Can I pick your collective brains about an idea for a home cooling solution that I have thought of?
SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT @ SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT @feddit.de Posts 2Comments 193Joined 2 yr. ago
SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT @ SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT @feddit.de
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This will work, in theory, and if you're willing to use a lot of water. It's probably a bad idea.
Heating one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius without phase transitions (freezing/melting, evaporating/condensing) takes 1 kilocalorie of energy. That's roughly 4 kilojoules aka kilowattseconds, or 0.0012 kWh.
Thus, to get 1.2 kW of cooling, which is about half of what those tiny portable air conditioners promise, at a 10 degree temperature difference, you'd need 100 liters of water per hour. If water costs $0.40 per 100 liters, and electricity cost $0.40 per kWh, an air conditioner (using about 0.4 kW of electricity to pump 1.2 kW of heat) will be a lot cheaper, and that's ignoring the power you might need to run the pumps and fan on your solution (all of which you get back as heat!)
Unless the water in the loop is below the dew point, you also won't get any dehumidification. This is actually more important than cooling, and a big reason why air conditioned rooms feel so much better (sitting in the shade in 40° C dry weather would be unpleasant but fine, at 100% humidity, it would be reliably fatal regardless of fitness).
If you're building new, look into:
In the end, you're building a new building, so you now have a chance to do everything right using modern but already proven technology. I wouldn't DIY anything critical and hard to change like this. Remember, you're trying to find the best (likely: cheapest in the long term while meeting your reliability requirements) solution that will solve your problem. There's a very high chance that's simply "add more A/C and solar according to what's locally available". And that's fine. There's nothing bad about that.
I wouldn't, for example, try to build with different materials than locally common, even if those were "better" by some metric. That often doesn't give you a better house, that gives you a unique house, and unique can be a nightmare.