How air conditioning changed the world

[rwsaunders]

For you design and construction geeks from our friends at the BBC...

How air conditioning changed the world - BBC News

[jclay]

For you design and construction geeks from our friends at the BBC...

How air conditioning changed the world - BBC News

I think about that a lot as I watch the Florida I knew as a child get buried under humanity. It utterly transformed the South...never mind the rest of the country/world. Forget medical and food refrigeration, without household AC Florida's population would be half of what it is now...maybe half. Contemporary Atlanta wouldn't exist. Ditto the rest of the large metro centers of the SE USA. Most of humanity would have wisely stayed in cooler climates.

Turn off household AC and I-95 & 75 would be all lanes northbound with transplants fleeing. It's a fantasy I have.

[j44ke]

When I lived in Arizona, I was shown an old house that had a way to set up canvas tarps around a porch. The tarps were soaked in water and hung up wet around the porch and the breeze that went though the house was cooled by the evaporation. Our 1929 house had a "swamp cooler" on the roof that was a four sided metal box with giant loofah mats on each side that were kept wet by a recirculating pump that sucked water out of a collecting tray and ran it back up to the top of the box. It had to be connected to a refill line with a float valve, because evaporation would quickly remove all the water. But it cooled the house nicely for most of the hot months, until the humidity went over about 25-30%. Unfortunately with more and more irrigation and changes in weather patterns, Arizona air was getting more humid in the cities even though that never seemed to mean more rain. All it did was reduce the function of the swamp coolers and increase the need for AC.

NYC in the summer is probably degrees warmer due to all the venting of AC units (plus all the cars and concrete.) Our building was built for flow-through ventilation, and has a stairwell that if returned to its original design would suck air from the ground floor up through the building and out the top. Unfortunately, the amount of dirt and crud in the air (admittedly, it was likely a dirtier city back before air conditioners) means most of the windows stay closed and the stairway has been sealed from the outside on most of the floors over the years - for security, ease of maintenance, short sightedness, etc. - and would cost a lot of money to renovate to its original function at this point (plus invite unwanted and complicated city regulatory attention.) So we use AC in the summer on all floors, and I know it creates vapor issues in the walls as cool air inside meets heated exterior walls. The building just wasn't built for AC use.

[j44ke]

The dogtrot house design mentioned in the article is the basis for the design of our house upstate (still in development.) Our house will have air conditioning, but we want it built to minimize the number of days we need to use it as much as possible.