Quote:
Originally Posted by mousquet
I'm not aware of the tech to design air conditioners . . . .
I also hear air conditioners just work pretty much like refrigerators and freezers. To cool the inside, they obviously release heat on the outside.
So it actually appears to be some very poor (and cheap, by the way) solution, not sustainable.
Experts say the only reliable thing to do today is to design buildings and cities differently . . . .
You'll notice there's no large windows to old Mediterranean homes, in their ancient villages. It's often a little dark, but you still can breathe without air conditioning in there, even when temperatures hit 90°F or more.
Your thoughts, if any. This could certainly be an interesting discussion.
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First of all, how air conditioners work. The article isn't clear on how the authors think A/C is "polluting" but there are 3 ways it can.
All air conditioners do--and refrigerators too for that matter--is pump heat from one place to another. In the case of refirgerators, they pump it from inside an insulated box to outside. In the case of air conditioners, they pump it from inside a room or a building to outside. This doesn' create heat, just move it around and you can say it increases the heat outside but I believe, other than possibly in the most dense urban environments, the additional heat burden outside is minimal.
The second way it "pollutes" is because doing what they do, air conditioners and refrigerators use electricity and generation of that electricity can pollute although not necessarily if done by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal or nuclear methods.
Finally, the third way it pollutes is because the chemical that used to be used to absorb heat on one side (the evaporator coil) and release it on the other (the compressor) was Freon, a halocarbon that could deplete then ozone layer of the atmosphere. In the US, and I assume in Europe, this has now been replaced, by law, by less damaging chemicals.
As far as home and building design, we are already doing very well at that, at least where it matters most. In the US desert Southwest, where temperatures can reach 125F/52C, people aren't going to comfortable in any building that isn't artifically cooled no matter how well designed. The goal is to build them so as to minimize the burden on the air condtioning by insulating them well and by minimizing the absorbtion of heat into the living spaces.
These things are done by thick or well-insulated walls, windows that are impenetrable to heat energy (it is possible now to make triple pane windows that keep heat out as well as the solid walls of those old Mediterranean houses), and reflective wall and roof coatings. The roof of my Arizona house reflects over 98% of solar energy that hits it. You can quickly get a bad sunburn from light reflected from it even if you have no direct sun exposure.
There is one other way to cool inside environments but it only works in the desert. These are known as evaporative coolers or, colloquially, "swamp coolers". They are just basically big fans that sit on the roof and blow air through a bunch of material that's kept wet with water and then into the house or building. They cool the air as the water evaporates and they can be quite effective but only where the humidity is very, very low.
http://www.kafbnucleus.com/news/educ...7d517989a.html
These use a lot less electricity than refrigerated air conditioners and so are a lot less expensive to operate.