"free" home air conditioning

[LeatherneckPA]

I stumbled across this website (http://mb-soft.com/solar/saving.html) and thought some of you might find it interesting.

[Saoirse]

I put a fan pointing up the basement stairs. This helps a lot, except in humid weather.

[Funkhouser]

Being in the South, every room has a ceiling fan (the rest of you southerners can relate I'm sure!), and the huge water oaks on my little piece of property lower the temperature by a few degrees easily. When it's up in the mid to upper 90s F everywhere else, my front yard usually stays in the upper 80s, and with the ceiling fans on in the house and the window open for cross-ventilation, indoors floats around the low to mid-80s. The only time I run the A/C is when it breaks 100 (like it did back in the first half of June).

[8kids4me]

The funny thing about this...my house was built in 1919, and the second owner was an inovative man(I think a VP at Delco), and he put in an "air conditioner" in the basement in the 20's. Basically a fan that pushed the basement air up to the first floor. It was gone by the time we bought the house in the 80's, but I wish it was back.

[Clair_Schwan]

My plans for air conditioning involve something similar - underground piping of water to an air-to-water heat exchanger in an aux air plenum that I had built for my furnace.

The aux air plenum draws air from the basement when I close the damper to the cold air return, and instead pulls return air down the basement stairs.

This system allows me to recirculate basement air throughout the house, and augment that cool air with the natural low temperatures of deep soil that I will extract using the heat exchanger.

During the winter, the water-to-air heat exchanger is valved for hot water from piping inside my large wood stove, and I use the furnace for heat, but with no fuel costs except the scrap wood that I burn and a little electricity.

In the summer, the water-to-air heat exchanger is valved to circulate water for hundreds of feet deep underground. That provides air conditioning for the cost of running a less than 2 amp pump and the furnace fan in the recirculation mode.

There is also an approach I have heard of to heat and cool a greenhouse. It involves circulating air from the greenhouse to large underground PVC tubes, thus heating up the soil a bit. The fan runs constantly, so the greenhouse stays a moderate temperature all day and all night.

I haven't tried it, and I haven't seen it, but it probably works reasonably well, especially in the winter when outside temperatures are way below freezing, and underground air temperatures are way above freezing. My only concern is the cost of all that underground ducting and a fan running all day and all night.

Clair