Modern carved air vents

Traditional Balinese air vents

Continuing the topic of air conditioning that I began in Nov 2007, Amy from Florida wrote to me to ask, "What do you suggest for those of us who live in hot and humid climates where an air conditioner becomes a necessity much of the year?"

I gave this a lot of thought when building my home, hotel and conference centre in Bali, where humidity ranges between 65 - 85% and can get as high as 95% at some times of the year, which is comparable with Florida's climate. What I did was to design permenantly open vents over all the doors and windows, so that there is always some circulation of fresh air even when the air-conditioning is being used. There is a layer of wire mesh between the inner and outer sides of the vents to stop bugs getting in, and the whole design works wonderfully well.

The ornate carved version in the first photo is an adaptation of the traditional Balinese open ventilation system using plain wooden uprights (shown in the second photo), which allows mozzies and other tropical bugs to come and go as they please.

As well as the problems I mentioned in my previous blog, another thing to understand is the weakening effect on a person's immune system if they habitually use heating and cooling systems to keep their environment within a narrow band of temperature. Depending on the climate, some heating or cooling is fine during cold or hot seasons, but the immune system loses robustness if climate control is used excessively or is too controlled.

There are many hot, humid countries in the world where peoples live very comfortaby without air conditioning. The trick is to incorporate air-flows into the design at the architectural stage, such as in the lovely old colonnial buildings in Singapore. 

Comments (1)

Write a comment

Please keep your comments relevant to the subject of the article. Don't use this facility to plug your own web site. Such material will be removed. If you enter the wrong security code, just refresh your browser and a new security code will be displayed.
Name:
BBCode:
Comment:
Code:*