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Comment by pseudostem | Hacker News Reader

I deployed my own design (not calculated, eyeballed) of a buoyancy based passive cooling at my parents home near Mumbai, India. It did make a measured difference of approximately (temperature meters aren't very accurate) 2 degrees Celsius. I have been reading a lot in my spare time and your blog looks like a nice read.

My point is, is 2 to 3 degrees Celsius enough? From what I read is that I need to really move very large columns of air to make a sizeable impact. TBF my energy bills did come down by ~10%

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At some point the thing to do is give people shovels and tell them the roof of their new dwelling has to be at least 2 meters/6 feet below the surface. Or use modern tech.

Got a point there, we as a species lived in 'caves' for a long time, it's only the past 2000 years or so we gave up our nice caves/mud houses. In my region in Europe people still lived in straw mudhuts/semi dug-in houses up until 100 years ago. Somehow that became uncool so we deal with modern people problems.

"uncool" !@!

how does this work where there are heavy rains in that part of the world, each year? desert, sure..

I’m not that familiar with hot temperatures but intuitively I would think that a difference of 2-3 degrees (Celsius) when temperatures are already high at around 40-45 to be noticeable.

For example if you go from 40°C to 37-38 that’s a quite good improvement if you don’t have to spend energy for this. I don’t know if that also applies to more extreme temperatures like 47°C, I cannot really imagine how that feels like.

At those temperatures heat stroke isn’t far away regardless of humidity. These aren’t temperatures to target 2-3c reductions as a safe goal, either.

Ref: lived in LV,NV for a decade.

From what I understood 2-3°C is not a safe goal but something you can get from the passive cooling solution the initial commenter mentioned. I would guess you can add extra active measures on top?

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