Cooling

Last year there was a popular posting about making your own air conditioner. The idea was to run pipes through a bowl of cold water (perhaps with ice), and weave the pipes inside a normal house fan. Turn on the fan and it blows across the pipes exchanging heat and cold, cooling the air, and voila your house is cool. I started to try the idea myself, wasn't able to get it to work, and I even tried a different version with hanging a cloth in a bowl of water.

In The deluded world of air conditioning William Saletan offers a very interesting perspective. "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable".

When you air condition a building you're taking heat that's inside the building and moving it outside. That's what an air conditioner is, a heat pump. The fluids that go through an air conditioning system? They're the medium through which heat is exchanged, or rather pumped, from one place to another.

As I mentioned in Make your own air conditioner, I want to minimize my power use. So I'm looking at alternatives to buying another window sized air conditioner (especially as none of the stores have any in stock).

One alternative I saw was to drape a cloth in a bowl of water, and blow air over the cloth with a fan. The evaporation is supposed to make the air cool. I tried this, and it didn't make any effect.

It's been hot the last few days. In St. Louis severe storms knocked out power over most of the city. In general the U.S. has had a real serious heat wave, and in England they've set another all time high temperature record. In the SF Bay Area it's been very hot for this area.

We're having a heck of a heat wave this summer. I live in the SF Bay Area and the temperatures are moderated a bit by the ocean. But yesterday it was over 100 where I live, which is an outrageous temperature. I know, I know, 100 isn't so outrageous in other parts of the U.S. but in the SF Bay Area our climate is highly moderated by the ocean. Usually severe winter or summer weather is but a rumor we hear about from friends in other parts of the country.