Efforts to understand, improve, or do less harm to the world around me.


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Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Running without A/C

We're deep into summer here so I worked out a system by which our house can stay cool and use less electricity. We setup two fans on different sides of the house that run at about 120 watts each. At the front end of the house, we point one fan into the house while at the other end, the fan points outside. With both running simultaneously, we manage to continuously cycle out the air so that whatever temperature it is outside, it stays in our house. On cooler days, this is very inexpensive.

So, in total we're using about 240 watts to the around 10,000 watt (!) air condition unit we have. Some serious energy savings.

Coming home

After leaving the house for many hours, things gradually get very hot - much hotter than the air outside. When we run the fans for a few minutes previous to engaging the A/C, we don't have to re-cool all that extra hot air.

Larger houses

I suspect in a bigger house four fans could do the same thing, ideally with the intake fan close to the ground and the exaust fan close to the ceiling, as hot air rises. Two story houses could handle this beautifully by having the intake fans on the ground floor and exaust fans on the second.

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