Cool Your House Without Any A.C

How to cool your house without an A.C ?

You can reduce the temperature of your room if you have the following :

1.An Aquarium full of fish and live plants

2.Silica Gel

When you put the above three items in your room just under the window, room temperature will be reduced drastically .

Logic :

Heat will always flow from higher to lower temperate region. In summer, outside temperature is more than room temperature. So, heat enter our room and increase the temperature so that an equilibrium can be achieved. But in turn this incoming heat raise the temperature of the room.

During summer air is full of moisture. When the relative humidity is very high we face a sultry condition.

So to reduce the incoming heat we will need something more cooler than our room. And to reduce the moisture we need something that can absorb it.

Aquariums are much cooler than our room. The fish in the aquarium cools it further as they are cold blooded. Thus making the adjacent places cooler. You can feel this phenomena by visiting any gift shop.

You will feel that places where the fish tanks are kept are more cooler than the places far away from them, in the same gift store.

Generally our rooms are not as big as the gift store. So a simple rectangular glass tank with some live plants are enough to reduce the room temperature.

If your room is big you need a big aquarium and if small ,general aquariums will serve the purpose.

Silica Gel will absorb the moisture in your room.Place 250 grams of silica gel just beside the aquarium.

More oxygenated air in your room will increase the CI (Comfortability Index) of your room. More Carbon di Oxide will do the opposite. Any plant will consume Carbon di Oxide to make food and release Oxygen as the byproduct. So a plant in your room will always increase oxygen and reduce Carbon di Oxide and thus increasing the CI.(But the problem is at nighttime plant will absorb Oxygen and release Carbon di Oxide )

Dwarf Bamboo trees can provide release large amount of oxygen in the room.So keep 2 dwarf bamboo tree just beside the aquarium.

So,

Moisture : Absorbed by Silica Gel

Heat : Reduced by Aquarium

CI : Increased by the Dwarf Bamboo Tree.

Even after you place all these, your room will not be as cool as an A.C room . But you will not face the ill effects of the scorching heat and humid conditions that are common in Summer .As moisture is absorbed and the thermo-stat like cooling is done by aquariums ,you can keep A.C out of your house.

Harmful Effects of A.C

Freon is a fluorocarbon gas which is nonflammable but releases CFC(reacts with Carbon die Oxide of air) in air which is extremely degradable for our environment.

Increase the electricity bill drastically.

Creates Noise Pollution.

Constant exposure to this artificial cooling can disturb heat balance of our body and often causes cold and coughs.

How do ancient human cool their house ?

Sprout waters on the roof and when the water evaporates it cools the rooms below.It is followed even today in the villages of Rajasthan,Jaipur.

Kings of Jaipur uses jewels and mirrors in the walls and ceiling of their palace to regulate temperature. 'Mirrored and bejeweled ceilings and walls retain warmth or render a room cool as the season demands.'(from Travel Photo Essay: Dreaming of Rajasthan, India by Sujatha Bagal)

An earlier form of air cooling, the wind-catcher (Bâd gir), was invented in Persia (Iran) thousands of years ago in the form of wind shafts on the roof, which caught the wind and passed it through water and blew the cooled air into the building.

The ancient Egyptians were known to circulate aqueduct water through the walls of certain houses to cool them. As this sort of water usage was expensive, generally only the wealthy could afford such a luxury.

Medieval Persia had buildings that used cisterns and wind towers to cool buildings during the hot season: cisterns (large open pools in a central courtyards, not underground tanks) collected rain water; wind towers had windows that could catch wind and internal vanes to direct the airflow down into the building, usually over the cistern and out through a downwind cooling tower. Cistern water evaporated, cooling the air in the building.

BOOKMARKED

A Practical Guide to Free Cooling, Alternative Cooling, Night Cooling and Low Energy Systems by Mike Hardy

Passive and Low Energy Cooling of Buildings - Professor Baruch Givoni and published by Van Nostrand Reinhold

'Fluid cooler' offers alternative to cooling towers or central chillers.(Close-Up: PROCESS COOLING): An article from: Plastics Technology by Matthew H. Naitove

Solar Heating and Cooling: Active and Passive Design by Kreith&kre

Geothermal Energy: An Alternative Resource for the 21st Century by Harsh K. Gupta and Sukanta Roy

Tips & Tricks

Two Tank Cooling System

Create a water tank in the darkest and coolest place of your house(Beneath the floor is the best option).Create a pipeline which starts from the tank,reach as many rooms possible and finishes its path into that same tank.Create another tank on the roof but place it in a shaded place.Connect this tank with the pipeline.When you finish this setup fill both of the tanks with water.Water,due to siphonic pressure and pressure difference will fill the pipes immediately.Upper tank will naturally be hotter than the lower tank. This heat difference will compel cold water from the lower tank to reach the hot tank.So that it can cool it down(law of equilibrium).To achieve the goal cold water will go through the pipeline and in turn will reduce the temperature of your house.

Overview of the cooling system

You can also use other coolants like liquid nitrogen but water is safe,cheap and readily available.

Aqua-Cooler

Can you create a small pond just outside your windows ? If yes,then create one and fill it with live fish and aquatic plants.Use pieces of marble and general sand to make the bed of the pond.Keep the pond open or cover it by a nylon net to prevent dirt.You can also cover the pond with glasses.But remember to allow a space for air.After a day or two you will feel the difference.Both the adjacent and the room below will feel a reduction in temperature.

The Aqua-Cooler in my house

Wind Catcher

First, a windcatcher is capped and has several directional ports at the top (Traditionally four). By closing all but the one facing away from the incoming wind, air is drawn upwards using the coanda effect(The Coanda effect, also known as "boundary layer attachment", is the tendency of a stream of fluid to stay attached to a convex surface, rather than follow a straight line in its original direction.), similar to how opening the one facing the wind would push air down the shaft. This generates significant cooling ventilation within the structure below, but is not enough to bring the temperature below ambient alone - it would simply draw hot air in through any cracks or windows in the structure below.

Therefore, the key to generating frigid temperatures seems to be that there are very few cracks at the base of the thick structure below, but there is a significant air gap above the qanat. A qanat has quite a lot of water inside, because there are frequent well-like reservoirs along its path. Completely shaded from the sun, a qanat also aggregates the cold, sinking air of the night, which is then trapped within, unable to rise up to the less dense surface air. A windcatcher, however, can create a pressure gradient which sucks at least a small amount of air upwards through a house. This cool, dry night air, being pulled over a long passage of water, evaporates some of it and is cooled down further.

An ab anbar with double domes and windcatchers in the central desert city of Naeen, near Yazd

Finally, in a windless environment or waterless house, a windcatcher functions as a stack effect aggregator of hot air. It creates a pressure gradient which allows less dense hot air to travel upwards and escape out the top. This is also compounded significantly by the day-night cycle mentioned above, trapping cool air below. The temperature in such an environment can't drop below the nightly low temperature. These last two functions have gained some ground in Western architecture, and there are several commercial products using the name windcatcher.

When coupled with thick adobe that exhibits high heat transmission resistance qualities (R-value), the windcatcher is able to chill lower level spaces in mosques and houses (e.g. shabestan) in the middle of the day to frigid temperatures.(The courtesy for this tip goes to wikipedia)