ecocheap

Now we’re finally reaching the end of our series on Cooling Your Home Without Air Conditioning. So far we’ve covered the basic principle, keeping heat out of your home, and circulating air inside your home as strategies for making life inside your home more tolerable in the summer.

The great thing about these strategies is that most of the can be implemented if you choose to use air conditioning in order to keep usage (and expenses) under control. Our last article on this subject series, minimizing heat build-up inside your home follows suit.

This will hopefully turn out to be a much shorter article than the others we’ve written on the subject, because there’s really not much to discuss here.

We’ll break this down into two areas: minimizing heat, and minimizing humidity.

Minimizing Heat
In the summertime, you’d do well to consider that pretty much every appliance you run will generate heat. Ovens, televisions, computers, etc. all give off heat and make it feel warmer in your home.

Use these items as little as possible. Do your best to do all cooking outside. We suggest prepping items in the kitchen, and rolling them outside to your grilling area. Likewise, look to foods (fresh fruits and veggies, cheeses, cold soups, etc.) that can be served cold. Not only will you avoid the heat ovens generate, the food will cool you off as well.

If you are still using your oven in the heat of the summer day, see if there’s a way to effectively “cut off” your kitchen from the rest of the home. Galley-style kitchens may not be as chic as the massive open kitchens of today, but the style of yester-year has an important benefit: it’s very, very easy to install a door and insulate the heat (and noise) of ovens, dishwashers, etc. from the rest of the home.

Minimizing Humidity
We’ve already discussed that the main benefit of air conditioning is not the cool air, but the fact that it dehumidifies air. If you’re not goingto be running an air conditioning unit, then you need to do everything you can to keep humidity build up in your home to a minimum.

Cooking indoors doesn’t just increase heat, it increases humidity in your home via steam. If you must cook indoors, be sure your venting systems are up to snuff. Any steam that doesn’t get vented to the outside will end up making your home feel warmer.

Likewise, keep hot showers to a minimum (not that you’ll want one anyway). Shower with the bathroom door closed, and be sure you’re running the fan in your bathroom to vent the steam outdoors. If your bathroom has a window, try opening it to let the steam escape there, and shower in the evenings (when you can open the windows in your home, instead of letting it linger during the day when the house is closed up).

Cooking and showers aren’t the only thing that increase humidity in your home, fabric items are another common culprit. Drapes, bedding, clothes, cushions, upholstery, etc. all absorb moisture and make the air in your home feel warmer. Minimize this as much as possible.

Keep clothes put away. Use drapes only where they serve a clear purpose (like keep the hot sun out). Use as little bedding as possible. Quit using decorative items made of cloth (like throw blankets and pillows) that retain moisture.

Well, that’s pretty much it. Didn’t I promise this one would be shorter than the others? Like I said, this subject is much more intuitive than many of the others: look for sources of heat and humidity that you are creating within your home, and zap ‘em!

Return to Cooling Your Home Without Air Conditioning: The Plan.

In our previous installments of “Cooling Your Home Without Air Conditioning” we’ve explained the fundamental way people can make living without air conditioning tolerable, and gone through some simple, inexpensive ways for keeping the heat out of your house.

While those parts are very important, it’s also important to keep in mind that good air circulation can make the air in your home feel a solid 10 degrees cooler. Practically speaking, that means that with plenty of fresh moving air, even 85 degrees can feel pretty good. In other words, if it’s 85 degrees outside, if you have a good plan for moving plenty of air through your home, you can make it feel like you’ve cooled your home to 75 degrees.

At our house, we actually keep all the windows open and fans going on any day where the predicted temperature is 85 degrees or lower. We don’t implement our “close up the house” plans until the mercury hits the 85-90 degree range.

So, let’s talk about how to set up a great circulation system. We’ll cover attic fans, window units, ceiling fans, and oscillating fans, and the situations where each are the most helpful.

Attic Fans
Attic fans (or whole house fans) are designed to suck air out of your house and into the attic. This style fan is different from an attic ventilator, which sucks air from the attic to the outside (keeping your attic cooler).

During the days when it’s cool enough to keep the windows open, using an attic fan to draw air through the windows and the rest of the house is an outstanding way to create air flow. If you’ve had to close up the house because it’s just too hot outside, once it’s cool enough to throw open the windows your attic fan can suck out all of the hot air from the day within 5-10 minutes.

