Could You Make One Room in Your House 5°C Cooler Without Air Conditioning?
Could You Make One Room in Your House 5°C Cooler Without Air Conditioning? Before buying an air conditioner, try treating your house like a science experiment. During a hot spell, it is very easy to assume that an uncomfortably warm room simply needs mechanical cooling. Buy an air conditioner. Plug it in. Problem solved. Except that air conditioning uses electricity, costs money to buy, adds another appliance to maintain and, in some houses, may simply be compensating for a much more basic problem: we are allowing too much heat into the room in the first place. What if, instead, we chose one room in the house and experimented with it? Could we make it 1°C cooler? Could we manage 3°C? And could a particularly badly overheating room actually be kept 5°C cooler at its hottest point simply by changing how we manage sunlight, windows, ventilation and internal sources of heat? The answer will vary enormously between houses. A north-facing downstairs room is very different fr...
