Air Conditioning

We broke down and asked Bob to go ahead and put in a conventional air conditioner last week.  The house was doing very well considering the heat wave we’ve had, but when the temp climbs over 95 degrees for over two weeks straight, and topping out at 100, it gets uncomfortable!

Fortunately, we had budgeted a high-efficiency DX cooling unit, and Bob has worked installation into his schedule.  If we get our photovoltaic panel array at some point, I guess we can feel a little better about using the energy for powering this thing.

At 90 degrees and under, the combination of good cross ventilation and ceiling fans in every room is fine, so most of our summer we will be leaving it off.  I’m not a fan of conventional air conditioning, because in my experience, it results in closed up buildings where no one interacts with the outdoors.  With our indoor/outdoor patios, we will see if we can keep a good balance...    

Comments

[Kitt]

A swamp cooler might have been a good alternative. You need to keep your windows open (or at least cracked) when you run it, and it humidifies the air nicely.

Mine sure is getting a workout these days!

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[Angelo]

Hey Kitt,
We reviewed the cooling options very carefully and struggled with our choices. We wanted a little more control over the humidity and temperature, and we wanted to hook whatever cooling unit we added into the existing duct system for even distribution. Swamp coolers work best when they are on the roof, but since we have a flat roof, there are no ducts up there to use. It would have been very difficult to make the swamp cooler work for all the upstairs rooms, and even more challenging to distribute cooling downstairs. We were looking at an even better option called an indirect swamp cooler, but the prices we were getting to connect it to our duct system were way too high. One local company is called Coolerado – Until they come down in price, they are more of a luxury item (but extremely energy efficient). The a/c unit is actually a very high efficiency unit.

[Kitt]

Coolerado installed some attic fans down the street from me. Looks like they do good work.

It does get complicated if you want to tie into the ducts. I got lucky, as I have a furnace in my attic as well as in the basement. Since I had to do a side-duct swamp cooler anyway (roof's too steep), they were able to tie it into the existing ductwork, and the unit is powerful enough that the cool air cascades down the stairs to cool the ground floor, too.

I didn't mean to criticize your choice, though! Luckily it's not hot enough here (usually) to need much cooling. But when you want it, you really want it.

(comment migrated from previous blog)