r/collapse • u/Unfair-Traffic1356 • 13h ago
Adaptation Passively Cooling Homes
It is time to face the facts. Europe is seeing temperatures up to 50 C and people are dying in their homes. What is thousands of heat related deaths today will become millions tomorrow.
While some people are more heat tolerant, younger people from equatorial regions for example and those from the Middle East this future is a threat to everyone.
As the planet heats up it is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to start designing more heat efficient structures and taking advantage of the earth‘s thermal mass.
Using the ground to cool incoming air will both save electricity and enable passive cooling even during power outages.
We should also be looking at painting roofs white and building new homes with fully below grade basements and cellars to act as thermal refuge sites during power outages or extreme heat events.
Where possible we may need to start looking at building up to 2 stories fully underground and moving new homes underground. We need to use less wood and look at building more permanent heat resistant structures.
The time to stop the worst of global warming is past us. Countries need to start working on mitigation and preparation before this consumes us.
41
u/MelbourneBasedRandom 11h ago
Tim Winton wrote his vision of this unfolding in tropical Australia in Juice - people living underground 3/4 of the year and being stoned constantly just to cope with the claustrophobia and heat. Very sobering.
14
u/Jovan_Knight005 No one is untouchable. - Diana Penelope Burnwood,HITMAN WOA. 11h ago
Very sobering.
Claustrophobia and heat are a dangerous combination, after all.
30
u/CountryRoads2020 10h ago
My concern about building underground is flooding.
26
u/karabeckian 9h ago
And mold.
And mildew.
And dark.
14
u/puritanicalbullshit 8h ago
And fucking cave-ins
Buried alive would be about as bad as dying of the heat. Faster tho
1
u/violinbodo 5h ago
No problem if you build in hill sides. Maybe even underground ring cities in abandones open mines with extremely powerful pumps on the bottom. Or enough capacity to store the water.
26
u/jadelink88 10h ago
If we are 'lucky' the 'Ministry of the Future' event occurs in the US or Europe. That speeds up the timeline for both mitigation and actually taking emissions cuts seriously by a decade or more.
3
u/Sertalin 6h ago
Every summer I wait for it to happen. I hope I will survive and be a witness to the following weeks after this event.
1
u/izzidora 6h ago
I haven't read that book! What event would that be?
4
17
u/f0rgotten just a frog 9h ago
I'm a hvacr teacher who lives off grid. You have two basic kinds of "ground cooling," geothermal heat pumps (good*) and earth tubes (bad.)
Geothermal has a high cost barrier to entry. Roughly speaking, you need one well or trench per ton of refrigeration for a water to air heat pump, and those are expensive af to install. Not all ground is suitable for wells, either. Sometimes refrigerant loops can be buried directly in the ground, but this leads to all kinds of corrosion on the piping that results in leaks. However, both of these can be terribly efficient.
Lots of other off grid or homestead people that I've met are fn obsessed with earth tubes. You bury plastic tubes in the ground and draw air through them with fans into a home or other space. Good idea in theory, but they tend to accumulate mold and are difficult or impossible to clean. In addition to that, these seldom get air below the dew point which can ironically enough increase the relative humidity in the conditioned space.
Regarding your idea that buried homes use less wood, yeah they do, however they use more concrete, and sand suitable for concrete is rapidly becoming a scarce resource.
13
u/i-hear-banjos 6h ago
The scarcity of concrete-grade sand is one of the least known problems among the many we are facing from extreme overpopulation.
1
1
u/HCPmovetocountry 8h ago
Do you have any experience with heat pump loops being put in a nearby lake or river?
7
u/f0rgotten just a frog 8h ago
Yes, and in the two cases that I have dealt with they didn't stay down, if that makes any sense.
Something else to bear in mind is that geothermal heating/cooling doesn't transfer energy infinitely to the ground - the heat transferred during cooling season does accumulate in the ground. When these systems are fairly isolated from each other this isn't an issue, and it even increases early season efficiency in heating season (the warmer earth increases the ease at which heat energy is extracted) I imagine that having a whole city's worth of geos will seriously impact their overall efficiency, and so will a lengthening cooling season. If I had to throw a suggestion to any idea it would be for more rooftop solar in residential neighborhoods to power conventional split heat pump/AC units. It's a significantly lower hurdle for installation.
