It actually detected any life forms in a room with medical grade temp sensors coupled with a kinect and then found 'hot spots'.
It wouldn't follow you (although that could be done); it was stationary and one of the big requirements was safety (don't want a robot arm slapping you in the face while coding).
Unfortunately no, the source isn't on github, although I should put it up there.
No it couldnt. Air Conditioning is not just about temperature but also humidity, which this doesn't address. I think room fans would still be necessary to keep the air moving as well. Plus, could tricking your body into thinking its cooler than it actually is be dangerous? Make sure people don't wear it while doing vigorous physical activity in the summer heat.
I believe the idea is not that it's a nervous system trick, but by heating or cooling a part of the body with high blood flow which occurs near the surface of the skin, you're actually going to impart a meaningful change on overall body temperature. Hospitals already do this for patients with hypo/hyperthermia. This could be monitored/regulated with a second band worn on the upper arm near the armpit which measures body temperature directly.
The question is more one of how much of an actual change can they impart (and under what circumstances?) given the size limitations of something like a wrist strap. My hunch is that this would need to be a fairly large system (including its power source) to have a meaningful impact outside of sedentary activity in an environment which is mildly under/over temperature. So good news for people who get chilly working long hours in their cold offices (which is a completely viable market), but not for runners looking to shed gear. Maybe there's something there for cyclists though, but only if they're willing to put up with a wheel generator.
Also, humidity impacts comfort largely because of its impact evaporation rates. Reducing body temperature reduces the rate of perspiration, in turn reducing the impact of humidity. You're right that it won't eliminate the effects of very high humidity, but it would reduce them.
>I believe the idea is not that it's a nervous system trick, but by heating or cooling a part of the body with high blood flow which occurs near the surface of the skin, you're actually going to impart a meaningful change on overall body temperature.
From the article i understand that it is a nervous system trick: "The research suggested that anything with a temperature change greater than 0.1 degree Celsius per second would produce the effect".
From my very limited experience SF is not that humid, yet has a lot of AC.
Things like painting roofs silver or insulating buildings are great starts to reducing AC use. (Dark roofs can reach 66C to 88C in hot weather, better roofing helps a lot. (http://www.epa.gov/greenhomes/ReduceEnergy.htm#advhome))
But this? I'd freakin' love to try something like this. I'm almost always too hot, even in England.
My body naturally gets very warm, very quickly, with very little exercise. If they can make this work, I might actually be able to wear a suit all day! Luckily I don't need to but that's beside the point.
Assuming they can get the size and look sorted so the average consumer doesn't become a social pariah by wearing one (calculator watches come to mind), I wonder how this is powered? And more importantly, would it last for 8-12 hours on a charge?
If they're using Peltier devices it's probably going to require a largeish power supply, and some kind of heat dissipating/gathering device. One possible way to get around this for something like a suit jacket might be to move it from the wrist to the upper back, and to sew thin copper wires into the jacket. Also you could probably get away with having a few thin LiPoly cells placed in pockets around the jacket. Couple it all with an inductive charging coat hanger, and you've got a product worthy of SkyMall!
It often is, but I'm in pretty decent shape. I cycle regularly (my commute is 34 km one way), am not overweight and eat decently. For as long as I can remember, I've always started sweating very easily.
Is this actually true? I'm not calling you out, but I see it reported in comments all the time, but I've never read anything about it. I failed with a quick search.
Beyond that, this whole discussion just went down in another thread, but I'm like the parent post...I just sweat easily. Even when I was younger in great shape (4-6 hours of basketball daily) I would sweat quickly and profusely. I read that some percentage (~15% I believe) of people sweat more than others.
I haven't looked into any research about this, but anecdotally I find this to not be true. Having peaked at 215 lbs. and ~12% body fat at 5' 11", (I'm now closer to 195 lbs. and ~10% body fat) I'd say that I'm in the top 1% in terms of muscle mass. I am often very hot. My theory is that because of the added muscle mass (which requires much higher food intake), I'm metabolizing food at a higher rate and thus generating more heat. I don't know if this is actually the case, but it's my theory.
This may not be the case for people who are fit in a more cardiovascular sense.
I'm 6'1" and a solid 215 pounds. I do powerlifting and Brazilian jiu jitsu. I get hot quickly. I've had training partners tell me that I "run hot", that compared to others, I feel like a furnace.
I don't imagine this making AC obsolete. It might marginally reduce demand for AC, especially in cooler climates where AC might only be used occasionally if installed.
