water which then passes the heat to the ground effectively cooling your air feed. A quick look online says current soil temp in Iran 21 inches deep is 35C or 95 F. That is your lower temperature limit. It’s physically impossible to become colder than the soil temperature (in this instance, as that is your lower temperature bound for heat transfer, in reality you wont even get there, because your driving force for heat flow is gone at that point) without putting in mechanical work (which is what a compressor does in your air conditioner) to compress your cooling fluid so that it may be evaporated repeatedly to exploit the tranfer of heat into an evaporating substance
That is the deepest depth I could find being actively tracked on the website I ended up on. I did not wanna do a deep dive into “great” average soil temp data lol. If you have a good source of data I will gladly change my comment to include the updated numbers. I wanted to say the average soil temperature at depth is ~50-55 degrees F, but I hopped online to make sure that was not a number that I know to be true due to where I live. Good to know that its roughly 6 feet where it stabilizes
If you go down deep enough the earth temperature is stable at 12 C. But I’m pretty sure that’s like thousands of feet down. Geothermal rigs drill 500+ meters (1600 feet) down. Having a hard time finding a source on the stable earth temp though.
I mentioned 6 feet because it’s well below the frost line where I am, but I guess in that part of Iran they probably don’t have to worry about that.
Mostly I was just wondering if you had found something on how deep those waterways were actually built.
Yeah thats exactly the issue I ran into. I started googling stable soil temp to confirm what I thought, and rapidly ran into a lack of answers lol. Any data I could find for free on websites didn’t seem to go very deep.
In terms of depth of the Qanats, yeah I was wondering the same. Without any modern tools I’m not sure how deep they would be willing to dig out (although I bet it’s easy digging in Iran, likely sand/dry dirt vs. clay and sopping wet boggy soil).
I am at work but I’ll see if I can dredge up info on Qanat depth
I wouldn’t call it obnoxious, it’s just pointing out that they are using terms that don’t align with what they stated. If nobody ever mentioned the difference, how can they ever learn? Not saying everyone needs “taught” but it really didn’t seem malicious like you seem to believe
Passive system doesnt mean u cannot play with thermodynamic laws, understand them and then cheat them (like they did) to make your passive’s system works.
Smart vs Facility (and the scramble who go with it)
Oh sorry, i meant “the destruction” bound to the facility by you know, capitalism. Because in my imagination an complex system would need more resources than the passive one, to be made.
Exactly what I thought. Thanks for the new fear, brotha! I hated these guys growing up. Think I still do. They were always around a pool changing area, and that set a fear in me for life I believe.
I didn’t see these until I was 10 or so, when we moved further south. They were equal parts cool and horrifying, but they made my mother uncomfortable. So she would call the kids out to mash them if she saw one. Became a regular service. We even drew up a logo for it at one point - a kind of cartoonish earwig with the no symbol around it.
Not quite an air conditioner, but it seems modernizing it could be a great idea for new constructions to save on power. Maybe as a supplement to Air Conditioners.
Not quite an air conditioner, but it seems modernizing it could be a great idea for new constructions to save on power. Maybe as a supplement to Air Conditioners.
It’s called “radiant floor cooling/heating” and this has existed for a while.
A radiant floor is just a heat transfer system that still needs a hot/cold source. Evaporative coolers (aka swamp coolers) are really the modern day equivalent.
Swamp coolers only work when the outdoor air is quite dry (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico). The resulting indoor air is very humid. Swamp coolers cannot make a big difference in temp. In NM they are perfect because the air is dry (too dry for comfort, IMO) and you only need to lower the temp by a small amount. So the resulting indoor air quality in NM is perhaps the best in the world for those who like ~65—70% humidity. A lot of swamp coolers in AZ have been replaced with A/C because the city temps have increased¹ to a point where swamp coolers cannot make a sufficient temp decrease. So I wonder if an AZ residents kept their swamp coolers going & added A/C. Note that A/C dries the interior air, so I suspect the swamp cooler might actually be make the A/C work harder in that scenario. If anyone knows something concrete about this I’d be interested in hearing it.
① One theory on the temp increase in AZ cities is simply more and more concrete covering the ground (roads, parking lots, driveways), less soil and vegetation. This means rainwater is drained off instead of having the large scale evaporative cooling effect of soil & vegetation absorbing water temporarily until it evaporates. IMO one correction (apart from reverting parking lots to gardens) is to get roofers installing vegetated rooftops. I really don’t understand why #vegetatedRooftops are nearly non-existent in the US. Pick any city and call every single roofing company in the region, and most likely not a single one of them can do #vegetatedRoofs.
One othe trick was to build houses close to each other with narrow streets between them, so they would be in the shade of buildings most of the time. This way the city can actually be cooler than the open area around it.
Of course this won’t work anymore with large modern glass buildings or wide roads between them.
The problem with that is it leaves little space for vegetation and soil, which give an outdoor evaporative cooling effect. The narrow streets approach should be combined with vegetated rooftops. An perhaps the vegetation should be able to thrive in the shade of solar panels.
Wind powered swamp cooler. Basically a humidifier, but it does lower the temperature. I’ve heard people call swamp coolers air conditioning, so I don’t think it’s wrong.
No, calling swamp coolers air conditioning is definitely wrong.
If it’s 100% humidity in your room, the swamp cooler is going to do absolutely nothing, but AC will cool it down and can even dehumidify a bit if you run it enough.
Swamp coolers are awesome, but they only work in dry climates unfortunately.
The water doesn’t actually have to be all that cool for swamp coolers, because it’s the evaporation that cools the environment and warm water actually evaporates quicker.
Amazing - I had no idea that anyone was making ice in the desert in BCE times. The wikipedia article seems to indicate that they did a lot of storing of ice in the Yakhchal structures - but it is confusing as to how they made it. It seems like they either gathered the ice from the mountains, or made it in outdoor shaded “ice pools” that were situated next to the Yakhchal. Surely the ice required winter desert temps to form? Otherwise how would the thermal mass of the ground ever get cool enough to allow ice to form, even with the magic of physics? The permanent shading helps, but year round-ice making surely wasn’t a thing, was it?
Seems like the ice pools were used for year round ice making at night. See the section on “Nocturnal ice making in early India and Iran”: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_cooling
It’s called evaporative cooling and it’s quite potent since water takes enormous amounts of energy when changing states. It takes around 5x the energy to convert 100°C water into 100°C vapor than it takes to increase temperature of said water from 0 to 100°. This energy has to be taken from somewhere and that is from the environment, dropping the temperature as a result. Problem with these is that the humidity of the air increases. Not much of a problem in desert, quite a bit problem in other places.
No, it’s a swamp cooler, which is still used today in drier climates. This is a desert, so yes the air is not humid, and yes the water is cool because it’s underground. Stop being so pedantic.
LOL Your comment makes it seem like you don’t think that it couldn’t possibly work, except that these things are still there and you can go visit them right now and feel how cool it is inside the buildings.
mildlyinteresting
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