Slashdot Asks: Beating the Summer Heat? 421
July is always one of the hottest months in the U.S., but this year the heat got an early start. Sustained hot weather has slammed huge parts of the country, and led to some serious consequences. All those AC units employed to bring some relief to homes have contributed to the extended post-storm power outage in the eastern part of the country; five days in, the count is still over a million customers in the dark. (I'm writing from Austin; this year Texas's famously warm weather is a little less impressive by comparison to the midwest, the Carolinas, and many other places; temperatures are expected to remain under 100 until Saturday.) If you're in one of the severely affected areas, how has it affected you? More importantly, what strategies have you used to beat the heat in the absence of (or simply unreliable) electricity? Details help. In particular, how are you keeping the human and animal members of your household safe from overheating? Read on below for an extended set of questions on dealing with the ongoing heat wave of 2012's early summer, and respond to any of them that make sense in your situation. Note, answers are of course encouraged from people who aren't in the worst-hit areas, too! Though you're free to respond however you'd like, it would be useful if you start with your location right at the top of (or in the title of) your comment, so others can scan them easily.
- How hot is hot for you, locally? What temperature extremes have you seen in your own dwelling or neighborhood in recent weeks? (Also, how are you measuring them, if in any way more specific than reading local weather reports? Do you have a home weather station, and is it hooked to an upstream data feed like The Weather Underground?)
- Have local power systems failed, and if so for how long? Do you have a generator, and do you have any advice for others who are considering one?
- Some people (especially kids) face greater risks than others in sustained heat, and some types of medicine require refrigeration. What are the consequences for you and your household of extreme heat?
- If air conditioning is part of your strategy for keeping cool, what do you do to maximize its effectiveness? (Insulate or cover windows? Run it at certain times of day? Raise the thermostat and rethink your idea of "room temperature"?)
- If your power goes out, how prepared are you for a one-hour blackout? What about a day, or a week? Have you taken any measures to keep your life sane if a storm (or just a glitch in the grid) robs your home of AC, TV, and PC? Even if your local summer weather hasn't been unusually hot thus far this year, are you keeping more water or other supplies on hand in case your area later gets gets the heat-and-darkness treatment?
- What advice would you give to others who want to maintain safety and sanity while under the broiler? (Especially useful are ideas for city dwellers, who don't generally have space for an extra freezer or a safe place for a generator.)
- Whether you're in one of the worst hit areas or not, are you taking any steps to protect electronics and data from outages or extreme heat? Have you seen any failures that you believe to be caused by temperature extremes?
- Finally, what are you doing to find some relief from this summer's heat, other than cranking up the AC? Are you spending more time at the local pool? Waking up early to enjoy morning temperatures? Scanning San Francisco real estate prices?
I hope your Independence Day is a good one, no matter the temperature.
Atlanta area... (Score:5, Informative)
Cooling Without Power (or very little power) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/cooling-without-power.html [builditsolarblog.com]
Early Planning for Global Warming (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Shemagh/Keffiyeh. (Score:5, Informative)
Shemagh / Keffiyeh only work in dry/arid environments. Crank the humidity up and you'll probably kill yourself from heat stroke while wearing it.
Reason for their non-popularity in the jungle :D
Re:Cooling Without Power (or very little power) (Score:5, Informative)
I was just about to post about these general methods.
Shadowing things helps massively.
Seriously hot areas sometimes have laws on the colors your house can be, sometimes even forcing you to essentially white only.
Make things as reflective as possible.
Even if you have to release a sail on the opposite side of the sun-facing side of your house, it helps. (this helps because if you open your windows on opposite sides, one side is cool, the other boiling, you get a nice air current)
The more in shadow you can make it, the better. Just being on the opposite side of the sun won't help, it needs to be really dark.
Sadly this won't work on all homes because some idiots decided it was a great idea to build houses that weren't in line with the way the sun travels...
Sprinklers.
A fountain works brilliantly in this case. More so if it generates a nice mist on collisions. Make as many falls as possible to maximize this. (plus it sounds real nice)
Even better if it refills automatically when it falls below a certain level.
That hose on roof sprinkler system is such a GOOD idea. I never thought of doing that before.
If you could make a system like that run on automation, ultimate house cooling. (you'd need to basically intercept the water stream coming down the pipes, which I am sure I remember reading is illegal in some areas of the world, make sure to check beforehand)
Coolboxes are fairly effective.