If made in to a product, I expect it to be popular for outdoor use. I find it appealing enough for that use case that I'm contemplating building one.
This is interesting, and in my opinion definitely deserving of the prize they got for it.
But I think it's real value (in contrast to "replacing A/C") is in developing markets, where a little wristband could really improve quality of life (in the sense that one isn't sweating to death in their shanty-town hut). Not only could it improve QoL, but it would also be much cheaper to install than a central air unit, and also much more feasible: everyone has a wrist, not everyone has an insulated home with consistent electrical service that could provide the power for a central air unit. Cool stuff!
Peltier heat pumps are inefficient; typically wanting a whole bunch of watts for achieving a small temperature gradient. So I'm wondering about the practicalities of powering this thing such that it could be worn as a personal item.
That doesn't seem to be much of a problem as the point is not to actually cool you, but to apply a temperature change of a fraction of a degree to a tiny part of skin to trick you into feeling colder.
When I stick a AA battery on a Peltier, to work out which side is which on unmarked unit, it actually does "feel" very cold really quickly. Hot side is obviously also very hot, very quickly.
I'd think it's more likely that the hot side is going to be the problem. Dissipating that heat without something like liquid cooling and active fans.
I wonder how changing the perception actually impacts the body's thermostat. I would gladly sweat and let my body do its thing than have a heatstroke while being tricked into thinking that it is relatively cool outside.
I can't find the article anywhere, but there was a similar idea done a while back where you would wear a 'dome' that was air-conditioned, keeping your head and shoulders cool. It worked wonderfully for keeping you feeling cool and as a result you didn't sweat.
Also as a result, you didn't notice when your body temperature was rising too high, so it did absolutely nothing to prevent heat stroke or any other forms of heat exhaustion. I'd be concerned about this wristband doing roughly the same thing.
I don't think this is something you should be wearing out for a jog, or while you work out in the fields, or similar.
It sounds great for my situation, though, where I'm sitting around programming in Costa Rica. I could turn off the A/C and let the house be its normal temperature of 85 degrees or so.
I can't be for sure, but I bet it does not trick your body, just your mind. I can go out in the cold, ignore my mind telling me the discomfort of cold or warm, but I still will shiver or sweat appropriately. Still, I would likely only use something like this indoors.
Sometimes tricking the mind would help, I believe - imagine those times you get nervous and start sweating (tough interview white-board sessions?). I know for me it seems like it just gets worse and worse once it starts and I know the room isn't getting any hotter.
Well, it can transfer heat when electric current is applied. They used these for processor coolers in the 90s, I remember my father had one and it broke one day and so his processor let out the blue smoke.
The device can make you feel a bit better but it can NOT replace an AC.
It was never designed to replace an AC.
If this was up for purchase i would get one especialy because it is portable and maybe it can be coupled with additional technology (measure blood preasure , acceleration, rfid access tags,...). People have been wearing wrist bands for ages (and even used them as currency) so it seems a good position for a gadget.
Unfortunately it's the modern media's job to give things catchy titles so they do well on the social media rounds. A lot of excellent stuff fails to do well on HN because it hasn't got the right title (I'm an HN firehose dweller so I get to enjoy a lot of the hidden gems :-)).
Indeed, I'm pretty sure there's room for an "off HN" type site that solely focuses on the best HN submissions that didn't make it for whatever reason.
Body temperature comfort is subtle. Is not the same 24ºC with an AC than by the sea shore, under a tree shadow with warm, slow wind.
For some reason i don't think a heat sink tricking my physical feelings will do for my quality standards regarding temperature control. I already detest AC, as in, I can't stand in ACed places.
Hopelessly naive. An air conditioning system is used to cool spaces yes. But where I live, it is just as important to lower the humidity. This device will not help with that.
Naive? This is a proof of concept, and it makes people feel cooler. Dehumidifiers use significantly less power than cooling. The peltier they're using with a 30% duty cycle would require about 30W per person.
Dehumidify a typical room: 500W
Cooling a typical room: 2000W
Reminds me a little of this, though this uses a constant fan rather than a pulsing schedule of cooling jolts. I've used one before, and it works surprisingly well for such a low-tech contraption.
I read the headline as "alternating current" also. Usually, engineers in the United States abbreviate "air conditioning" as "A/C," where the slash, used contrary to the usual usage of slashes, distinguishes one familiar abbreviation from another. I'm surprised the Wired editor didn't catch the ambiguity.
