MMM talks about sucking it up and doing without central air conditioning to save money, but there simply are places in the US that become difficult to live in without AC for a couple weeks each summer. I wanted to share a couple of ideas I had about dealing with that particular problem.
I live in Kentucky, which tends to be rather humid for most of the summer months, but only during the 'dog days' of summer is air conditioning truly required; so I look around my house, and see all of the modern marvels that make our lives easier (i.e. computers, dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, washers & dryers (tried the clothesline thing, doesn't work reliablely in Kentucky's climate, if it's not too humid for the clothes to dry before they smell like mildew, it's already raining) ) and I, of course, can't help but notice that all of them take energy to function, and therefore put off heat. This is fine for two-thirds of the year, since they contribute to the heating demand of the home, but that last third of the year, we are fighting against the natural flow of energy. And that is a costly fight.
While at my workplace, a factory, the entire factory is heated in winter, as the machines contribute to the heat demand. However, during the summer season, only certain areas are are conditioned; functioning as respites from the heat & humidity on the worst days. These areas include restrooms, offices and meeting rooms; but not the factory floor where the vast majority of the machines reside. I propose taking a small inner room, one with no exterior walls, and making a getaway room during the worst heat of the summer day. This is similar to what children would do during the 'dog days' by hiding inside the family root cellar for a couple hours playing games like jacks or marbles. A modern walk-in closet fits the bill nicely.
So, then, how do we keep the room cool? Well, I have thought of two potentially low cost ways of doing so. The first, and the title of this post, is to use a phase change material in safe containers stored in the getaway room. The ideal material for this purpose is heptadecane, which is basicly just a purified form of wax, similar to petroleum jelly, with a melting point about 72 degrees F (that's about 22 degrees C for our metric friends). I've found this purified oil/wax can be bought in 5 gallon buckets from a few places around the web. (this is just one, not a recommendation;
http://www.jbwax.com/Products.html )
We could place the 5 gallon buckets into the getaway room as they are, and use them as the base for a small table or some such, or transfer the wax into cleaned pickle jars, peanut butter jars, etc. As long as they were well cleaned, and well marked (so no one could mistake it for something actually edible, if we were to use this getaway room as an actual pantry also); the additional surface area of the containers might improve performance. The room cold be sealed & insulated, or not, but there shouldn't be any power using machines inside the room, nor should the lighting be anything other than the most energy efficient available, presently LEDs. With a decent LED reading light & comfortable chair, this room could be a refuge from the heat of the world.
But the above method pretty much assumes that the house can cool off below 70 F overnight, and give the wax a chance to divest it's accumulated heat and solidify. In some areas, that's not realistic. For those areas, I have a moderately cheap solution as well. Somewhere nearby, but not
in the getaway room, a small deep freezer should be sighted. It can be a beat up one from craigslist, or even an older & less efficient one if you can get it cheap enough, because we won't be keeping food in it, and we won't be running it all year.
We will be placing plastic jugs of water (old juice or milk jugs, but the clear juice bottles are more likely to survive several freezings than milk jugs are). A week or so before the actual 'dog days' start (yes, we all know roughly when that happens in our area; in my area it's no sooner than mid-July an runs through August; but isn't continuous. Other areas may have a different pattern.) we stock the deep freezer with water bottles, and let it run unmolested. When the real heat hits and we need to escape, we turn on an aquarium air pump that is
inside the deep freezer and has tubing running into our room, ending with air stone diffusers
above our reading chair (cold air falls) and we prop the top of the deep freezer open slightly with a small object (just the tubing itself might be enough) so that air has a chance to enter into the deep freezer as we pump it out with the aquarium pump. We can unplug the deep freezer, or not; it won't matter in the couple hours we are reading a good book, or listening to our favorite podcasts in the dark, or just napping in a recliner. Once the peak heat of the day is past, and we can't really read, listen or nap any longer; we just turn off the aquarium pump and close the freezer lid. It will recover by the next day. Once September starts, we unplug the deep freezer for the year, remove the ice bottles (use them in your cooler? water the houseplants with meltwater?) and prop open the lid to allow it to dry out till next summer.
Any thoughts or critiques?
