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Re: Cooling a house with ice



Mike Allenbau <allenbau@aol.com> wrote:

>Simpler solution - carefully cut the house into 150 pound pieces, number
>them, UPS them to Fort Yukon, Alaska, reassemble the house, and then it
>will be cool.

You gotta worry about your girth limits too, if you want to be practical
about this. I seem to recall UPS accepts a max of 108" length and perimeter
combined, with ovals and circles counted by the rectangles they inscribe.
Doesn't it get hot in Alaska sometimes?

Barrow looks coolish too, with a 1% dry bulb max summer temp of 57F, and
average temperatures of -13 F and -15 F in December and January, with an
average of 0.00 Btu/ft^2/day of sun. Perhaps there is a version of Murphy's
law that says, "If it's cool enough in the Winter to easily make enough ice
to cool your house in the Summer, you won't need to do that."

I keep picturing a shallow swimming pool, or perhaps a crawl space foundation
or a literal "floating slab" basement floor, insulated on the bottom--this
is the most expensive part to imagine--perhaps just some perimeter insulation
and a layer of plastic, on the ground, with a foot or so of dry soil on top
of that, then a little plastic pipe, then a layer of EPDM rubber, then a foot
or so of plain water, then a thermal cover of some sort, eg a building or
grass or a parking lot on top of some kind of low, thin, concrete roof mound
with a radiant barrier, over the water, and lots of those $10.83 Leslie-Locke
or $19.95 Solar Tex automatic foundation vents around the perimeter, with the
bimetallic springs reversed so the louvers  open  when the air gets below
freezing outside. Of course most people wouldn't want to live inside this
cold store...

Or perhaps we can change our metabolism... My grandmother used to tell me
about a local character in Kentucky: "Frozen Usher" used to come to town
in a horse-drawn wagon, once a year, on the hottest day of the year, all
wrapped up in layers of sweaters and coats and hats and gloves...

>I'm impressed by all that math, though - is any of it correct?

I think I done it right, within an order of magnitude, except for that there
last number. And I'm not sure how well that 0.2 radiator will work...
My grandmother also used to yell "Turn down the radiator!"
when we had the station up too loud.

Nick


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