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Richard Branson (who asked for UK taxpayer money to repair his private island after hurricane Irma) Has set a climate change challenge:
As the world continues to warm, you can expect more and more folks to be turning to air conditioners to keep their living environments cool and comfortable. And in that sense, this energy-intensive technology will do plenty to exacerbate the very problem it is designed to solve. The Global Cooling Prize is a competition to help stop runaway climate change, by dangling US$3 million in prize money for the development of more energy-efficient cooling solutions.
The Global Cooling Prize is backed by the Indian government among other partners, with Richard Branson taking on the ambassadorial duties.
$3M could keep this site running for some time -- go team SoylentNews!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday December 04 2018, @01:52AM (7 children)
All an A/C does is transfer the heat inside your home to the outside. There are two reasons for heat being inside:
It's relatively cheap to keep a very well insulated area cold, or hot. The lower the R-value, the more you are spending, till the point you have a huge campfire, or you're blowing ridiculous amounts of cool air into a single spot.
If we increase the R-value of housing sufficiently, we would need a far less robust cooling systems in the summer, as well as spending less energy to to heat in the winter. There are a number of materials that we could possibly use to do this, and prefab housing like ecolite concrete. The building materials are there, and there are plenty of innovative housing concepts.
One of the bigger issues though is waste heat generated in the house from technology. My smartphone can get pretty fucking hot when charging up, and that goes for a lot of things requiring large battery capacity and fast chargers. Then we have our computers which generate substantial waste heat, televisions and monitors, ovens for cooking, etc. As well as every single AC/DC converter in the house. I would suggest the radical step of providing liquid cooling connections to different areas of the house, as well as moving to pure DC where possible. I'm looking into designing a house this way for myself, if for nothing else than the servers. PCs can be operated remotely, but that screws with the latency for gamers.
Having a variable DC hookup with a liquid cooling loop connection could allow technology in the house to be more efficient in terms of much heat it generates (no AC/DC conversion usually required), and where that heat goes. A common liquid cooling loop could remove the waste heat to a pond, or something else outside. In winter, that same waste heat could be instead shunted straight into the heating system for the house.
In some places, it may just be completely infeasible to cool a structure above ground. Making housing, and then afterward covering it up with dirt and landscaping, may the only practical way to provide cooling in some cases. That's not a bad idea either. I saw a school with buildings at least 20 feet tall, with 15 feet of landscaping up against all the walls. It looked like you were entering a bunker. I asked about it and was told by the principal they had designed it that way to help with cooling costs for the school district, and it worked.
We could keep working on A/C technology, but instead of propping up old inefficient housing tech, we should work on both sides of the equation so to speak.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday December 04 2018, @02:04AM (5 children)
Agreed.
Lower maintenance than liquid cooling: Big copper pipes tied to the ground and/or the water pipes under the house. Tie some of your hot sources to cold plates.
Conduction isn't as good as pumped hydro, but it's better than nothing, especially if passive.
Small DC fan on cold plate optional.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:58AM (4 children)
At the retail price of copper, you may just as well propose huge diamond crystals for the purpose - at least they have a large thermal conductivity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:33AM (3 children)
Only $9/kilo. That's ~$1/m, 2.5mm (10AWG) or $3/m for 35mm pipe.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday December 04 2018, @08:37AM (2 children)
Linky please? Here's what I can find locally [bunnings.com.au] retail prices.
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The original context specifies "no liquid cooling".
A big pipe without a circulating liquid inside is almost dead as to thermal transfer. Heat diffusion is proportional with the surface and invers proportional with the length the heat needs to travel.
Now, you can arrange to absorb (release) heat from inside (to outside/in the ground) by increasing the exposed surface - just use a longer pipe for exposure.
Trouble is when you consider the transport between hot and cold exposed areas - this will go through an area as large as the cross-section of the pipe wall. At 1mm wall thickness, 35mm inner diameter, the area is π×(R2-r2)=166 mm2.
Assuming 20cm of pipe between inside/outside (a thinish floor) and the temperature differential is between 32C (inside) to 2C (almost frozen soil), the heat transfer between the two ends through the copper pipe is ~10W [thermtest.com].
Now, if you want passive (no liquid cooling), you'll want bars of copper, not pipes. At 35mm radius for a bar, the minimal heat transfer surface blows up to a 3850 mm2, which increases the dissipated heat to a "whooping" 300W.
The initial investment for "passive cooling using sunken copper bars" for a reasonable home size is left as an exercise for the reader.
For supplementary points, the reader is invited to describe a solution that works during winter, when one would be happy not to lose the heat in warming the underground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @01:19PM (1 child)
Actually, your link is not that crazy price. Somewhat of a markup, but it costs about AUS$30 for that 3.1kg of pipe. The price is $50. So, you have about 70% markup for manufacturing and distribution for the that pipe from raw metal.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 04 2018, @01:39PM
This doesn't make it cheap tho.
I tried to find a copper round 42mm diameter for machining in a hobby project. I gave up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 04 2018, @02:38PM
Those are all good suggestions. Thorough insulation is the best bang for the buck. Windows are always the achilles heel for the envelope of the structure, but don't spring for the triple-paned argon-filled options, because we will never make our money back on the initial investment. Instead, good old-fashioned storm windows that we nail to the outside are much better. If we want something automatic, there are insulated roller shutters like is common in Europe (those add extra privacy and security also).
New buildings can use Passiv house standards to achieve energy efficiency, or use earth the way you describe. Existing buildings, though, can still help themselves a great deal by switching their heating and cooling to a ground-source heat pump. Fluid coming out of a loop of pipe buried in the ground will emerge at 55F year round. In the winter we only have to bump that up a little to 72F, in the summer we can blow a fan across a coil carrying that 55F fluid and we have air-conditioning. Some setups can dump heat into our water heater also, such that we see even more dramatic efficiencies.
Washington DC delenda est.