These things are extremely efficient and are an excellent investment if you don’t already have one (unfortunately, I’ve noticed that newer homes don’t often come equiped with attic fans). Purchasing a new attic fan will be pricey, but believe me, they’re worthwhile. You’ll need to calculate the cubic footage of your home and order accordingly.

Window Fans
Window fans are another important component of your strategy. If you have a whole house fan, then window fans are really secondary components (and possibly unnecessary, all though we DO use them in our home). But if you don’t have the benefit of attic fan circulation, then window units are the crux of your plan.

Window units can do two things: blow in outside air, and suck the hot air out of your home (yes, they do make high capacity units similar to attic units that are designed to fit into your windows). But window units have another important benefit. While attic fans just suck everything up and into your attic, window units can be set up to facilitate cross ventilation.

So, for example, you can create cross ventilation by blowing air into one window, and sucking air through another window. In my opinion, the highest and best use of window fans is to blow air from a shaded window (hopefully on the north side of your home) into the house, and put a window fan in another window on the south side of your home to suck that air back outside.

You can set up wonderful currents this way, and even build breezeways inside your home (with nothing more than simple fans!).

Ceiling Fans and Oscillating Fans
If it’s so hot that you’ve had to resort to closing up your house and waiting for the reprieve of the cool night air, the ceiling and oscillating fans are your lifeline.

Ceiling fans circulate air within a particular room or area, and when functioning efficiently can make a room feel 6-8 degrees cooler than the ambient temperature.

Oscillating fans can be used to cool a particular point (as in, point one on yourself to cool off), or can be used to create cross ventilation currents within particular areas (much like window fan units).

Other Options
Another option to strongly consider, if you have an existing hvac system, is running the fan system on your hvac. Running that will provide air circulation, but probably won’t make you feel all that much cooler. However, if you run that and an attic fan, you can create some nice air flow even with your windows closed.

Likewise, if you have a basement, you can suck air out of the cool basement and into the warmer living area in order to make the living area cooler. Again, when combined with other solutions (like sucking the air through an attic fan), this can really work to cool things off in your home.

But even air circulation won’t help you if you’re creating tons of heat inside your living area by other means. In the next (and final section), we’ll discuss ways to reduce the creation and build up of heat inside your home).

Return to Living Without Air Conditioning: The Plan.
Continue to Part 4: Circulating Interior Air.

In part one of this series, we discussed the basic principle of life without air conditioning:

Suck cool air into your house at night. Keep hot air out during the day.

We explained that even on the hottest days, a well insulated home will only see a thermal gain of about one degree (fahrenheit) per hour. But even though that’s still tolerable in most climates, it pays (both in dollars and in comfort) to do everything you can to minimize that thermal gain.

The main entry points for heat in your home are windows and your attic. These are the culprits that will lead to rising temperatures in your home, and they are fairly easily and inexpensively neutralized.

The attic
First, let’s discuss the attic. We all know attics get hot. Really hot. HELLISHLY hot on summer days. They are generally not climate controlled, have poor ventillation, and black asphalt shingles soak up the heat from the sun. What you may be surprised to learn, is how much longer it takes that attic to cool off in the evening than the rest of your home.

As you might imagine, people in Florida have a keen interest in keeping homes cool. The University of Florida did a study of new homes where they asked homeowners to cut the a/c for a few days to see what would happen.

Surprisingly, the results were that the most miserable time of day for those homeowners was in the early evening. Even though it was cooling off outside, the insides of these homes were staying REALLY hot, and temperatures were still climbing.

So the researchers investigated and found that the problem was attics. Specifically, heat got in and was trapped. It couldn’t escape through the heavy fiberglass insulation these homeowners thought they were doing themselves a favor by installing. So even though temperatures outside were falling, the attic held heat over the home and so the temperatures in the living areas continued rising.

The solution to the attic problem is to keep heat from entering in the first place, and to mitigate whatever heat does enter with good ventilation.

Take a trip up to your attic and see what the ventilation system looks like. Make sure any and all vents (called “soffits”) are unobstruted. Check any gable openings as well.

If there is a fan in your attic, either gable mounted or roof mounted, make sure it works. It’s probably not worth it to leave it on at all times, but they do sell attic fan thermostats that will automatically turn on when the temperature of your attic reaches a certain level.

If you don’t have a fan to ventilate your attic, you may not need one. Monitor the temperature in the space over the course of a few days, and see if existing passive ventilation is doing its job and clearing out hot air. If it is, I would skip the fan step. If it’s not, then by all means, get thyself an attic fan and use it!