I like the idea of cooling people as opposed to whole buildings, but I don't like that this isn't actually decreasing your body's temperature, it just 'tricks' you into thinking it's colder/hotter outside. Perhaps it'll pave the way for clothes that can become cool or hot, depending on the temperature outside. I'd be very interested in those.
We're warm blooded. If you want to decrease your body's temperature, death is probably the way to go.
We don't feel warm because our core temperature is above 98.6, we feel warm SL that we are aware that we're having to work harder (typically through sweat) to stay at 98.6.
Likewise, it seems like you could make this safe if you could measure or estimate the user's core temperature. Should it deviate significantly from normal, shut the device off.
It's considerably more complicated than body temperature and sweating.
The body has ways of generating heat. If they do not turn off fast enough when the A/C fails, you get hot. It is entirely possible that this device could help elderly people in A/C failure, by forcing their bodies to adapt to variability instead of constant cool air.
Likewise, sudden heat will cause the skin to flush and draw a great deal of blood[1]. This imposes a greater workload on the heart and results in shock if the heart cannot keep up. Constant exposure to heat, as with this device, should force the heart to gradually strengthen as the hot season builds, increasing heat tolerance. Likewise, variability should strengthen the heart.
[1]If you ever have to enter a machine room with failed A/C, where the heat index is above body temperature, bundle up in heavy winter clothes over your whole body. Otherwise a runaway flushing response will draw heat into your body and kill you.
This page[1] says " If the dry bulb temperature is higher than 35°C (95°F), the hot air passing over the skin can actually make the worker hotter. When the temperature is more than 35°C and the air is dry, evaporative cooling may be improved by air movement, although this improvement will be offset by the convective heat. When the temperature exceeds 35°C and the relative humidity is 100%, air movement will make the worker hotter. Increases in air speed have no effect on the body temperature of workers wearing vapor-barrier clothing. ".
This may not replace AC, but I wonder if (in colder countries) it would help with dieting. Want to lose weight, just turn your thermostat down by a degree and use this device to help you adapt to it.
Maintaining body temperature takes energy, so being in a cooler environment would help, but it would be minimal, I'm fairly sure. Air has a much lower specific heat than water, and I remember reading a reddit discussion about drinking ice water all day to lose weight versus room temperature water. I don't remember what the result was, but it didn't take as many calories to heat the water as you'd think.
Well a calorie is the amount of energy to raise a gram of water by one degree Celsius, so if you're drinking 2 litres of water a day and it's 0 degrees vs 20 degrees, you'll burn around 20,000 calories a day from the difference.
Note though that that's calories, and not kilocalories, which is what we generally talk about for dietary purposes. So ~20kcal a day, which would represent about a 1% change for the average person. Not a huge gain.
How about a solar powered thermoelectric mesh woven into a short that cools my body off? Can I have a wired article if I build one, even when it doesn't work?
At first I thought this thing hooked into your blood flow to actively cool down your blood, like watercooling does for computers, it would've been a much cooler idea (no pun intended)
I live in a small "flat" in India. Without A/C in the summer (only at night), our consumption is ~200 KWhr per month. With A/C only in one room for something like 4-5 hours per day, it shoots up to ~500 KWhr per month. Indians switching to A/C on a big scale will be a disaster for the world.
I believe that the answer lies in architecture, not in more energy-intensive devices which may or may not actually work (this one fools the body - that could be catastrophic, increasing chances for a heat stroke). India was always hot - but older buildings used to be built (1) with high ceilings (2) with cross-ventilation.
This contrasts with buildings in cold countries, where buildings are insulated against winter. In the name of "better" buildings, Indians are switching to sealed buildings working with Central A/C. Blind imitation.
On the other hand, there were builders committed to "environment-friendly", low cost buildings (not the modern scam of "green buildings", which are actually more expensive.) Laurie Baker in South India was one - a real unsung, and now forgotten hero:
Very true. I visited New Delhi in December and noticed how heating/AC wasn't built in to the buildings yet it felt normal to just bundle up/unbundle up depending on the temperature. Getting rid of boilers and only boiling water when you need to is another approach that helps with energy cost - especially if they get smarter and can predict usage (on in the mornings, off when people are out of the home, etc).
Old homes (pre World War II) built in the southern United States all are centered around high ceilings, cross-ventilation. The home I grew up in wasn't air conditioned, and the summers, while nowhere near India's level, are extremely humid (90% plus most days) and are routinely above 90 degrees F.
