Passive Solar Design works hand-in-hand with various cultural practices. If we are going to return to passive solar design as a default norm, we will need to do more than give up our addiction to North American Affluenza.
We will also need to embrace cultural practices that avoid adding heat unnecessarily to homes and work spaces during hot weather. We can look to the historic American Deep South for clues as to how to survive our increasingly hotter weather with less AC and perhaps even mitigate global warming.
Among other things: Traditional Southern homes tend to optimize for creating cross breezes by opening two windows opposite each other. Homes often have deep porches which sometimes wrap around three sides of the house so some windows can be left open even in the pouring rain and so residents can go hang outside in the shade on the porch during summer.
In recent years, Americans in the Deep South seem to increasingly just run the air conditioner to keep cool. This creates a positive feedback loop -- AKA vicious cycle -- where the region is hotter due to higher energy use, thus requiring more AC use.
But before air conditioners were available, people knew how to stay cool enough to not drop like flies from the heat. This was due not only to some of the building practices but also due to cultural practices.
A lot of Southern food traditions, from making sun tea on the porch to eating cold potato salad during the summer, are rooted in the reality that it gets quite hot for several months out of the year, so people traditionally tried to limit their use of the kitchen stove and oven where possible during the hottest months of the year.
Before there was AC, if you made the mistake of heating the house during the day in summertime, it might never adequately cool off again that day for purposes of trying to sleep. If you did this consistently, the house would just stay unbearably hot, which could be life threatening in the hot, muggy weather of the Deep South.
In the more distant past, plantations often had a second kitchen outside of the main house for doing the cooking during the hot summer months. This practice kind of lives on in the form of the popularity of grilling during the summer months as a means to cook outside of the house rather than inside of it.
These days, many people seem to eat and cook much the same year-round and just accept high AC bills during the summer as a consequence. Cultural adaptations to the heat seem to be slowly fading from our collective conscious as a thing just as the entire world is increasingly heating up to unbearable levels for part of the year in many places.
This is perhaps not entirely coincidence.
Even if you don't think that avoiding adding heat to the system at home has any effect on global warming, surely you can see that it might make a comfort difference for you and your family during the increasingly common heat waves. It might also be the difference between life and death for at least some members of the family, like the extreme young and extreme old who generally don't cope as well with extremes of heat.
We will also need to embrace cultural practices that avoid adding heat unnecessarily to homes and work spaces during hot weather. We can look to the historic American Deep South for clues as to how to survive our increasingly hotter weather with less AC and perhaps even mitigate global warming.
Among other things: Traditional Southern homes tend to optimize for creating cross breezes by opening two windows opposite each other. Homes often have deep porches which sometimes wrap around three sides of the house so some windows can be left open even in the pouring rain and so residents can go hang outside in the shade on the porch during summer.
In recent years, Americans in the Deep South seem to increasingly just run the air conditioner to keep cool. This creates a positive feedback loop -- AKA vicious cycle -- where the region is hotter due to higher energy use, thus requiring more AC use.
But before air conditioners were available, people knew how to stay cool enough to not drop like flies from the heat. This was due not only to some of the building practices but also due to cultural practices.
A lot of Southern food traditions, from making sun tea on the porch to eating cold potato salad during the summer, are rooted in the reality that it gets quite hot for several months out of the year, so people traditionally tried to limit their use of the kitchen stove and oven where possible during the hottest months of the year.
Before there was AC, if you made the mistake of heating the house during the day in summertime, it might never adequately cool off again that day for purposes of trying to sleep. If you did this consistently, the house would just stay unbearably hot, which could be life threatening in the hot, muggy weather of the Deep South.
In the more distant past, plantations often had a second kitchen outside of the main house for doing the cooking during the hot summer months. This practice kind of lives on in the form of the popularity of grilling during the summer months as a means to cook outside of the house rather than inside of it.
These days, many people seem to eat and cook much the same year-round and just accept high AC bills during the summer as a consequence. Cultural adaptations to the heat seem to be slowly fading from our collective conscious as a thing just as the entire world is increasingly heating up to unbearable levels for part of the year in many places.
This is perhaps not entirely coincidence.
Even if you don't think that avoiding adding heat to the system at home has any effect on global warming, surely you can see that it might make a comfort difference for you and your family during the increasingly common heat waves. It might also be the difference between life and death for at least some members of the family, like the extreme young and extreme old who generally don't cope as well with extremes of heat.