I shared a post from BeSpainSavvy about tips for living without air-conditioning in Spain. Very good points. I live without AC in Florida by choice. These tips are all important.
I like how they phrase their motive (which is the same as mine) for choosing AC-free life: “If you’re like us — Team No AC because you’re saving the planet or just because you’re dodging a power bill that looks like a flight to Tokyo …”
My comments:
I have been very diligently trying to increase airflow in the house. And I love that my whole house floor is entirely ceramic tile, and sometimes yes I sleep on the bare tile.
(The tile is cold in winter but that’s what scatter rugs are for. In summer I roll up the rugs.)
It can be hard to convince local government to stop chopping down trees and mowing the grass down to bare sand, but at least we can plant vegetation in our yards and balconies.
Another of my favorite tips: cook outdoors all summer if possible. Also cuts down on bugs in the indoor kitchen. If you’ve never heard of a solar oven, check them out! Great way to cook outdoors with zero danger of fire.
In response to my share of the post from BeSpainSavvy about low-tech cooling tips in Spain, a permaculture colleague pointed out that not all of those methods work in a more humid place. While her observation is accurate, it doesn’t mean that we are forced to depend on air conditioning. Many traditional cultures have existed in many hot humid places for millennia without forced-air cooling.
I commented:
Yes there are sea breezes by the ocean <where I live, without AC, and where a number of “civilian” housemates have lived with me for various periods of time — in some cases several years — as well>.
BUT it would be a lot less stifling inland too if we would be more protective of trees and other vegetation.
Many traditional urban areas in other parts of the world are lined with trees, but especially here in Florida we seem to have something against trees.
You guys don’t have a seabreeze, but you have a lot less asphalt than we do and that should help.
Also I noticed sort of an analogy to microclimates. I might call it “time microclimates.” There are times of the day when it’s sunny and less humid, and thus evaporative cooling works for a little bit. I hang my sheets out during that time. I have also learned to hang sheets in such a matter that the sun strikes them instead of striking windows. We don’t have shutters so I use other things like that to keep sun from hitting windows.
Dependence on electricity for cooling is brutal. (Oops, that was supposed to be BRITTLE, but I’m going to leave that talk-to-text morph “brutal” there as well because it’s true too!) I hope more people start defending trees, and also re-learning passive methods as described here.
BTW, I NEVER expect to be cool in summer, and don’t even always expect to be comfortable, it’s not unusual for me to sweat at least some parts of the night in summer. Not ideal but not unusual. And if I don’t expect to be cool, those gentle puffs of natural coolness that arise at various times of night and day are very refreshing!
You are so right about the importance of cooling the body rather than trying to cool the whole space. It’s a little more flexible and not so energy dependent.
We in the permie community should never give up the quest to experiment with and promote low-tech DIY and passive / non-electric methods of cooling.
Hopefully even permaculture sites that use air conditioning are not just keeping it on all the time.
It’s too easy for the populace to be threatened by a power failure. They (corps, govt) could threaten us with anything, coerce us into things just by turning off the electricity. And we see that after a storm, people are in a massive panic state because they don’t know how to get along without electricity.
in Permaculture classes we learned so much about indigenous / low-tech building techniques that created superior adaptability to heat. Our modern industrial buildings are a big part of our problem with climate control dependence. Pushing the building codes to accommodate more naturally cooler buildings is an important part of our work. It prob won’t be easy but maybe the increasingly intense and frequent disasters will make it an easier sell.
“It’s impossible to live without air-conditioning” is a dangerous and expensive widespread message that unfortunately keeps getting more and more traction.
We should be looking at retrofitting houses to be more like in Belize, Queensland, Vietnam, dogtrot houses in TX, etc.
Here is the Facebook post including the OP from Spain, and we’re getting some great comments in the thread!
PS. Added another comment later to my colleague, who is a fellow Florida resident:
PS. hey K I just got a great idea! And it would give us a chance to hang out!
One, please come for a stay at my beach home and check out what we’re doing. And enjoy the ocean together and catch up!
Two, I’d like to come visit your place and experiment with creating some kind of little outdoor sleeping pod.
We can think of it as sort of cross-Florida collegial internship 🙂
Maybe other sites would be interested in the cross collaboration as well. This is really an extremely important front of our work, making it viable to live in Florida long-term without unsustainable centralized energy systems. It’s not just the operating costs it’s the repair bills and such that can make regenerative enterprises grind to a halt, force ppl to go out and get “jobs” in the dinosaur economy.
We’d be doing a great community service by putting our heads together and evolving the design of low-tech retrofits etc.
Another low-tech thing, one that doesn’t require retrofits, is simply sleeping in different rooms of the house in different seasons as temperatures change. When civilians are living here, they get their own private bedrooms if they want, but everybody is permitted and encouraged also to experiment with bringing portable bed into the common areas to stay cooler.
More thoughts:
• Also: there can be conflict between letting in air flow, and excluding unwanted light. This is particularly pronounced in urban areas where the officialdom have not yet caught up to the growing awareness that irresponsible/excessive/badly designed street lighting harms bird and insect populations, as well as being detrimental to the human nervous system. It would be great if we could just do like Paris and other cities and just shut our public lighting off at a certain hour like 1 AM or 2 AM. The movement for Dark Sky Cities is very encouraging and I hope more and more cities will get on board! I encourage everyone to mention it to your local government bodies if you have not already.
• And additionally: there can be conflict between airflow versus greenery that provides shade and privacy. I’ve started to be willing to compromise a bit on privacy just so I can have some more airflow.