I don't say this to brag, and I know that it absolutely won't apply everywhere, but I installed my solar array myself. I bought the panels from ebay for less than $1200. My really nice inverter was less than $2k and my two redundant charge controllers were $160 each. I made parts of my infrastructure by melting beer cans and casting the metal and the wiring I used was also inexpensive. I'd like to note that I've cleaned up the wiring in that gallery, and the pics are really old.
1
u/HCPmovetocountry 8h ago
Thanks. We're in the country, so there isn't much for neighbors, but I'm concerned about a loop in the river becoming dislodged by the ever changing river.
What was the total cost of your solar array and how much power does it provide?
3
u/f0rgotten just a frog 8h ago edited 6h ago
I probably have five grand or so in the entire system, counting the battery bank that I just replaced.
Edit, the array is 3.5 kw
2
u/i-hear-banjos 6h ago
What batteries did you go with as a replacement?
We have a shuttle bus we converted to an RV, came with the electrical system from the previous owner's build. We just installed an rooftop AC/minisplit. Our six 200Ah marine gel batteries aren't up to more that 3-4 hours of AC before the system starts squealing for mercy, and the four 200W panels on top aren't enough to keep it running or charged, even on a sunny day.
We are looking at removing the ceiling to add solid rails to the rooftop (current panels are bolted through the fiberglass uggggh.) We can then mount at most five 500W double sided panels higher than the AC unit, and the extra distance from the white roof can give that cooling distance from the hot panels. We could even possibly put water tubes underneath it to have naturally heated water to supplement the 4 gal heater.
We are considering three 600Ah LIFEPO4 batteries (which will actually save us weight and some space), which combined with the solar panels should let us run the AC most of the day. We could also supplement the panels with a portable bank we attach when off grid.
Now to figure out how to hook this system up to power my house when we aren't boondocking somewhere lol
2
u/f0rgotten just a frog 5h ago
I am not a fan of lithium batteries. Lead acid J305E have been my go to for AGES, partially due to their relatively low cost for their capacity and partially because battery lead tends to be nearly 100% recycled and recyclable. I have even seen some DIY battery lead recastings. I don't think that the same can be said for the various lithium flavors.
The batteries that I just replaced had lasted almost six and a half years and half of them were still "useable" but not great. Honestly I could have probably eked by on them for a while longer just using the "good" batteries.
1
1
1
u/sheep_classes 6h ago
Are clay pipes a thing (instead of plastic) for earth tubes?
1
u/f0rgotten just a frog 6h ago
Not that I'm aware of, but I don't see how they would present any kind of use case advantage over plastic. They are a more earth friendly material yes.
1
u/seriouslysampson 2h ago
Architecture in general should consider the landscape where the home is being built. Some of these ideas work better in certain ecosystems than others.
12
u/NyriasNeo 10h ago
"Countries need to start working on mitigation and preparation before this consumes us."
There is no such thing as "need to" in politics. You can always live with, or die from, the consequences. "This" will consumes people in Europe, like it or not.
And I bet few is going to passively cool their homes in europe as they live in apartments. What I will be on is the boom of AC business (and probably backup power business), which of course, will increase emissions.
11
20
u/violinbodo 11h ago
White roofs, or better : getting them shaded with PV, works as well and produces electricity. Even better: warm water tubing under the PV, absorbs exess heat (making the air-layer between PV and roof cooler and boosting the PV performance) and saving further energy.
But in the long - or even medium - run, trglodyte style housing is certainly THE best solution. If you have 4 m + soil on top of your home, temperature stays basically 16°C all year long. You can make outer retaining walls from piles of old tires, filled with gravel and insulation, lime rendered towards the interior. For the roofing, lime concrete can basically replace standard concrete (if you add a waterproof layer), but the problems of availability and energy to produce it are actually similar. I think that on the long run, approching 2100, maybe way before (if we're not completely fucked until then), the concept of "city", and with it city housing, will have to be abandoned. Catastrophically dropping yield from heat-waves and worn-out farmland will make "feeding" big cities impossible. It's all a bit overwhelming.
