Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

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Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Postby George Collins » Thu Jan 26, 2012 3:56 am

When my wife and I married, she already owned a house in Long Beach Mississippi. It started as a shack and was added on to piecemeal by previous owners that were a little too DIY iffn you know what I mean. That dern place was impossible to heat and cool. We put a lot of money into trying to make it something other than what it was.

This far South, heating really isn't that big a deal. On the few cold days we do get every year, living in that impossible-to-heat house simply meant we did lots of cooking, wore thick socks and donned long-handled underwear. Make those fewer minor adjustments and all was good.

Summers were a beast.

Cooking a meal meant you were destined to swelter for the rest of the day. Being the permaculturalists-in-waiting that we were at the time, we solved the problem by being forced to cook outside or die. We did everything we could that we thought might even have the slimmest possibility of providing relief. We had doubled paned, argon filled windows installed and paid WAY too much for them. We vented the roof. We had additional insulation blown into the attic. I would go outside in the hottest part of the day and hose the roof hoping the cooling effect of the water evaporating might help. And there was no amount of tree planting that would have helped since the house was set in the middle of a half acre lot and was completely encircled by several massive live oaks, several massive water oaks, three pecans and a magnolia. What's even crazier, our air conditioner was massive in its capacity relative to the smallish 1300 square foot house. We sold that oven-for-a-house after eight long years of struggle. We never did manage to cool that thing sufficiently to allow us to cook lunch inside during the late spring, summer and early autumn months.

The only redeeming qualities were those massive trees and all that beautiful St. Augustine grass. But 6 weeks after we sold it, Hurricane Katrina ripped through our beautiful state and that yard was no more. All of the monster water oaks were gone, the live oaks . . . unrecognizable.

The house we moved into next was everything that the first house wasn't.

At one time, The Bennett House as it is known, was considered the pride of the town in which we now live. It was an antebellum home built in 1850 and there we were living when Katrina cut its swath of destruction through God's Country.

We were without electricity from August 29 until September 8. During that time, living in a home built prior to the luxury of central heating and air conditioning, we learned some valuable lessons about architecture as it relates to passive cooling.

The more I learn about permaculture, the more I see it as a revival of the Old Ways with a modern twist.

My parents, who lived through the aftermath of The Great Depression, also suffered through the aftermath of Katrina. However, our experiences were quite different. The house that I was born into and in which they lived during the (for them) 14-day power outage is a typical ranch-style, 1600ish square foot house that features:
- All red brick exterior construction
- Minimal attic space
- Standard 8' ceilings,
- Wall-to-wall carpet,
- Central heat and air,
- Mostly large windows situated on the east and west
- All tiny windows on the north and South
- No tree cover to the east, and moderate tree cover to the west.

That is to say, their house was built with the intent of having central heat and air perpetually.

Several days after the storm was over, the roads were finally clear enough to make the 10 mile drive to check on them. They were obviously suffering. Their lack of sleep was painfully obvious. They had obtained a generator by the time I was able to get to them but its capacity was reserved exclusively to run deep freezers which were full of beef my daddy had just had processed. Because of the radiant heat from the bricks keeping the inside of their house oppressively hot, they were unable to go to sleep before 4 a.m. Because the mosquitos and love bugs were like a biblical plague that year, they couldn't sleep outside. They were truly miserable. They couldn't leave because thefts of generators were rampant and they had not yet eaten a single mess of beef from their just butchered steer and were not about to leave such an investment to the whims of passers-by. They were stuck.

Our situation was much different. Remember, our house was built prior to central heat and air. There were relatively few east and west windows and all but one of those was shaded by an awning or a screened porch. All exit doors opened onto the two screened in porches. The house had vintage but mostly serviceable double hung sash windows and the house had two stories. When the electricity went down, we simply opened every door and almost all of the windows and the draft created by doing so would have been sufficient to fly a kite had the ceiling been a bit taller than the 11' they actually were. The house was oriented due South. Massive trees shielded it from the sun to the west, north and east. The house was built up off the ground as much as 8' in some areas. Being in the above ground basement felt akin to being in a cave; always about 72 degrees.

For security, my oldest son and I slept crossways the two porch doors, heavily armed. Trouble makers would have had to step on one of us to gain entrance.

We did all of our cooking outside. Dutch oven, roasted hot dogs, roasted steak . . . it was great.

Most impressive of all though, during the height of the storm's rage, was that then-155-year-old house never uttered a groan, not a creak . . . nothing. It stood like stone through 100+ mph winds and never uttered the first syllable of complaint. Every board, every nail, every window, every door, every brick on that thing is original as far as anyone within living memory knows and the only damage was that we lost a few shingles. Folks back when sure knew how to build em.

I purposely raise my kids hard so that when/if times get hard, they will be able to cope. This instance proved the method behind my mother-in-law perceived madness because for 10 days, all of my little ones (expect the 6-week old baby) had an extended camping-ish trip and true to form, had a blast the whole time. Their mother, whom I can't force to take hikes long enough to impart leg-cramps to, didn't fare quite so well without running water and her kids had to pull her through the ordeal.

