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(June 30, 2015 at 9:11 am)NoraBrimstone Wrote: No worries. It amused me more than anything. [FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE AND WINKING EYE]
How've you been? Long time no see and whatnot...
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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(June 30, 2015 at 4:16 am)pocaracas Wrote: Some of you guys are a bunch of wusses!
My apartment stands at the 3rd floor of a 7 floor building - just last week, we had a sort of a heat wave reaching 39C (102F) and my place remained nice and cool, meaning at about 25C (77F).
How do I do it? Clever use of blinds. Also, my windows face East and West, I have a whole other building on my south side.
Keeping the windows open so air flows is a must.
Then close the blinds so no sunlight lands indoors, but it still allows for air to move through - in the morning, open the western side wide open and close on the eastern side; in the afternoon, it's the opposite. If you won't be home during the day, just leave it ready for the afternoon.
Blinds technology!
I have this kind installed on all my windows:
I once showed this to a german friend of mine and he said it looks ugly, so he preferred interior blinds - it seems to be a cultural thing.
Interior blinds look pretty from the outside, are a nag on the inside, but provide you with a sort of extra "wall" and air can flow in between the window and the blind, by convection - hot air goes up. Northern european countries like to use these because it helps heat up a little beat - but isn't so nice when the sun is hot and you want to cool your place.
It is my impression that people in the US follow the aesthetics from northern europe, while being plagued by southern european heat (or worse). Something fails at the conception level and homes become frying pans in the summer and ice cubes in the winter. Thus the excessive reliance on central AC and/or heating.
(correct me if I'm wrong)
The first thing to remember is that with the advent of modern HVAC systems, homes have stopped being built in response to natural heating and cooling methods and have become slaves to electricity and technology. We are hugely dependent on artificial heating and cooling systems to make our homes comfortable and it has fundamentally changed the way we live in our homes and how those homes are designed.
The second thing is that while air flow is pretty important, you (the generic resident) need to be cautious about leaving windows open and promoting air flow through your home on really hot days. Often times all you get is 100 degree air moving through your house rather than the desired cooling breeze. It's also important to understand where the prevailing winds are coming from so that any artificial assistance you employ to cool your place (fans) isn't working against what nature is already giving you.
Third, the single most effective way to prevent your place from getting too hot is by stopping the sun's heat (and, by extension, light) from entering your house in the first place. Interior blinds don't work for this because the heat will already have passed through the window by the time the light itself is stopped, so nothing is achieved - the heat has already entered the home. The best method is to have blinds, sunscreens, overhangs or trees outside your windows that prevent sunlight (and the associated heat) from ever even entering your home. This is easiest to control when you have a southern exposure (in the Northern hemisphere, a northern exposure in the southern hemisphere). East and West exposures are the most difficult to control because of the extreme angles of the sun as it rises and sets - they're the exposures that require full exterior window shades in order to prevent the heat getting in, but that also blocks views.
There are tons and tons of books on how to design passively heated and cooled buildings out now - it's the "passive" part of the green/sustainable movement in architecture and it's generally the part of design that is least understood by architects today because accrediting programs like LEED ignore a lot of passive design choices in favor of giving points for the HVAC designers specifying a "more efficient" HVAC system (not that that isn't important, it's just that LEED overlooks a lot of design solutions). Residential is where passive systems are best suited, anyway, due simply to the scale of a lot of institutional and commercial buildings.
/rant
Teenaged X-Files obsession + Bermuda Triangle episode + Self-led school research project = Atheist.
(June 30, 2015 at 10:12 am)Clueless Morgan Wrote: The first thing to remember is that with the advent of modern HVAC systems, homes have stopped being built in response to natural heating and cooling methods and have become slaves to electricity and technology.
Maybe on your continent
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
I'm currently trying not to die of heat stroke. I thought it would be nice to sit out on my balcony for a while in the sunshine after work. I changed into shorts and a cami dress, and smothered myself in sunblock and went outside with my laptop and a drink. I lasted probably less than 10 minutes. It was too hot. I couldn't see my screen and the sunblock made me feel like I was actually melting. Inside is much better. There's a fan in here, and I can fucking see.
(June 30, 2015 at 10:43 am)NoraBrimstone Wrote: I'm currently trying not to die of heat stroke. I thought it would be nice to sit out on my balcony for a while in the sunshine after work. I changed into shorts and a cami dress, and smothered myself in sunblock and went outside with my laptop and a drink. I lasted probably less than 10 minutes. It was too hot. I couldn't see my screen and the sunblock made me feel like I was actually melting. Inside is much better. There's a fan in here, and I can fucking see.
Too true. My garden temp just reached 29.3C. Shouldn't complain though, we rarely reach such heights. Just a pity we are adapted to survive in grey drizzly climates it seems.
"Shouldn't complain"? I'm going to burn to death. I'm almost 100% Anglo-Celtic. I'm not evolved for exposure to direct sunlight at all, let alone this hell. I left work earlier and it felt like I'd opened the door to the oven. Excuse me while I complain, and wish for some good old British RAIN.
I just got back from the Blacksburg town council priorities meeting.
Myself and a few friends have been working on making backyard hens legal in Blacksburg for a few months now. We finally got it listed as one of the towns priorities. The process will still take a year or more, but this is a pretty big step in the right direction.
100% Humidity and 94°F (34.4° C) here in Nashville. I would literally perish if it weren't for central AC. If there is a perk for living in the south, it's that we decided decades ago that we ain't having that shit.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
PM me your email address to join the Slack chat! I'll give you a taco(or five) if you join!--->There's an app and everything!<---
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