Seeing a lot of contrarians in this thread who just don’t like that the Middle East had literally cool tech before America… pardon, before the people who stole America from the Americas, had literally cool tech.
Probs they are gonna call this thing “weapon of mass destruction” as a pretense for the next Yearly Oil Extraction invasion, conveniently ignoring that from an environmental perspective “”“modern”“” AC is over twelve hundred times the WMD Iranian Air Conditioners ever were.
I was told that the houses in trinidad, Cuba have a similar cooling effect. Also the round white houses in tunesia have a cooling effect. Any tunesian or Cubans here?
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.
That’s where this insect family gets its latin name: Dermaptera, i.e. “skin wing”, as the wings are usually hidden under a leathery flap. They also are super complex in the way they unfold from under these flaps.
Also, earwigs are completely harmless and cool and should be left alone. If anything, they can be beneficial in gardens, as they hunt other, harmful insects.
Harmless in the sense that they aren’t dangerous, but they are capable of biting. Source: one was in my headphones a few years back and was biting my ear. I initially thought my headphones were just really itchy.
In my headphones!
shudders
I still check my headphones every time before putting them on now
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
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.
mildlyinteresting
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