Time marched on, the world returned to normal and all was eventually good. Then fate intervened and we were forced out of that grand old house and from there, moved into one remarkably similar to the house I first described that was impossible to cool. AC bill the first month was ~$500.00. Living there drove the lessons home with fierce force.

The worm turned. We built our dream home.

Unfortunately we did so immediately prior to learning about permaculture for there are things that I would have done differently given the opportunity. Fortunately, we had lived in that antebellum home, learned much from doing so and carried the lessons forward. When we spoke with the contractor, while describing our vision, we told him that what we were after was an "old house built out of new materials."

This is what we wound up with:

The house is designed so that if the electricity were to go out, we have a built-in generator fueled via a subterranean propane tank to keep our freezers going but not the heater/air-conditioner. The reason the AC is not connected to the generator is because the house is designed to be passively cooled just like the 1850s house. It's features include:
- Two stories to minimize the size of solar catchment relative to total living area and to facilitate venting of heated air out of the second story which pulls relatively cool air into the first floor to provide convective cooling
- 9' ceilings to allow heated air to travel above head height
- Faces due South
- Shaded to the west
- Planting trees like mad on the east
- Row of live oaks ~ 100' to the South
- 4 windows to the east, 2 of which are tiny
- No windows to the west
- All south facing windows not under a porch will be under awnings shortly
- Working shutters (the price of which (along with cabinetry) was one of the larger shocks received during the whole process)
- No faux windows or doors
- All windows double hung
- All south and west doors under porches (none to the east)
- MANY windows and mostly glass doors on the north to facilitate natural lighting without heat
- Built up off the ground
- Cellar (probably the only house in Mississippi with one) with a reenforced panic room
- Reflective metal roof
- Exterior walls painted white to reflect heat
- Cutsey little flower box right outside the kitchen window (this doesn't actually help with the cooling but it is cool so I thought I would mention it.)
- Blown foam insulation which turns the whole structure into one giant styrofoam cooler and improves the structural integrity such that we can supposedly withstand a direct hit from an F5 tornado/300 mph winds (and I hope like H.E.Double Hockey Sticks that little feature remains untested).

So if the construction of a new home lies in your future, you could probably do a lot worse than finding really old homes in your part of the world and copying them in every relevant, material principle of design. That's what I did albeit accidentally. And the more I study up on permacultural design principles, the more impressed I am by many of the methods of those that came before.
Last edited by George Collins on Thu Jan 26, 2012 5:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Solve world hunger, tell no one." "The, the, the . . . The Grinch!"

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Re: Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Postby matt walker » Thu Jan 26, 2012 4:22 am

Excellent post George, and great advice. As I was reading I was enjoying the perspective on important design aspects in a very different climate than mine. Very neat thinking about the old place drawing like a chimney with all that hot air. Thanks for that.

Cellars are a great way to stay cool. I'm surprised they are so uncommon.
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Re: Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Postby eeldip » Wed Feb 01, 2012 6:42 am

blow foam insulation, never heard about the added structural benefit, but it makes sense. everything i've read and seen points to the foam being worth the extra cost. i think its getting dropped from passive haus standards because of the petroleum, but that issue wouldn't bug me so much.

in the south i think that radiant barriers are important as well, did you research that?
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Re: Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Postby George Collins » Wed Feb 01, 2012 3:08 pm

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, this is the type of insulation we used:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFjxWdPPY1Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player[/youtube]

After the roof was in place but before the foam was blown in, the temperature in the attic was 140ish during the heat of the day. After the insulation was in place, the temperature in the attic was about the same as the ambient temperature.

In answer to your question, no, we did not research radiant barriers. However, the insulative properties of the foam are such that I'm not sure a radiant barrier would add much to the total R-value.

But, like Commissioner Gordon in Batman, "I've been wrong before."

This I do know though: the attic serves as a playroom for my kids and iffn it ain't indestructible, it WILL be destructed.
"Solve world hunger, tell no one." "The, the, the . . . The Grinch!"

"If you can't beat them, bite them."
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Location: South Central Mississippi, Zone 8a

Re: Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Postby matt walker » Wed Feb 01, 2012 4:38 pm

Hey George, when the Youtube links don't show up, delete everything from the end of the link back to and including the "&", that usually does it.

I need to look into that insulation locally. My house is in dire need.
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Re: Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Postby pa_friendly_guy » Wed Feb 01, 2012 8:30 pm