The drawback in this is the cultural need for privacy that seems to have developed in many modern countries. People want to be able to shut their door, and this interferes with the cross ventilation. The whole "separate rooms on separate floors" also drastically hurts this concept. My house was reasonable, but my bedroom was tucked into the roofline on the top floor. It was unbearably hot, so my brother, father, and I would sleep on cots on a screened in porch.
These work great with assisted convection. Open an attic window. Place a box fan in the window, blowing outwards. Everyone opens their windows and the hottest air in their room (at the ceiling) is drawn out through the door vents. It'll even work in single-floor apartments. Since getting a box fan (12 years ago) I've no longer needed AC to sleep at night.
Roofing also plays a part in cooling your home. The old cedar shakes roofing systems are naturally porous and enable ventilation.
Unfortunately, most people forget about this when the re-roof with asphalt shingles and rubberized underlays. The combination of the two lock in the heat.
Roofing also plays a part in cooling your home. The old cedar shakes roofing systems are naturally porous and enable ventilation.
Unfortunately, most people forget about this when the re-roof with asphalt shingles and rubberized underlays. The combination of the two lock in the heat.
I grew up in a Florida home built around 1900, and we had no central air-conditioning until I was in my teens. The house was all windows, with 12 ft ceilings, and had even been fitted with an attic-fan, which is a kind of central fan circulation system that draws air in all the windows and pumps it out through a dormer window in the attic.
Privacy had nothing to do with our desire for air-conditioning. In fact, most of the doors in our house were removed because the house was used as a day-care for children prior to my parents ownership, who never bothered to put the doors back on. We grew up with very little concept of privacy.
We loathed the Florida summers. I can remember plenty of sleepless nights, lying awake in bed, sweating through my sheets. We wanted relief. That's all we wanted.
What's particularly sad is how the vernacular architectural features, which have evolved over thousands of years to deal with these issues, have been largely abandoned over the 20th century. Only to be replaced by ugly concrete buildings and AC units. These include the Malqafs[1] (windcatchers) once found all over Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia. Also the use of underground streams[2] to cool buildings. And generally not building huge south-facing glass windows when you live in a place that reaches 45°C in the summer...
Also, a personal architect-hero of mine is Hassan Fathy[3]. This man inspired generations of environment-friendly architects.
Is it realistic that you could find an underground stream wherever you want? Around 20 million people live in Mumbai. I'm just not sure it would work on that scale with tall residential buildings, as awesome as it is.
It's sadly part of a growing faddishness with "Western" technology and developments. I find it quite sad because the local solutions are often quite elegant.
In Korea for example, they have clever traditional windows that open like normal windows, but also draw up completely and hang from the ceiling, turning your house or other structure into a pavilion. Large roofs provide lots of shade.
In the winter, you literally light a fire under the floor of the building and radiant heat warms the entire structure.
Some of these things carried over into the modern age, but many sadly did not. They're remarkably comfortable and energy efficient dwellings.
> And generally not building huge south-facing glass windows when you live in a place that reaches 45°C in the summer...
People love south-facing rooms with giant glass walls in Japan. I asked several people about it and the most common (sensical) response that I got was that it makes it much easier to do laundry since people hang things out to dry.
Anecdotal observation: I just checked my monthly consumption since the beginning of this year and it averaged to 154kWh per month. I'm in Finland, I live in a flat and we have an electrically heated sauna that we use on a regular basis which isn't exactly very energy-efficient and, to think, we don't generally try to minimize the consumption of electricity at all, really.
Just wondering, what sort of consumption does that 200kWh include?
I am as baffled as you are, which is why we started keeping track of monthly readings. One of my acquaintances has a store selling electrical goods, and he too was very skeptical. We have a refrigerator, an electric cooker, water heater, TV, a PC, and other usual stuff. I used to leave the water heater on in the winter months. A faulty thermostat in the water heater is my best guess. I'll try this hypothesis out this winter, and probably buy a new one in summer. Anyway the possible culprits are few, so hunting it down should be easy.
(But the A/C unit's consumption is believable - it is rated at 1.8 units per hour, so around 5 hours usage for 30 days should push the usage up by 300 units.)
I think it is the concept "anything with a temperature change greater than 0.1 degree Celsius per second would produce the effect" is very interesting. Building a device to do that is not a big deal..
Yeah, I definitely don't see this as making AC "obsolete" so much as perhaps raising the threshold of when you turn on the AC. As a resident of the Deep South, this could potentially make sitting outside during the height of the summer a more pleasant experience.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 772 ms ] threadIt wouldn't follow you (although that could be done); it was stationary and one of the big requirements was safety (don't want a robot arm slapping you in the face while coding).
