Ayoob wrote:Is this a viable way of cooling off a house? I know it's hard to move cold air through a tube to deliver "coolth" there. I would think it's easier to remove hot air from the top and siphon it off the ceiling, pull it down a tube to the basement, and run it through a series of cement blocks or pipes or something at 58* to just nuke the heat, and allow the cooler air from the basement to push up against the bottom of the air in the 1st floor.
Let's say it's a 1000sf level and you pull 1000cf/hr down and out, you exchange about 1/8th of the air in the room every hour, the hottest part is out and the coolest part is in. Those numbers are fiction I don't know shit about fans.
My first house was built in 1913 and worked the exact opposite of what you are describing. The ceiling's in the basement and first floor had open grates to pass are with convection currents up through the house. You opened the two windows in the attic on the north and south sides. In the basement you opened the widows which were in wells extending down the exterior walls. As hot air was blown out of the attic it created an updraft that pulled cool ground level air into the basement where it mixed with the cool basement air, then flowed up through the grates replacing the hotter air escaping through the attic windows.
It wasn't anything like central air cooling but it did passively keep the house from becoming stifling hot. A forced air attic fan would have made it much more effective. Sort of the primitive ancestor of this modern system.
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