Can Vines Speed Urban Cooling? – UC Davis
ucdavis.edu
ucdavis.edu
And in the winter it falls off letting the sun in to help with heating.
The side of the house that isn't covered (yet) is noticeably warmer.
The only maintenance is opening windows and pushing away any vines that want to cover the windows, and once a year making sure no vines got in the gutters. (A tip: Don't cut the vines by the window, but rather pull them off and let them hang loose - this signals to the plant that it's at an "edge" and it won't try to grow more in that direction.)
My house is a masonry exterior with a mostly southern exposure. It soaks up the sun and keeps the house very very warm late into the evening... which is not a helpful feature when it's 90F every day of the summer. My plan was to do basically what they described here. Setup some trellis 4 ft or so some the house, and plant some fast-growing vines.
Anything to shade the house will obviously be beneficial from a cooling perspective. The vines are mostly to reduce the cost of shading and increase the aesthetics.
Now what plants are the best balance of low water usage, high growth, low maintenance? That's a good question and I look forward to seeing what UCDavis comes up with.
If you mess around with beta alanine and manganese (chloride), be prepared for an increase in olfactory sensing (smelling), and you'll soon discover the rotting smell of vegetation when things get damp, foggy or it rains amongst many other things. I pity our canine friends.
I think humans wouldnt live in such damp environments if they could smell how bad it is, but as they cant normally/couldnt in the past, would explain the migration to damp conditions in human history, instead of mastering irrigation in arid environments.
So whilst the growing of vines and other vegetation on buildings could work at absorbing the ultraviolet and infrared radiation spectrum to reduce urban cooling, is it such a thought out idea, or are we increasing a new bacterial attack vector into our immediate environment?
Thinking of the recent article [0] on the “miracle house” in Hawaii that survived the fires even though entire blocks around it burned to ashes. The key was to not have combustible stuff on or close to the walls:
“But Michael Wara, the director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Wood Institute for the Environment, said it was likely the Millikins’ decision to dig out the existing landscaping directly surrounding the house and replace it with river stones that made the biggest difference.
“What folks in the wildfire business call the zone zero or the ember ignition zone, is kind of a key factor in whether homes do or do not burn down,” Wara said.
Having nothing combustible in the 5 feet directly around a house is enormously important.”
[0: https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/08/what-saved-the-miracle-hou... ]
Vines with sticky pad cause no damage at all if you just leave them there.
The ones with wrapping tendrils can try to penetrate into the brick, so don't plant those, but the sticky type causes zero damage.
In fact cleaning them off would be worse because then the sticky pad might remove some loose material! If you do need to remove the plant kill it, and let it sit for a few months and then it will come off without removing even lose material.
Living wood is very very hard to ignite. It would need to dry for several months before it can sustain a fire without help.
It's not like grass that can dry completely (and the leaves are dead, but not the roots) and then can catch fire. With a vine if it's dead (and getting dryer) it's not coming back - so pull it off the house.