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| Living without air conditioning |
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| Written by Karen Kingston | |||||||||||
| Saturday, 19 January 2008 | |||||||||||
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. Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2008 Quote this article on your blog or website | Views: 1994 | Print | E-mail
I live in tropical Australia (12 degrees south of the Equator) and don't have much use for airconditioning - because my home is built on stilts (it's 3 metres - 10 feet off the ground) and has lots of floor-to-ceiling windows and doors. We use fans constantly during the summer wet season but don't have to use them for weeks on end in the winter dry season.
Apart from all the other advantages mentioned by Karen, our electricity bills are very modest indeed. I too am familiar with living in an area with high humidity (often at 95%-100%) year round. Even though we had open windows and fresh air with fans, we found that after 5 years of living on a tropical island most everything we owned now had some sort of mold on it. Even on items that we used regularly. We resorted to using air conditioning to minimize the mold.
My parents, who still live in the house, still use airconditioning but only wait till the afternoon to turn it on, and then they turn it off at night. On really humid days, they turn on a dehumidifier for a couple of hours. This combination has been helping reduce the mold problem. Hi. I am happy to find your blog, I have read a few of your books and often refer to them on my blog. This post reminds me of a palace we saw in Kerala India. If you browse to the bottom of my blog, you will see a photo of a room called Mantrasala with similar air conditioning vents near the floor of the building.
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