Basically an inverse heatsink that takes heat out of the air in to ice inside the container. Bonus points for dry ice or more exotic.
More effective if placed at fans and windows.
If you can make a system that has the ice in a basement and cycles the pipes up through the house, ultimate liquid cooled house.
If you do actually do this, make sure the pipes are also at ceiling level. I know this doesn't exactly sound safe in the slightest, but heat does rise.
Make sure things are sealed! This is advanced so shouldn't really be attempted unless you are experienced with putting pipes together. (or you know someone who is absolutely capable of it, not just "oh yeah I could do it!" friendly favor type help)
Try to find breeze channels in your house and attempt to maximize them. These are both a menace and a very useful cooling system.
Many of those above can be combined in various ways for separate methods of cooling.
For people and animals
wet towels, cool strips and hats for the face.
A water sprayer on a rough spray / mist setting if you can change the density, spray yourself with water every so often.
White clothes, nothing else.
Make sure they are thin and loose to allow sweat to get out.
Make sure things are covered and not open to sunlight. That is the worst thing to do in heat.
Most of these things are fairly simple to do for an average family to do with a little DIY.
Some are more advanced, especially if you attempt to place pipes around a house.
There is far more things you could do, some even involving simple DIY systems, but it also involves some electronics and pump systems which is beyond the scope of this, really.
Alternatively, make a massive sterling engine in your garden connected to some pumps that moves water around your house.
Because why the hell not? Steampunk as F&*@.
Use the tried and true old methods (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not an American, I live in Southern Europe where temperatures often go over 40C (*9/5 +32 = 104F IIRC the conversion).
Our ancestors managed to survive without AC using common sense.
1. Close every shutter early, and open them late (when the temperature is cooler outside). You don't want curtains, it won't work.
2. Limit your movements : you don't want to open the front door very ten minutes.
3. Shut down every electronic devices, or isolate the room in which they are.
4. Have a nap during the hottest hours of the day ( 2-5 PM), and profit of the coolest hours of the day : early in the morning, or a bit hotter, late at night. (Obviously, if you're not working, and have the time to do it.)
5. Drink often, and drink water.
6. Take care of the young, and the elderly. The latter are usually forgotten, and left alone. Have a look at the 2003 summer in France/Europe if you want to know what not to do. Sometime people were found dead days or even weeks after they actually died.
That's basic things that can make quiet a difference.
Re:White roofs help greatly. (Score:5, Informative)
Generally, you don't want to heat your attic. This is why properly designed houses have either a vented attic (designed to stay as close to outside temperature as possible) or thick insulation against the roof deck. Cathedral ceilings (i.e. no attic) also should have thick insulation in the ceiling. Either way, the roof should not contribute to heating the house in the wintertime unless there is a design fault.
Do NOT do a DIY on a automatic power generator (Score:4, Informative)
Do NOT do a DIY on a automatic power generator or try to jumper a manual generator to your house as if you do not do it the right way it can back feed and kill workmen trying to fix the power lines.
Re:Atlanta area... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sorry, but, WHAT?!? (Score:4, Informative)
You should plan on one minimum 3-day outage per year with the current electrical grid, on a national average. If you want to drop that to 8 hours per year, expect to pay about $1,400 per kW peak demand per year more. If you want to go to 45 minutes per year, it should be another $700/kW.
An interesting thing about that number is that it is actually cheaper to put in your own generator (or even solar with batteries!) than having the utility do it. The payback is only a couple years worst case.
The issue is that for higher reliability you need to limit distance effects and be able to tolerate maintenance activities.
Re:White roofs help greatly. (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, you can think of black as a heat conductor, while white is a heat insulator. So a white roof will actually keep your house warmer in winter. In winter you'll have sunlight heating the black roof more than the white. But unless it heats it more than the interior temperature, the black roof is still going to radiate interior heat away more quickly. And at night the white roof will win by a huge margin.
Re:Turn off your mining rigs (Score:4, Informative)
Using a heat pump to recover energy is as silly as thinking you can build a perpetual motion machine by connecting a generator to a motor and having the motor power the generator. It's fantasy.
Build a sealed box. The bottom box contains 40% ammonia, 60% water.
Run a pipe from the box, up into a reflux chamber (pack glass beads or a copper pot scrubber into the pipe, it'll make water condense out but pass ammonia), then across, into a condenser that zigzags down.
Connect the condenser to a pipe that runs diagonally down and to the bottom of the reservoir.
Attach really hot shit to the box.
Watch ice form on the condenser.