We’ve been playing with different ways to retrofit the house on the farm with cooling systems that do not cost the earth (literally).
Given the era the house was built in and the materials it’s made of, heating and cooling are pretty much a bit of a disaster. Summer, particularly gives us grief. When we bought it, it had fully ducted aircon, which we hated. Luckily for us, the weather gods stepped in and removed the system with a well placed lightning strike.
So, over the winter we played with ideas for alternatives and decided to go with this, from Bill Mollison’s permaculture designer’s manual:
Clearly this comes from a desert environment and our humid heat will need different strategies, but the principle should work the same.
We went with flexible corrugated ag pipe, buried 2 metres below ground, with around 50 metres of pipe run down to the house. 160mm pipe was the only affordable item, so we went with four pipes, to maximise surface area for heat exchange, as per the following:
The pipes wiggle side to side to try to encourage mixing of the air and hence, increase heat transfer to the earth.
The pipes go into the house as close to the middle as we could manage:
Because the last 7 metres of the pipe is only just below ground level, we installed high density foam insulation over the pipe to help reduce heat transfer here. Ideally, we probably should not have used corrugated pipe for this section.
The air from the pipes is transferred into the house via a cob plenum chamber:
You can see the pipe ends in the right hand picture. The orange bag is stopping unwanted critters from entering the bathroom (although a baby red-bellied black snake did make it in at this time, it didn’t survive the experience – while we love these critters, poisonous snakes are just not welcome in the house. Better than a brown, though, I suppose…).
The air intake is a pretty funky cob structure, with a recycled steel roof and a solar panel that drive four computer fans that pressurise the system, to reduce the likelihood of water ingress:
The inlet faces northwest, the direction from which our most awful hot winds originate. Hopefully this will help the fans on those ridiculously hot days.
In the house, the air is routed through the bathroom and into the middle of the house. We still need to do some work to make these bits look nice:
On the hottest day we’ve had so far (~38°C), the air was coming in at 19°C). Nice…
Special thanks to Will and Kenney from Integrated Bio-Tecture for helping us to make this happen.