How to cool our homes (even without ACs)

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I grew up in an old villlage house with one-meter-thick stone walls. The interior of such house is cool whole summer. The building materials matter. I have recently read an article in National Geographic that traditional clay architecture is much more resilient to heat than modern concrete equivalents.

I've been designing and building passive solar homes in Canada since 1981. The simple fact that it is not common has me constantly scratching my head in bewilderment. The current super insulated house I'm in stays a comfortable 22-23 C all year with no AC and some small baseboard heaters for the cold season. We lost power last winter for 31 hours at -5 C and the indoor temperature went down 2.5 C over that period of time. Prioritize solar orientation, good design and efficiency. Outlandish displays of wealth are really pathetic in this day and age under the current circumstances

These type of videos need to be played in movie theaters, so that more people will realize faster how modernization is leading to bigger complex challenges

I live in South Asia and have an AC because of the high humidity level and sometimes the high heat levels here. The temperatures range from the high twenties to the low thirties. However no matter how hot or humid the climate is, in our home we only use the AC for a couple of hours at night just before going to sleep to cool down the bedroom. This is usually sufficient for a good nights sleep. We never use the AC during the day time. Then we just rely on the breeze and a couple of fans.

I want to point here out, that warm capacity of a building DOES matter a lot. I work in a company, and we have 2 buildings here - one built in traditional way - solid bricks, and new modern well isolated framed one. The traditional one feels comfy all year long, but the new one gets very quickly hot/cold, due to lack of heat inertia… Sometimes, it gets so cold in the night, that you want to turn on heating when you arrive, and then 6h later, you’re melting down. Madness! But technically it’s very well isolated and almost passive!

I think that a central issue is when even the nighttime low is not low enough to bring the inside down to something livable, and then the daytime high is just brutal or medically dangerous. The problem with passive cooling techniques is that they only work to a point, but the climate exceeds that in many places.

I was really impressed by all the passive cooling ancient people had at their disposal, like wind towers or even making ice, in. a. desert 🤯 So much stuff is not used just because we think the modern technology is better.

Honestly I can't afford to cool my home. Best solution for my case will be to plant trees in from of my house to introduce a shade during the day.

I've personally built my house 10 years ago. I invested a lot in insulating materials from top to bottom and I've planted several trees around my house. Even that right now temperature in my area goes higher than 40 Celsius I have no AC and no need for one. And I am using not much gas in the winter for heating. I am sure that trees and insulation does the job of keeping inside temperatures in confortabile zones.

"Passive House" design is a method of designing houses that can use up to 90% less energy than standard housing, and it includes ways of keeping the house cool or warm with little climate control. It's great to implement in new construction, but it did make the upfront cost of the house higher as well. There is also a push to try and retrofit existing housing to meet Passive House standards. Cost tends to be an issue here as well, unfortunately.

I've been telling people here in the southwest the native americans used adobe bricks to build homes. Adobe is very resistant to changes in temperature which keeps the house cool inside and warm during the winter (yes it does get cold here). Not only is adobe one of the most recyclable materials but it literally comes from the ground.

We are a big extended family in the Philippines. It gets really hot and humid here. Our ancestral house is quite big, it has seven bedrooms but only one has airconditioning (the rest have stand fans/ceiling fans only). When it gets really hot, everyone sleeps together in that one airconditioned room. That single room which uses an inverter-type aircon has four bunk beds. We sleep there only during the hottest summer months, around 2 and a half months of the year. I say our system works. Our next step is to install solar panels, hopefully by next year. 😀

I live in Spain and we’ve recently bought a flat. It gets cooled down by the pipes under the floor. It works really well and I love that you don’t have this direct cold air coming at me from the air conditioning. The downside is that the cooling is not instant, you need a few hours for it to cool down the place. However it doesn’t heat the outside and it’s supposed to be more efficient as well. I’m not sure what technology it is though.

When we built our Earthbag home in tropical Puerto Rico, we knew the plan was never to use AC, and to generate all of our own electricity. To accomplish cooling in the hot tropics we have 1 meter overhangs and a green roof. Then we run efficient USB ceiling fans during the night if it's too warm still.

Living in hot tropical region with hotbox room 5C hotter than outdoor temperature throughout my teens probably tempered me to stay comfortable at higher temperature. The gap between my "comfortable" vs everyone around me including families are a stark difference. Knew some that can't sleep if its not cooled to under 24C while I find 27C too cold. Point is, if more people can adapt to slightly, just slightly less cooling, would save a whole lot of energy. Especially those that insists its too hot, crank the AC up, then proceed to wear jacket or blanket cos it got too cold.

District cooling is something I think about from time to time on a neighborhood level. From thought experiment to thought experiment, I ended up settling on thinking of every distributed solution in terms of how it would work if I owned a rental neighborhood or apartment complex. It's gotten me to the point where, if I could afford a decent amount of real estate, I'd probably be a landlord so I can put "be the change you want to see" into practice. Something I would play around with in district cooling, is radiative cooling panels. There are substances that you can paint a panel with, that radiate heat as light in a wavelength that passes through the atmosphere out to space. Employing radiative cooling in a district cooling solution could raise the efficiency, either by implementing it on premises (before the heat is carried back to the center), centrally (as part of central cooling), or both. Where I am though, it gets pretty hot and pretty cold, so it's more likely that I'd just find a way to centralize the heat exchange for individual AC units. I have even more interest in making a neighborhood area network, as people seem to have completely forgotten about the benefits of a free and open internet.

I live in an all brick house, our solution was installing highly efficient windows and ceiling fans - these two things cut our a/c cooling costs by about 45%.

However that said, due to widespread AC for decades, humans, especially middle class and above no longer acclimatize to local hot conditions like their ancestors did which makes shifting away from AC a lot more challenging as none of the other methods deliver indoor cooling nearly as powerful as AC

I love the idea of designing buildings like the ones Charles Gallavardin is working on that reduce heat and promote airflow. A Cambodian architect, Vann Molyvann, did this in many of his building designs such as the Royal University of Phnom Penh with a roof design and louvered windows that maximize air circulation. It really makes a difference! This is a very interesting and important topic and I learned a lot from this video.