Unfortunately no, the source isn't on github, although I should put it up there.
The question is more one of how much of an actual change can they impart (and under what circumstances?) given the size limitations of something like a wrist strap. My hunch is that this would need to be a fairly large system (including its power source) to have a meaningful impact outside of sedentary activity in an environment which is mildly under/over temperature. So good news for people who get chilly working long hours in their cold offices (which is a completely viable market), but not for runners looking to shed gear. Maybe there's something there for cyclists though, but only if they're willing to put up with a wheel generator.
Also, humidity impacts comfort largely because of its impact evaporation rates. Reducing body temperature reduces the rate of perspiration, in turn reducing the impact of humidity. You're right that it won't eliminate the effects of very high humidity, but it would reduce them.
From the article i understand that it is a nervous system trick: "The research suggested that anything with a temperature change greater than 0.1 degree Celsius per second would produce the effect".
Things like painting roofs silver or insulating buildings are great starts to reducing AC use. (Dark roofs can reach 66C to 88C in hot weather, better roofing helps a lot. (http://www.epa.gov/greenhomes/ReduceEnergy.htm#advhome))
But this? I'd freakin' love to try something like this. I'm almost always too hot, even in England.
Assuming they can get the size and look sorted so the average consumer doesn't become a social pariah by wearing one (calculator watches come to mind), I wonder how this is powered? And more importantly, would it last for 8-12 hours on a charge?
Beyond that, this whole discussion just went down in another thread, but I'm like the parent post...I just sweat easily. Even when I was younger in great shape (4-6 hours of basketball daily) I would sweat quickly and profusely. I read that some percentage (~15% I believe) of people sweat more than others.
This may not be the case for people who are fit in a more cardiovascular sense.
If made in to a product, I expect it to be popular for outdoor use. I find it appealing enough for that use case that I'm contemplating building one.
But I think it's real value (in contrast to "replacing A/C") is in developing markets, where a little wristband could really improve quality of life (in the sense that one isn't sweating to death in their shanty-town hut). Not only could it improve QoL, but it would also be much cheaper to install than a central air unit, and also much more feasible: everyone has a wrist, not everyone has an insulated home with consistent electrical service that could provide the power for a central air unit. Cool stuff!
I'd think it's more likely that the hot side is going to be the problem. Dissipating that heat without something like liquid cooling and active fans.
Also as a result, you didn't notice when your body temperature was rising too high, so it did absolutely nothing to prevent heat stroke or any other forms of heat exhaustion. I'd be concerned about this wristband doing roughly the same thing.
It sounds great for my situation, though, where I'm sitting around programming in Costa Rica. I could turn off the A/C and let the house be its normal temperature of 85 degrees or so.
With cheap sensors, the room temperature, body temperature, humidity and perspiration can be measured.
Run some analysis and warning the wearer about heat stroke suddenly becomes possible!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect
The device can make you feel a bit better but it can NOT replace an AC.
It was never designed to replace an AC.
If this was up for purchase i would get one especialy because it is portable and maybe it can be coupled with additional technology (measure blood preasure , acceleration, rfid access tags,...). People have been wearing wrist bands for ages (and even used them as currency) so it seems a good position for a gadget.
Unfortunately it's the modern media's job to give things catchy titles so they do well on the social media rounds. A lot of excellent stuff fails to do well on HN because it hasn't got the right title (I'm an HN firehose dweller so I get to enjoy a lot of the hidden gems :-)).
Indeed, I'm pretty sure there's room for an "off HN" type site that solely focuses on the best HN submissions that didn't make it for whatever reason.
For some reason i don't think a heat sink tricking my physical feelings will do for my quality standards regarding temperature control. I already detest AC, as in, I can't stand in ACed places.
Dehumidify a typical room: 500W Cooling a typical room: 2000W
http://www.sharperimage.com/si/view/product/CoolWare-Persona...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents
We don't feel warm because our core temperature is above 98.6, we feel warm SL that we are aware that we're having to work harder (typically through sweat) to stay at 98.6.
Likewise, it seems like you could make this safe if you could measure or estimate the user's core temperature. Should it deviate significantly from normal, shut the device off.
The body has ways of generating heat. If they do not turn off fast enough when the A/C fails, you get hot. It is entirely possible that this device could help elderly people in A/C failure, by forcing their bodies to adapt to variability instead of constant cool air.