So, ventilation is important and something that can be addressed quickly and easily. Quite often, homeowners find that they already have the appropriate systems in place, they just need to uncover vents and turn on ventilation fans.

But there are also practical ways to keep heat from entering the attic in the first place. If you’re constructing a new home, there are all kinds of roofing choices (light shingles, metal roofing, etc.) that can greatly decrease the amount of heat entering your attic. But for the purposes of this article, we’re assuming you’re retrofitting an existing home.

Hands down, the most effective thing you can do is install a radiant barrier in your attic. We’ll do an entire article on radiant barriers some day, but for now, what you need to know is that this stuff is pretty much space age tin foil that can reduce the cost of cooling your home by a solid 40% (according to studies at the University of Florida).

Radiant barriers work by reflecting heat from the sun’s rays. You can install them on your attic ceiling, on the walls, and on the attic floor. These babies are easy to install, inexpensive (about $100 shipped for 1000 square feet of material), and work REALLY well.

Today’s radiant barriers are perforated to allow moisture to escape (eliminating mold concerns in humid areas), are multi-layered (so you don’t have to replace them due to dust build up), and come in a wide variety of applications (some are affixed to bubble wrap, fiberglass insulation, or foam).

To install on the ceiling/walls of your attic, you can literally just staple gun the stuff to whatever surface you want it to be on. For floor installations, you can simply roll it out over your attic floor (no glue, staples, etc. necessary).

To keep heat from entering your attic, there is no better solution for existing homes than installing a radiant barrier.

Windows
Windows are the other place where thermal energy from the sun enters homes en masse. Luckily, we have solutions for you that don’t involve purchasing $10,000 worth of insanely expensive new windows for your home.

The best solution possible is to keep the sun from hitting your windows in the first place. Once the sun hits your windows, the heat has to be disipated (in this case, into your house). There’s no getting around that. Yes, shades, blinds, etc. can help lessen the blow, but the heat will simply be transfered into the walls instead of the living area. Your house will still get warmer.

So, shade the OUTSIDE of your windows. You accomplish this with existing vegetation (ie, trees) if it’s available. But if that’s not an option, consider UV filtering window screens, or window awnings to shade your windows.

Solar screens allow you to see out your window, but filter UV rays entering your home by as much as 95%. Generally, I recommend getting the filters that are in the ballpark of 75-85%. Once you cross that threshold, they soar in price and you don’t really get much bang for your buck. Solar screens also provide additional privacy (it makes it harder for people to see into your home).

People with solar screens installed estimate that they observe a 10-15 degree difference over windows in rooms without solar screens, and they reduce their energy expenditures by 30%. Obviously, solar screens can be a big help in reducing thermal gain inside your home, and your need for air conditioning.

Window awnings consist of frame that holds metal or canvas in order to shade an area. Those areas might include doors, patios, or windows. As a quick aside, be sure your door is either covered by a porch or an awning. They present the same problems as windows.

Metal installations are more expensive, but white metal is highly emissive, and will reflect a large amount of solar radiation back into the air. But as the ultimate purpose of the awning is to shade windows so that the sun doesn’t hit the window, canvas will work just fine.

There are a gazillion (it seems) different ways to install awnings, different styles to choose from, and different materials to use. We’ll have to cover awnings more fully in a special post at a later date.

If solar screens and awnings are out of your price range (both are reasonable diy projects), try this cheap, ingenious solution:

Purchase mylar shades (you know, the ones used for car windshields) at the dollar store. Duct tape them together to fit the size window you need. Purchase a white roller shade (or bamboo roll shades work fine as well) and afix your mylar sheet to it (this step is mostly for appearance sake, but does provide added durability). Then attach to the outside of your house.

These babies are cheap and effective!

Once you’ve taken care of the outside of the windows, implement all of the things you’ve probably heard already for the inside of your windows:

-Use white blinds and keep them drawn to keep heat out.
-Same deal on the curtains.
-Consider installing cellular blinds for added efficiency.

Other considerations
Even though windows and the attic contribute to thermal gain in the home more than any other culprit, keep in mind that once any sunlight hits your house, the heat has to go somewhere. So an important strategy is to overall limit the amount of sun that hits your roof and walls.

