I was just sitting here, relaxing on an early Saturday after-lunch and realized that it's pretty much room temperature outside today, and there's a nice grayish overcast so the sun isn't beating down. But in Arizona (which is probably Mexicaneze for "hot place", i.e., "arid zone", but let's not get into etymology. :-) ) it probably doesn't get overcast like that very often. :-)
So, anyways, you're always flaunting that mansion of yours out in the irrigated middle of the desert, and I'm wondering - do you cool your indoor air by refrigeration (like an ordinary "air conditioner"), or by evaporation (aka "swamp cooler")?
Resource efficient ? Who much does a tank wagoon full of water cost ? Or a kWh ? How about insulation ? Storing the cold of the night ? Best is possibly having a private wadi with waterfall.
What part of Australia is it where people dig tunnels into the sides of hills and live inside the hills? Saw parts of it on an Elmo special my kids were watching. Ingenious.
In the US we have "berm" houses, which are quite cost efficient in both construction cost, maintenance, and heating/cooling. In Arizona , or any desert, the most efficient means of heating/cooling is the heat pump with underground exterior heat exchanger- space should not be an issue in most locations, it must be something with subsurface bedrock or something that makes it impractical, or maybe the initial costs scare them away.
I spent most of my working life working a second part-time job as a projectionist in primarily 1920's vintage movie theatres, and as such became intimately familiar with all the technical details of such buildings.
Completely forgotten today are the ground water "air cooled" systems of that era. Several of our theatres originally had a system whereby water was pumped out of wells in the basement and sprayed through an "air washer" and returned to the ground through a well on the other side of the basement. If you can get water at 55 degress or below, you can achieve perfectly satisfactory air conditioning that way. The air leaving the washer will be 55 dry bulb, 55 wet bulb and 55 dew point, which is about what designers aim for today with mechanical refrigeration systems. You can't use well water practically with coils because a practical coil has a temperature differential of 15 - 20 degrees between the fluid and the air, but an air washer can have a very small temperature approach.
Anyway, in the downtown areas of a few large cities so many buildings were doing this that the temperature of the well water rose to the point where it didn't work any more. Then in the mid 1930's, air washers began to be outlawed due to health concerns, so mechanical refrigeration as we know it became dominant.
Believe it ir not, prior to about 1930 most theatres that had mechanical air-conditioning used carbon dioxide as the refrigerant! Freon had not been invented yet, and the other refigerants were considered too dangerous for such densely occupied buildings.
Your point on heat pumps is well taken; I am just pointing out a historical experiment with using the earth as a sink for waste heat.
I'm not Jim, but I am another Aussie that lives in the middle of the desert and uses an evaporative cooler to beat those Summer heat waves.
Well, I'm not really in the desert, but where I live is on the edge of the dry zone, and temps of 40+ are common in Summer with very low humidity (evaps are no good if humidity is high)
The choice around here is really one of how rich you are, and what sort of lifestyle you lead.
If you are rich and your kids are well trained not to leave doors open, you install a ducted refrigerated unit with an outlet in each room - install cost for average sort of house is around $12,000 or so. This is a nice unit and you will have a nice cool home, but the running costs are quite high - perhaps around 50 cents/hour
If, like me, you are only an ordinary sort of person (say $50,000/year) you buy a ducted evaporated system with outlets in each room - install cost is around $4000 for an average house, and since you are only running a fan and a small pump the running costs are quite low - eg somewhere around $0.12 (twelve cents) an hour.
So, for me, now on a pension, the evap system was a good choice - I can afford to run it 24/7 when the heat is high, and it only needs a clean every
2 or 3 years. I leave the back door open for the dogs to come in and out - I couldn't do that with a refrig system.
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