I agree about the basement George, around here most everyone has a basement. It is the Cheapest area of the house to build. Very few places are built on a slab here in Pa. Because of the frost line you have to go down at least 24" so that the footer will not move. Most people around here go down 3' to be sure the frost won't move the house. When you are already down that far with block it makes sense to go a few more feet and have a basement. It is a great place for the furnace, wireing, heating runs, hot water tank etc and it gives you a great place for a work shop. Many people remodel the basement into a TV room, Bar area, or play area for the kids. It is cool in the summer and pretty easy to heat in the winter because its under ground. You have to have a good french drain around the footer so that you don't have a water problem in the basement, but that really isn't rocket science. Water runs down hill, so you have to give it a place to drain and you should have no problems. When it gets really hot here in the summer I shut the house up tight and turn on my furnace fan. It sucks cool air from the basement and keeps the house cool for several days until the heat wave ends. It only works for a few days, but around here that normally gets us through the worst hot spells. It normally cools off here at night so the basement can sort of recharge with cool air after a really hot spell. I don't mind the heat all that much, but to be honest I really don't know what heat is compaired with what you have in the South. A good friend of mine was from George and her Daddy can up to visit after they had been in Pa for several years. He was shocked, I mean totally shocked, that we could actually sit outside after the sun went down and it was very comfortable. Some nights it actually gets a bit chilly. He said in George they can't go outside even at night because of the heat.
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Re: Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Postby George Collins » Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:35 pm

We have the French drain.

Other than that, all I know about basements is that we have one and that is where our DVD player/theatre room and panic room are. We call it a DVD player because even though to look at it, most would call it a television, it isn't connected to a cable or satellite dish or anything else that would allow it to received signals from afar. And other than that one, we don't have one in the house. Unlike every other house we know of, we refuse to allow the TV to be either the literal or figurative focal point of our home. Instead, we have a fireplace.

As for the heat, your acquaintance from Georgia gave an accurate account of what summer in the deep South is like. I've been to PA and many other northern states in the summertime and yes, during the heat of the day in the hottest part of the summer, the temperatures do probably get, at their hottest, as hot as we get at our hottest. We by no means have the market cornered on summertime heat.

However, the experiences I have had with y'all's heat as compared to our's is that as the sun goes does, the comfort level goes up. That is not the case in the deep South as your GA acquaintance related. Once we are into June, if you aren't getting a rain, in a swimming hole or in air conditioning, there is no escape.

Comparing our world to the Mojave Desert, where the day time temperature gets far hotter than here, the daytime comfort level was certainly no worse and by some accounts marginally better because in a low-humidity environment, a person at least has the benefit of the evaporative cooling. The night-time desert temperatures are down right cold.

Where the humidity and the temperature vie for the title of "Closet to One Hundred" the sweat can't evaporate so it doesn't cool the body down. So the core temperature remains high signaling your body to produce even more sweat. The sweat (especially when wearing cotton) simply acts to form an additional layer of insulation.

It is a vicious cycle. You just get hotter and hotter.

Then the sun goes down.

But nothing changes because the humidity hasn't changed.

If you spend a great deal of time out of doors in the months before it heats and during the months it is doing so, things are survivable. If you are the type that never gets out from under the effects of air conditioning and you suddenly find yourself broke down on the side of the road in the middle of the day in the summertime, things can go sour quickly.

We had a family reunion two years ago on July 31st/August 1st. Being cheapskates, and knowing that buying a tent large enough to accommodate my 6 kids (one is away at college), my wife and myself would cost almost exactly the same as renting an air-conditioned cabin, and since buying a tent would at least give us something to show for our money, we bought the tent. The year 2009 saw July 31st set a new daily record: 114 degrees if memory serves. If we could have taken a Mulligan that weekend, we would have gladly threw money away renting a cabin with A/C.

We were staying in the campgrounds of the Okotoma Resort (it aint really a resort by most folks reckoning - tha'ts just what they call it). Thank GOD they had a pool. If we weren't eating or going #2, my kids and I stayed in the pool from the time they opened it up in the morning until the time they ran us out at night. We were soon thereafter miserable and didn't get any releif until the following morning when we could get back in the water.

It was awesome actually. Yes we suffered. The silver lining to that dark cloud however, was that we were the only ones in our exceedingly large extended family that had the metal/stupidity/guts/grit/whatever to face those conditions. And the others SAW us doing things they knew they couldn't handle.

Made em all look like wimps. :twisted:
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"If you can't beat them, bite them."
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Re: Passive cooling - Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

Postby pa_friendly_guy » Tue Sep 25, 2012 12:31 am

I was just re-reading this post because I enjoy it, What you said George is so true. The old time designs were functional, they worked with out electric, and they made sense. A good friend of mine had an old Victorian Mansion in town, 11 foot ceilings, transums over every door, large porch out front, small porch off the kitchen. The house was made with Balloon constuction. That means that the 2X4 went from the 1st floor to the attic, about 23 ft long. He explained that the house was designed to open the lower side of the double hung windows on one side of the house, and the top window on the other side of the house on both floors. The transums were opened to allow hot air to rise and exit the rooms. There was always a cross breeze that pushed the hot air out of the house. It was a great design. The balloon construction worked well when the house was heated with coal originally. The heat from the coal furnace from the basement would rise and enclose the house in an envolope of hot air. In the summer it created a draft that helped keep the attic cooler. When it was switched to gas it didn't work so well, the gas furnice did not radiate the heat into the basement and the walls had no insulation, so the outside walls were always cold. He started using the old gas space heaters in every fireplace to heat the rooms they were in and not worry about the temps in the other rooms. I agree that double hung windows make good sense. My modern house has casement crank out windows unfortunately. Oh well, it does not get that hot here most of the year.
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