Unless you have lived in the tropical humid heat, you wont be able to relate to this. Moving to NYC recently and living without an AC or even a fan feels so glorious. I bet 10% of my brain was constantly fighting the heat back when I was in south of India.
Funny, I remember coming to NYC from Scandinavia thinking it was so humid and warm and impossible to get anything done during the summer months.
Guess it really depends on what you are used to.
Then, in the winter, the old NYC apartments were so dry and warm because of the central heat that typically couldn't be regulated from the radiators in the apartments. They just blasted on all winter and the only way to adjust the temperature would be to open the windows :-)
In Beijing, we had central CITY heating in the winter. It was so toasty I would open my window whenever the air pollution wasn't took bad.
During the summer, it was hot and humid. Unfortunately, centra AC wasn't a thing, and the wall units would only do so much. Now I live in LA and the weather is mostly perfect.
It is humid and warm in NYC but it hasn't been this year yet. But it will come and the inside of apartments will be amplified.
Most building are side by side with no windows on the side. And unites tend to only have windows on a single side which means it's impossible to get airflow.
As for radiators some can be adjusted but many are binary, either on or off. You could always turn one off for awhile too. They stay warm for quite awhile when off.
Every summer, I see a couple of posts on HN about some supposedly groundbreaking scheme to cool a building by a few degrees without using an traditional A/C. Usually it's a combination of ventilation and evaporation, resulting in somewhat cooler but much more humid air.
I guess it might work in the Bay Area. But as someone who lives where I regularly see temperatures higher than the human body temperature with humidity higher than the human body's water content, that kind of scheme is an absolute non-starter. This article does a great job explaining why.
The fact that blowing air over blocks of ice didn't work 100 years ago should remind today's inventors that damp air is unlikely to be a good solution, either, in most parts the world that currently rely on compressor-based air conditioners.
Swamp coolers don't work in the tropics, obviously. They are great in the desert though (except during monsoon season). In the tropics, you cool by extracting humidity, not injecting it. And extracting humidity might not work very well in a very dry desert...so...
The ice block thing worked perfectly fine in Iran, at least.
> In the tropics, you cool by extracting humidity, not injecting it. And extracting humidity might not work very well in a very dry desert...so...
You seem to be saying that an air conditioner requires significant ambient humidity in order to be effective. That doesn't make sense, as anyone from Phoenix, Arizona can testify.
A typical air conditioner does not cool the air by extracting humidity. It extracts humidity by cooling the air and so bringing it below its condensation point. Extracting humidity is a welcome side effect, since it helps us feel more comfortable, but it is not the primary function of a modern air conditioner.
Fellow Zoni here, and a moon-lighting HVAC service tech. To clarify a common misconception, A/C refrigerant does not cool air even though that is the net result. It actually absorbs heat and releases it outside the strucure. Sorry for the pedantry, but if we come here to learn, may as well learn the technicals.
This is a distinction without a difference. Removing heat from the interior air is the same thing as cooling the interior air.
If you mean that the air conditioner doesn't produce a magical substance called "cool", that's true, but no one claimed that it does. The mechanism transfers heat with the effect of cooling the interior.
I second that. The Bay Area has this gloriously perfect climate where you need nothing more than a table or ceiling fan in the summer, a small electric space heater in the winter and nothing at all most of the time. With the right architecture and insulation you could spend almost nothing on heating or cooling.
When did you move to NYC? It hasn't gotten hot yet this year but you'll see that living without an AC or a fan is hell here. The inside of apartments (especially older ones which most are) gets amazingly hot and it stays that way once it heats up outside.
It has been a rather cool spring and we haven't had a heat wave yet but rest assured once we do you will find inside your apartment will be unbearably hot and humid. And it will stay that way well into autumn.
The city itself gets hot too with a lack of airflow and tons of AC units pushing out heat and exhaust from vehicles and the Subway as well. The Subway stations will be unbearably hot as well since the train is air conditioned and has lots of heat exhaust from this and its regular operation.
Luckily apartments are small enough that a decent window AC can usually keep an entire unit comfortable and only has to be run when you're home.
It has been quite cool so far this year. My experience moving to NYC from northern CA three years ago has been: 1st summer (2014) I got by without an AC (but with fans) and it wasn't that bad. 2nd summer (2015) was quite agonizingly hot and humid and I vowed to get an AC for the next year. 3rd summer (2016) I had an AC and was very glad as it was quite hot that year as well.
Likewise, I just came back from HK and I have no idea how they could get anything done there before the introduction of AC. And I was told it gets even worse in the middle of summer!
In India, we employed a variety of methods that, all combined, did a good enough job of keeping things cool.
The first was a stepwell, called Baoli in Hindi. This was basically a giant swimming pool dug out and filled with water. Around the stepwell, terrace-like steps were created where the general public could hang out and stay cool. For example[1].
Another method was to have dual walls with some lattice patterns on the first wall. The first wall absorbed all of the heat and would get warm in the evening, but the second wall, recessed from the first wall by a certain distance, would be spared the hot sunshine, and would stay cooler. These second walls made up the walls of your room.
Moving to basements was also a popular solution, since beneath the earth stayed cooler. The British especially loved this solution.
Older homes in India have high ceilings with ventilation at the top to allow for natural convection. The hot air would escape from the top and be replaced with cool air. In places like New Orleans, the Creole architecture also involves inlet vents in the basement-region, where cooler air would be sucked in.
Finally, after the arrival of electricity, we had evaporative coolers, where pads made out of hay would have water dripped onto them. The evaporation of the water would cool things down inside the cooler via latent heat, and this cooler air would be blown into a room with the exhaust fan. This is a fantastic solution for dry heat places because it doesn't get rid of humidity (making the skin feel terrible), and has the power consumption only of a puny exhaust fan (unlike a full blown positive displacement compressor).
I went to HK in the middle of hottest times (Aug 1st) last year and it was absolutely brutal. But then again, the entire city really grew out of nowhere during the past century, so it kind of grew in tandem with air conditioning.
HK is one of those places that's absolutely amazing as a city, and has some of the worst weather on earth (crazy humidity all the time, insane heat in summer, crazy rains and typhoons all the time… and a cloud of pollution emanating down from Shenzhen).
Spare a thought for the Philippines - the wikipedia typhoon path picture almost completely covers the entire country (HK is hidden in there too, though)
I guess it depends on what you are used to. I get distracted by being too cold (ACs included); if it's hot I don't have it. I get a lot more done in humid 40C Thailand(etc) then I get done in cold, rainy London in the same timespan. Programming that is; for meetings cold is better I think.
I grew up in Bangladesh and I promise you there will be summer days in NY that will just as sweltering as the warmest, muggiest, air sticks to your body days in South Asia.