Likewise, sudden heat will cause the skin to flush and draw a great deal of blood[1]. This imposes a greater workload on the heart and results in shock if the heart cannot keep up. Constant exposure to heat, as with this device, should force the heart to gradually strengthen as the hot season builds, increasing heat tolerance. Likewise, variability should strengthen the heart.
[1]If you ever have to enter a machine room with failed A/C, where the heat index is above body temperature, bundle up in heavy winter clothes over your whole body. Otherwise a runaway flushing response will draw heat into your body and kill you.
This page[1] says " If the dry bulb temperature is higher than 35°C (95°F), the hot air passing over the skin can actually make the worker hotter. When the temperature is more than 35°C and the air is dry, evaporative cooling may be improved by air movement, although this improvement will be offset by the convective heat. When the temperature exceeds 35°C and the relative humidity is 100%, air movement will make the worker hotter. Increases in air speed have no effect on the body temperature of workers wearing vapor-barrier clothing. ".
[1] https://www.osha.gov/dts/osta/otm/otm_iii/otm_iii_4.html
Note though that that's calories, and not kilocalories, which is what we generally talk about for dietary purposes. So ~20kcal a day, which would represent about a 1% change for the average person. Not a huge gain.
EDIT: fixed autocomplete phone typo
I believe that the answer lies in architecture, not in more energy-intensive devices which may or may not actually work (this one fools the body - that could be catastrophic, increasing chances for a heat stroke). India was always hot - but older buildings used to be built (1) with high ceilings (2) with cross-ventilation.
http://www.architecture.com/SustainabilityHub/Designstrategi...
This contrasts with buildings in cold countries, where buildings are insulated against winter. In the name of "better" buildings, Indians are switching to sealed buildings working with Central A/C. Blind imitation.
On the other hand, there were builders committed to "environment-friendly", low cost buildings (not the modern scam of "green buildings", which are actually more expensive.) Laurie Baker in South India was one - a real unsung, and now forgotten hero:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Baker
http://www.hindu.com/folio/fo9908/99080300.htm
The drawback in this is the cultural need for privacy that seems to have developed in many modern countries. People want to be able to shut their door, and this interferes with the cross ventilation. The whole "separate rooms on separate floors" also drastically hurts this concept. My house was reasonable, but my bedroom was tucked into the roofline on the top floor. It was unbearably hot, so my brother, father, and I would sleep on cots on a screened in porch.
Go back a little further (1850-1900-ish) and everyone had doors that look like http://makingitlovely.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/MG_8405...
These work great with assisted convection. Open an attic window. Place a box fan in the window, blowing outwards. Everyone opens their windows and the hottest air in their room (at the ceiling) is drawn out through the door vents. It'll even work in single-floor apartments. Since getting a box fan (12 years ago) I've no longer needed AC to sleep at night.
Unfortunately, most people forget about this when the re-roof with asphalt shingles and rubberized underlays. The combination of the two lock in the heat.
Unfortunately, most people forget about this when the re-roof with asphalt shingles and rubberized underlays. The combination of the two lock in the heat.
Privacy had nothing to do with our desire for air-conditioning. In fact, most of the doors in our house were removed because the house was used as a day-care for children prior to my parents ownership, who never bothered to put the doors back on. We grew up with very little concept of privacy.
We loathed the Florida summers. I can remember plenty of sleepless nights, lying awake in bed, sweating through my sheets. We wanted relief. That's all we wanted.
Also, a personal architect-hero of mine is Hassan Fathy[3]. This man inspired generations of environment-friendly architects.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_tower [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Fathy
[1] http://www.monticello.org/site/house-and-gardens/bedchamber
In Korea for example, they have clever traditional windows that open like normal windows, but also draw up completely and hang from the ceiling, turning your house or other structure into a pavilion. Large roofs provide lots of shade.
In the winter, you literally light a fire under the floor of the building and radiant heat warms the entire structure.
Some of these things carried over into the modern age, but many sadly did not. They're remarkably comfortable and energy efficient dwellings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ21SchGpsQ
Yeah, and occasionally die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22948168
People love south-facing rooms with giant glass walls in Japan. I asked several people about it and the most common (sensical) response that I got was that it makes it much easier to do laundry since people hang things out to dry.
Just wondering, what sort of consumption does that 200kWh include?
(But the A/C unit's consumption is believable - it is rated at 1.8 units per hour, so around 5 hours usage for 30 days should push the usage up by 300 units.)