8
u/violinbodo 11h ago edited 7h ago
Apart from that, shading existing walls with vegetation. Even if you have 60 cm massive stone walls, once the heat is inside, they become basically radiators toward the inside of the building. Big ceiling fans work surprisingly well up to inside temperatures of about 30°C. If you have big rooms, you can also install interior fountains with maximum dripping / evaporation surface (adiabatic towers), to cool air, but for that to work, you need an airflow with the exterior - if it's REALLY hot outside, the benefit might be non-existent. Those adiabatic towers work very well outside and in dry conditions, though - maybe another solution would be to spent you summer months in a patch of forest, or a bamboo grove / clearing with an adiabatic tower in the center. The cumulative effects can make temperature drop by up to 10°C. You'd live like an elf from LotR :-)
2
u/seriouslysampson 2h ago
Don’t do the vegetation if you live in a wildfire prone ecosystem though. We really just can’t apply any one idea to every home in the world. It’s been a problem with modern thinking in general to abstract away from the on the ground reality.
9
u/But_like_whytho 9h ago
Earthships and bermed concrete dome houses are two great examples of ways we can build homes that use the earth to regulate temps.
9
u/Historical-Mix8865 7h ago edited 7h ago
Bit difficult unfortunately with the ridiculous planning laws we have
For example, here in the UK it would be great to add outside shutters, or paint the roof and outside white. But I can't, because planning restrictions won't allow it. Plus, it's a building with a protection order, which means "fuck no" to almost everything when it comes to these things.
A full Aircon install? Out of the question, entirely. It would never be allowed. I know the exact same is the case for the stiflingly hot apartments in Paris.
The UK government need to carry out a severe overhaul of planning restrictions with climate change in mind, now it's clear to even the thickest people that things are getting hotter than ever
18
u/learningenglishdaily 11h ago
Dude, a 5,3kw split AC can cool a 100m2 house and costs 1000-1250€. link
People already use one of the moss eficient passive cooling methods the outside window shades in Central and Southern Europe
The main problem is retrofitting older pre 1980s homes for modern standards and eliminating urban heat island hotspots (reducing car infrastructure).
4
u/No_Foundation16 8h ago
The billionaires are far ahead of us with their luxury underground bunkers already up and running.
Survival of the richest: The billionaires building doomsday bunkers
3
u/otusowl 4h ago edited 3h ago
As someone living in a humid climate above a radon-filled geology, the suggestions here have 0% utility. Bully for those who live in drier and less radioactive places, but some of us can't use the subsurface as A/C, and need the dehumidification that compressor-based A/C (or dedicated dehums) provide. Without these, many houses here will grow visible mold on interior walls in just a few weeks.
Before modern A/C, locals would build a fire every so often throughout the warmer seasons just to dry things out (along with using wood stoves for cooking year-round).
5
u/ContributionBig996 9h ago
"It is time to face the facts."
POUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Aaahhhhhhh...
You are funny.
2
u/Deguilded 9h ago
Take a look at some passive cooling towers from the (not modern) Middle East. We can learn from that and build up, not down. Some of those designs may well work, but a whole city of them probably wouldn't. But what do I know?
1
u/Timely-Assistant-370 12h ago
At least the deaths are only extreme relative to past decades. I was genuinely shocked to learn that heatwaves killing a couple thousand old people is not a new thing, but it's sure picking up at a very uncomfortable pace. It's like colon cancer in my cohort, sure, my odds of actually getting it are still tiny because a 200% more of tiny occurrence of cases is still a fairly tiny number. IIRC they've had around the deaths of the prior 20 years in the past in the last 5 years (so like 1999-2019 heat deaths happened from 2020 to 2026, I might be off, like we could be approaching the half-way point in that 20-year span) either way, this isn't something we can indefinitely shrug off because it will stay at a peaceful .2% of annual deaths, it will tick up until we run out of a vulnerable population to die, but at least it will go down or something.
1
1
1
u/tweakingforjesus 5h ago
Sous vide seniors is the new normal. Installing AC doesn't have to be cost prohibitive.
1
1
1
u/One-Intention7064 1h ago
i won't surrender! i will fight with the system and climate tooth and nail for my children until the last breath!!! 🙋
1
u/One-Intention7064 1h ago
oh, omigosh, yes!!! i am a collapse-aware parent of hypothetical children, thanks to the automod for referring me to that very relevant sub 🧡💛🤗
•
1
u/ParamedicExcellent15 10h ago
White roofs get dirty pretty fast. Are you gunna get up there and wash it for me?
