LonelyLarynx

I think to many, these terms have lost their meaning already. I personally never really used them, nor do most of the people I know. People are just people. The only place I see this distinction so strongly made is in media, and only certain kinds of media. I’m sure though that this doesn’t represent everyone’s experience, or every location, I just wanted to share that I think in some places this is already fairly well accepted.

I’ve had some great role models as a kid who were both biologically female and male, but the things they taught had nothing to do with gender. We have “they”, but I wish we had a better singular gender neutral pronoun in English. “They” can be confused with plural and “it” can sound very rude. I guess distinguishing between singular and plural isn’t critical… I just wish we had the ability to invent a new useful word and have it be widely accepted. So much of our society runs on precident and momentum sadly.

You’re describing a fancoil supplied with cool, regularly replaced, municipal water (normally this water would be a fully closed loop cooled with an air source or ground source heat pump). Your energy needs will just be a circulation pump. You’ll probably notice a little cooling but it depends on how cold the water is, the surface area of the radiator, and the flow rate of the water. It has the advantage of being low maintenance so give it a shot and perhaps build it in a way you can access the components and improve / experiment over time.

Look into an approach / methodology called Passive House. Passive House focuses on making buildings that have near zero heating and cooling load. If you get the math right / design from scratch with this in mind you can make a Passive House in nearly any climate. Common modern single-family-home building techniques are generally not at all closely aligned with building a Passive House.

When trying to keep a house cool, here are the things I would focus on (in order of priority):

1. Reduce solar heating impacts: either place shade trees or awnings to block direct sun on the entire structure (or the windows at a minimum).

2. Build a highly-insulating enclosure (~R30 walls and ~R50 roof at a minimum, but you could push that further). If you are set on building with lumber you still can, you could building an offset double-stud wall filled with insulation, and of course an appropriate amount of exterior insulation a well. The goal in addition to insulation quantity is to reduce thermal bridging. Consider a “simple” house layout. Avoid too many corners / details / flourishes that add construction complexity.

3. Utilize free-cooling first: as your first stage of cooling, open large windows close to the ground and open clearstory windows in the roof / top of a stairwell or similar, it really depends on the layout of the home (and ideally the layout is design around this concept). This allows the heat to be drawn out naturally via convection. Include ceiling fans for comfort. This approach will work until outdoor air temperatures get quite high. Once free-cooling will not longer work

Once free-cooling will not longer be effective you can transition to mechanical cooling. Close all windows and cool your space either a high-efficiency air-source heat pump (and / or your free-cooling municipal water fan coil).

4. Similar to the design methodology to encourage natural air / heat flow out clearstory windows or “solar chimneys”, also consider just having higher ceilings where heat can pool but you won’t feel it. Your exhaust should pull from these areas.

5. Dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS): don’t design your mechanical ventilation system to cool using air (aside from the free-cooling described earlier). It’s inefficient. Hydronic heating and cooling (moving heat with water) is much more efficient. That means heat pumps for heating as well as cooling. Mechanical ventilation rates should be the bare minimum, just enough for fresh air but not for temperature control. Perhaps look at flow rates included in ASHRAE 62.1 or a standard more focused on residential homes. Also, your supply air can be separately ducted to each room (not a shared trunk), each being much smaller than what you see in a “normal” house, this gives more control for every single room.

6. ERV: of course you’ll want to install an energy recovery ventilator to capture what heat / “cold” you’ve worked to produce before instead of throwing it away along with your exhaust air.

7. For heating your domestic water, get a heat pump hot water heater (with tank). Instead of making heat it takes heat from the surrounding room and puts it into your domestic water tank. That means it “outputs cold” into the surrounding room, the opposite of a gas or electric resistance water heater.

8. Earth tubes: to naturally pre-condition your supply air by running it through the ground first. Another form of free-cooling but useful when the house is “buttoned up” because outdoor air temperatures are too high. This is when you’re only supplying minimum ventilation air.

9. Limit the things in the house that make heat. Efficient refrigerators / freezers (see energy star website), computers that are no more powerful than what you need, etc. Place these things in areas where the heat won’t bug you as much.

Hope this helps.

My thoughts as well. Seemed more significant than just losing train of thought.

I’m loving this kind of commentary. Positive (different than apathetic or gullible) and practical. A huge contrast to some other places on the internet. Just wanted to say this is noticed and appreciated and will hopefully encourage others (including myself) to do better.

I’ve been thinking about this recently with the heat in my region. Wouldn’t a light cloak, with very light clothing underneath, work well for sun protection (one or two layers over skin) while still keeping fairly cool (due to airflow)?

I’d support this! Maybe more of a general purpose urban planning / build environment community to be a bit more constructive.

TL;DR: You’re correct, in my professional opinion.

The catalyst in most hydrogen fuel cells are still too expensive and have a limited life. Hydrogen will mostly be sourced as a waste product from oil and gas extraction (though it could be done with clean electricity and electrolysis), that’s why oil and gas companies are becoming so interested in pushing hydrogen (see the successful “clean” natural gas campaigns, but depending on how you measure it natural gas can result in more emissions than coal and is just a bunch of greenwashing. Same would happen with hydrogen in my opinion). Additionally, we’d have to build out an entire hydrogen delivery infrastructure that serves only that purpose. We’ll just end up with commercial fuel stations like we have now. Fuel cells (for many fuels) can make sense in very remote applications, or industrial applications where specific waste gasses can be turned into supplemental electricity right on site.

Battery-electric on the other hand is much more flexible and fits into our existing infrastructure better. It’s not just power dense batteries for cars; it’s (maybe gravity) batteries for communities, safe and long-lived (maybe salt) batteries for homes, better batteries for our electronics. Research in one area can support improvement of the others. They all connect to the same electricity grid so the energy can be shared among applications. Batteries play a role in decentralizing and democratizing energy (today you can put PV on your house, charge your car or home battery, use your car to power your house in a power outage, etc). As mentioned we can use greener and cleaner batteries (even completely non-chemical) in some applications, and one day we can hopefully get to the point of using ultra- or super-capacitors in place of high-density chemical batteries. In the mean time we have batteries that work and are getting quite affordable, we can transition to this solution now without waiting for a miracle breakthrough, then continue to iterate the technology over time.