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The Five Best Ways for Free Home Cooling with No AC

Posted on by dishanth
The Five Best Ways for Free Home Cooling with No AC

It’s hot these days. Here are the five common sense ways for home cooling with no AC.

  1. Close your curtains and blinds during the day. This will help to keep the sun’s heat out of your home. If you don’t have curtains or blinds, you can use sheets or towels to cover your windows. Close your curtains and blinds during the day.
  2. Run ceiling fans. Ceiling fans can help to circulate the air in your home, which can help to keep you cool. If you have a ceiling fan, ensure it is set to blow down.
  3. Use fans to create a cross breeze. If you have windows on opposite sides of your home, you can open them to create a cross breeze. This will help to draw the cooler air in from outside and push the hot air out.
  4. Take cool showers or baths. Taking a cool shower or bath can help to lower your body temperature. You can also use a wet towel to cool down your neck and forehead.
  5. Cook outside and unplug devices. Cooking outside on a barbeque, camp stove, RV, or other appliance outside will help keep your house cooler. The heat generated by an oven or a stove can quickly counteract any other efforts you made throughout the day.

Here are some additional tips to keep your home cool without air conditioning:

  • Ventilate your home at night. If it’s cooler outside than it is inside, open your windows at night to let in the cool air and begin the next day with a nice cool house.
  • Plant trees around your home. Trees can help to shade your home and keep it cooler in the summer.
  • Use reflective insulation. Reflective insulation can help to reflect the sun’s heat away from your home.
  • Seal up any air leaks. Air leaks can let in hot air, so sealing them up is important.

By following these tips, you can keep your home cool without air conditioning and save money on your energy bills.

 

 

 

 

Source  Happy Eco News

Could this colourful plant-based film replace the need for air conditioning?

Posted on by dishanth
Could this colourful plant-based film replace the need for air conditioning?

Scientists at Cambridge University in the UK are working on an eco-friendly alternative. Their invention consists of a plant-based film that stays cool when exposed to sunlight.

The material could someday be used to keep buildings and cars cool without the need for external power. Coming in a range of textures and bright iridescent colours, it’s aesthetically pleasing too.

How does the eco-friendly cooling film work?

For a material to stay cooler than the air around it during the daytime, there are two critical requirements. It must have high solar reflectance to reflect the warmth of the sun and not heat the air around it. It must also have a high emissivity in infrared bands to emit heat into outer space efficiently.

Only a few materials have these properties and scientists are already developing them into paints and films capable of what is known as ‘passive daytime radiative cooling’ (PDRC).

When applied to the surface of a car or building, it means that these materials create a cooling effect without consuming electricity or creating pollution.

How can PDRC materials be made more attractive?

Since they need to be solar reflective, PDRC materials are usually white or silver.

Adding colour would decrease their cooling performance. This is because coloured pigments selectively absorb specific wavelengths of light, only reflecting the colours we see. This extra light absorption creates a warming effect.

“These limited colours hinder the applications where visual appearance is a key consideration, such as for architecture, cars and clothes,” says project member, Dr Qingchen Shen.

To increase the desirability of these materials, colour is an important factor.

Along with the project’s lead investigator, Dr Silvia Vignolini, Dr Shen set out to research ways of achieving colour without the use of pigments.

They looked to structural colouration as a solution. This is where shapes and patterns reflect specific colours of light without the presence of pigmentation, as seen on soap bubbles and oil slicks.

Seeking a natural source of this phenomenon, the research team used cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) – derived from the cellulose found in plants – to create iridescent, colourful films without any added pigment.

“We specifically use cellulose-based materials for our films because cellulose is the most abundant polymer in nature,” says Dr Shen.

It is also one of the few natural materials capable of promoting PDRC.

After experimenting with basic colours, the researchers are now working on glittery CNC-ethyl cellulose films. They are also developing different textures that could blend in with various wood finishes.

How effective is the colourful cooling film?

The researchers created layered cellulose films in vibrant blue, green and red colours and put them to the test.

When placed under sunlight, they were an average of nearly 4°C cooler than the surrounding air.

One square metre of the film generated over 120 watts of cooling power, rivalling many types of residential air conditioners.

As a general guideline, bedrooms require around 80 watts per square metre and living spaces 125 watts of air conditioning capacity.

The researchers hope to find new ways to leverage CNC-ethyl cellulose films. These include adding sensors to detect environmental pollutants or weather changes.

Ultimately, they hope the film coating could serve several purposes at once. It could be used to both cool buildings and to alert to changing levels of pollutants in congested areas, for example.

 

 

 

 

Source Euronews Green

Air Conditioning in a Camping Tent – Just Add Water

Posted on by dishanth
Air Conditioning in a Camping Tent – Just Add Water

The fabrics currently used to make tents are engineered to block out winds and water to help keep their inhabitants dry and comfortable, but they tend to work both ways, preventing hot air from escaping from the tent. The tent can feel sweltering, even with plenty of ventilation.

You can always pack a portable air conditioner to drop the temperature inside your tent, but those require an ingredient that is often in short supply at rural campsites: electricity. Running a portable AC unit or even a simple fan on a solar panel for an extended period is impossible, and you do not want to carry batteries in your backpack.