The most practical ways to do this (aside from installing a new roof and siding) are to use plants to shade the areas. Use trees to shade your home if possible. Grow vines up trellises to shade the walls of your home. The roof is a bit tricker to shade in the absence of trees, but with the proper support systems in place, I’ve seen REALLY neat homes where homeowners have grown gourds on ropes over the roof.

Even keeping the heat out, air circulation is very important in order to maintain the comfort of your environment. We’ll discuss circulating the air inside your living space in our next section.

Return to Cool Your Home Without Air Conditioning: The Plan
Continue to Part 3: Circulating Interior Air

The fundamental thing everyone needs to understand about successfully living without air conditioning isn’t entirely obvious. In fact, it’s probably the exact opposite of what you’d do on your own (throw some fans in the windows, right?).

The most important thing you can do to stay cool on hot days without air conditioning is to keep your house closed up. That’s right- during the day, when temperatures start rising, close all your doors and windows. You don’t want any of that nasty, humid, hot air getting into your house.

It’s not until temperatures begin to fall in the evenings that you want to open your home up and let the cool air in. So if you choose to live without air conditioning, the premise of your game plan should be this:

Suck cool air into your house at night. Keep hot air out during the day.

If you’re shaking your head right now, convinced that this is a crazy idea, keep something in mind: during the hottest days of summer, the ambient air temperature of a well insulated home will only rise by one degree per hour.

That means that even on the hottest days, where temperatures are rising 10 hours or more, the interior temperature of your home will rise about 10 degrees (maybe less).

So, by sucking in all the cool night air you can (in our area, an average summer night is 65-70 degrees) potentially cool your home enough so that the raise in temperature won’t heat your home that much when it’s closed up.

For example, even on the hottest days, the interior of our home is unlikely to climb above the 80 degree threshold, without air conditioning. Is 80 degrees on the uncomfortable side? Sure.

But we’ll discuss more ways to circulate the air and make that number feel a bit more tolerable in a subsequent section. In our next section, we’ll show you how to vastly minimize your home’s thermal gain in the summer.

Translation: we’ll show you every trick we know to keep the temperature in your home from rising after you close it up in the mornings.

Return to Living Without Air Conditioning: The Plan.
Continue to Part 2: Keeping the Heat Out.

You may have read in a previous post that our home’s hvac (whole house air conditioning unit) recently went to wherever hvac’s go when they die. Having known that our unit was going for awhile, we developed a plan for what to do when the inevitable failure occurred. We’ll outline our plan, and explain some principles anyone can adopt in order to live without air conditioning.

Living without air conditioning is certainly an attainable goal. Of course, there are certain climates in the United States where that goal is more attainable than elsewhere. In areas of the northern US, living without air conditioning is possible with minimal lifestyle/home modifications. In other areas (particularly humid areas), a/c units are just as useful for their dehumidification benefits as for their cooling features.

Depending on where you live, you may have air conditioning alternatives such as swamp coolers and earth tubes. Swamp coolers work well in the arid, desert climates of the southwestern United States, where adding moisture to the air creates an evaporative cooling effect that does a great job making the ambient air feel much cooler.

Earth tubes work by drawing the air from your home through tubes burried several feet under ground. Because the temperatures there are more stable and cooler than the outside air, a heat exchange takes place, whereby your home essentially uses the earth as a “heat sink.” These are a great idea, and cost pretty much nothing once installed (but installation can be pretty stinking expensive).

While swamp coolers and earth tubes are both great ideas, and save tons of money over traditional air conditioning units (not to mention being vastly more eco-friendly), they do not work well in humid climates. In fact, they can be extremely dangerous (promoting mold growth).

We assume you’re reading this article because you want practical, real life ways to reduce your air conditioning dependence, or eliminate it altogether. Though automobiles get lots of attention for their environmental detriments, the fact of the matter is that 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from homes. So reducing the amount of energy you’re using in your own home is not only cheaper, it’s doing the world a BIG favor.

So, now for some practical ways to live without air conditioning. The vast majority of these principles and suggestions can be implemented even if you do use air conditioning (in order to reduce consumption).

The information we need to provide to our readers on this topic is far to vast for a single post. To enhance readability, we’ve broken this topic down into four parts:

1. The Fundamental Rule of Life Without Air Conditioning
2. Keeping the Heat Out
3. Circulating Interior Air
4. Reducing Heat Build-Up Inside Your Home

As each of the four parts are published, we will update links in this post and between the posts so that they are all linked together.