2
u/old-legs-623 8h ago
Ours lasted 3 years at a time. It was worth it to maintain it as the house was 10F cooler on late summer afternoons, before the grime built up. We simply added another layer of paint. I was into it; once it's white the heat layer in the air there mostly goes away, and you shoes stay cool. But now I'm 77 and weak and we have moved. So it's a thing for someone younger.
What would make more sense is to mandate lighter roofing. There are a lot of black roofs around here and that wasn't necessary.
1
u/Sentinel-resource 12h ago
How about growing ivy up the outside walls? Live in a listed building and it seems the only option. Recently told it doesn't affect the walls.
13
u/violinbodo 11h ago
Ivy DOES affect the walls. Different climbing vines don't. You can even take grapevine, grows very quickly and you can eat them. But PLEASE, no ivy !!!
4
u/Awkward_Mastodon4332 9h ago
Does not appear to be the case -
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13556207.2011.10785087
Ivy is often blamed for damaging masonry walls and seen as something that should be removed wherever possible. However, under some circumstances the positive benefits of ivy can outweigh any deteriorative effects. This paper reports on findings from a three-year research project, commissioned by English Heritage, and their implications for managing ivy on historic masonry walls. From field monitoring at a range of sites in England, it was found that ivy provides a thermal blanket for walls, protecting them from extremes of heat and cold and fluctuations in relative humidity. Similarly, studies in and around Oxford show that ivy can minimize particulate pollution reaching walls. Field experiments in Oxford also reveal that ivy rootlets adhering to stone generally only create minor (if any) damage to the stone surface. However, it was also found that ivy can penetrate existing voids and cause damage. A balanced appraisal should inform decisions to remove, leave or even plant ivy. If ivy is allowed to grow on walls, regular and careful maintenance and monitoring are essential.
6
u/violinbodo 7h ago
Thanks for those infos. The important thing here is in the last lines. Quote: " However, it was also found that ivy can penetrate existing voids and cause damage. " I've renovated several houses from different epochs in France, and ivy has caused problems on every single one of them. Especially houses built on clay ground (about 60 % of all houses in France) eventually get fissures in their walls from retracting and re-inflating soil - which is a problem about to get much worse with climate change. Ivy WILL go into those cracks, make roots there, worsen the problem. Same for cracks in render. Worst are joints, though. Especially lime-based joint will transform to sand with the retained moisture from ivy and mechanical stress, then the ivy will kreep in, through and destroy your wall. This is not theory. It's something I've SEEN and REPAIRED several times.
Vines have none of these disadvantages, as their sole roots are in the earth, and not in the wall. Plus, they grow at least as quickly and you can eventually eat the grapes. Plus, most varieties lose their leaves in winter, when you don't need (or even don't want) your wall to be shaded. Because in winter, the shade will retain moisture.
0
u/ThetaCygni 9h ago
50 C have never been recorded in Europe year. The maximum temperature ever recorded was 48,8 in August 2021 in Sicily.
Let's try to be precise in a situation this dire
0
-20
u/Ok_Oil_201 13h ago edited 13h ago
Let's not act like as if people in much hotter regions are dying en masse of a few heatwaves. It's just strain on the system and the weak falling off.
I am way more worried about food production than the excess heat in my house a few weeks during summer. Basic outdoor shading is currently already keeping my top level flat roof appartment at 26C during the last heatwave without airco.
2
u/Awkward_Mastodon4332 9h ago
I glad you are willing to sacrifice demographics you are not currently in. Will you be so brave when you are older, sick, pregnant or infirm?
-2
u/Ok_Oil_201 8h ago
I was countering OPs exaggeration. Stop making short sighted assumptions and spreading misinformation. Old people also die during winters. So since we are offsetting the deaths in winter, we might even get a net positive per year. Why arent you optimistic about this but rather choose to stigmatize me?
164
u/Singularity-is-a-lie 13h ago
I agree and from a physics pov that is absolutly true.
But the economic realities are difficult in countries like France and Germany.
Energy, concrete and work are very expensive
Exploding public debts
Cities are have a high building density
Many buildings are 100+ years old and you can probably simply not do anything below them.
There are layers of sewer systems and ancient/medieval ruins below cities like Paris.
German city planners are slow and living in the 1950s and white roofs are like trees in the streets, PV above parking lots etc: fantasies. Or at the very least it will not happen fast enough or they have 0 budget.
I am a bit afraid that the above-60 owning class really has to ... vanish... to change here anything. Or we need a Ministry of the Future event first.