Al Kasani, a researcher at the University of Connecticut’s Center For Clean Energy Engineering, drew inspiration from the way plants wick water from the ground and then sweat to cool themselves. Subsequently, he designed a self-cooling tent fabric that retains its thin and lightweight nature; with an added twist – it is fortified with titanium nanoparticles that absorb moisture from reservoirs at the base of the tent. This releases water across its surface, rapidly evaporating, resulting in a cooling effect that reduces internal temperature by up to 20 degrees.

Using either water sourced from a faucet at a campsite or water drawn from a stream in a rural setting, Kasani estimates that a gallon of water can keep a tent cool for up to 24 hours. You don’t need purified, clean water, evaporative cooling works with any water.

This upgraded fabric won’t be available in camping gear for a while—the material is still in the research phase—but according to the university, “industry interest has been high in Kasani’s technology.”

It will be interesting to see this type of product enter the mainstream. Any success with a passive cooling system like this will have spinoffs that can help in other ways. Suppose you can cool a camping tent by 20 degrees. In that case, you could also provide cooling shelters to protect vulnerable people living on the streets without access to air conditioning. A similar protection could be created for refugees or hospitals in hotter regions. Advances in technology might even find a way to use it to cool traditional buildings and reduce energy costs in warehouses. The potential is almost endless.

 

 

 

 

Source Happy Eco News

India has a looming air con headache. Does antiquity hold the solution?

Posted on by dishanth
India has a looming air con headache. Does antiquity hold the solution?

As the climate crisis makes the world hotter, people are looking to stay cool. By 2050, there could be three times as many air conditioning units on the planet as there were in 2018. But are an estimated 5.6 billion units — and their accompanying energy demands — really the answer?

In India, for example, the International Energy Agency believes air conditioning could account for 45% of peak electricity demand by 2050 unless things change. The vast majority of India’s electricity supply still comes from coal (although heavy investment in renewables is underway). Pair dirty energy with hydrofluorocarbons, the highly-potent greenhouses gases used in air conditioning units, and you have a solution that’s compounding the problem in the long term.
Luckily there’s people like New Delhi architect and designer Monish Siripurapu. The founder of Ant Studio is looking at the issue of cooling and is looking back — way back — for answers.
India is no stranger to passive cooling systems: the famous stepwells of Rajasthan have used water evaporation to offer relief from the heat for over 1,500 years. Jaali, a type of latticed screen filtering sunlight indoors, are another centuries-old method of keeping cool. But for his solution Siripurapu turned to the Ancient Egyptians, who would fan a porous jar of water to produce cool air.
A beehive-like terracotta cooling structure being built in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Credit: Ant Studio

 

Dubbed the CoolAnt, Siripurapu’s system comprises a honeycomb-like network of terracotta tubes. Water is circulated by an electric pump over the surface of the structure, inspired by a beehive for maximum surface area, he explains. Water evaporates from the terracotta surface when air passes through the tubes, cooling the air.
The studio’s cooling system was first conceived for factories and places where machines throw out hot air. With temperatures in summer upward of 50 degrees Celsius near the air exhausts, the CoolAnt system can reduce the heat to the mid-30s Celsius, its creator claims.
Ant Studio’s first model in a factory in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, is topped up with 200 liters of water every week, recycled by the factory, and used 3-4 hours a day, six days a week, explains Siripurapu.
An example of the CoolAnt natural ventilation system using rectangular terracotta as the evaporation surface. Credit: Ant Studio

 

“We are trying to re-adapt this in multiple places for different needs,” says Siripurapu. “We have implemented (it) in a café, in a school, and we have done one in a residence.”
Ant Studio’s work is also providing custom for local potters, who Siripurapu says are losing out to advanced manufacturing techniques. Typically, one cooling system requires around 700 tubes. Siripurapu says the studio is looking to scale up, and is fundraising and consulting with organizations like the United Nations Environmental Programme.
There is growing interest in a return to vernacular architecture, using localized methods and materials, and bioclimatic architecture, designing to take account of the local climate without needing to use additional energy to cool or heat buildings.
A traditional wind tower, or “barjeel,” in Dubai. The structure is open-sided at the top, with an interior dividing panel encouraging a cooler breeze to divert down into the building while air pressure forces warmer air up and out of the other side. Credit: KARIM SAHIB/AFP/AFP/Getty Images

 

In South East Asia, T3 Architecture Asia has designed affordable apartments in Ho Chi Minh City, and hotels in Cambodia and Myanmar, that feature ventilated roofs, fiber-glass insulation and open-air corridors negating the need for air con. At Expo 2020 Dubai next year, national pavilions will use numerous zero-energy cooling methods, including one inspired by “barjeel” wind towers, a concept that dates back 5,000 years.

“Civilization,” Siripurapu says, “cannot continue to build the same way that we are doing.”
“Unfortunately, as an architect, we are used to looking at a single client … we don’t really look at the bigger picture,” he adds. “The motivation now, what we are trying to do, is (see) how our spaces, our interventions, can actually impact millions of people.”
“We can still be very sustainable and make something really good.”

 

Source: edition.cnn.com