Exploring the Arts and Sciences of Sustainable Air Conditioning Alternatives TPS-0027

I am making use of this precious moment where there has just been a very small amount of rain, but enough to get me to enact a rain catchment drill and open the hatches and try to get everything I could possibly capture.

Sadly it was not a continuous rainfall. But it was enough to at least test the roof integrity and to run through that drill of remembering things.

I've pretty much set things up so that it's not a headache. It's not a big chore. It's just a few tasks. It's just a little mini conversion of a few things like, okay, well, I'm gonna remove the shade from the dome garden, because obviously, with cloud cover, it's not gonna get burnt by the sun.

So I have at least until until tomorrow to leave that shade down. It's just canvas material, which would allow droplets to go through it, but I don't wanna risk that that runs off, away from the garden beds.

It made me think about just what people do sailing. I know nothing about the science of that but have seen enough footage of the activities to where they're just being very dynamic and responsive.

It's cool to have a bit of a drill and to know and realize, you have a few things already in muscle memory.

Because of the temperature, it's not winter, it's middle of summer, I'm trying to get as much of that warm rain water on me as possible. It's a beautiful experience to catch one drop of rain and put it to use in a garden.

Knowing that it's gonna get some of those drops just naturally, even better, knowing that the roof over my head, the very small, very humble, tiny home roof over my head is working as it's engineered with its corrugated metal, wired together onto a rain chain that goes down to a galvanized pot.

It's nice not buying a bunch of expensive, brand new, hyper engineered, hyper plastic, whatever it is. There's all kinds of fancy stuff out there. And I'm not gonna say I don't use some modern contraptions for things, but I'm weaning myself off more and more every day and if I can get the job done, even with materials that are destined to rust out, given the fact it's a desert and it barely rains at all. I can stretch that timeline quite a ways.

So less plastic, less over engineered, expensive sustainability stuff.

What a cowboy could have done on the range a hundred years ago or whatever.

It's a very beautiful, centering, meditative experience just to be greeted on the skin by the drops of rain.

I hope that anybody listening who has more rain in their life and takes it for granted that, well, you probably don't have to appreciate it as much as I do.

I'm not spoiled with rain. It's just amazing experience, to behold. And it always makes me think about all the rain that I squandered, and that what I was spoiled with, and all the places that I've lived that were rainier and more temperate climates.

Thinking back of how many years I've lost, of not having planted fruit and nut trees in a food forest decades ago.

How much more time I personally could have had to get ahead of the game of growing my own food on my own land. That's a fact of life being a landless peasant for most of my life until last year and that's true for a lot of people in the world.

I planted a lot of fruit and nut trees on other people's property as a professional designer, installer, on various crews and gigs and community projects and all kinds of places.

To be trying to keep these few trees I've got out here alive under these extreme conditions, under such extreme shifts in the planet, geopolitically and climatologically.

All I can say is that I'm glad that I had all the training that I've had, and I hope it really kicks in as I need it, and that it serves me well, and that, as I can afford to, I'm scaling out from this very, almost like a scale model in a lab.

It's a simple functioning scale model of a one man ecosystem and just keeping that alive studying the effects of frost kill in the winter.

And now this is the first summer where I've had crops to sustain.

Last year it was only in the fall that I got the first crops going.

Seeing the trees struggle in the heat and desiccating winds, making sure to keep them hydrated so we pull through, keeping the fish fed and their water level up because there's a lot of evaporation in the heat.

Holding on to my cognitive function despite sleep disruption due to temperatures.

I've done the research now a little bit studying what's going on with sleep disruption.

When temperatures at night are above 87 degrees, your body is going to have a very difficult, if not impossible, time trying to do what it needs to do.

It's just a fascinating part of the physiology of sleep. In order to sleep properly, the body actually will thermo-regulate, and drop the core temperature down about two degrees at night for sleeping.

That's part of circadian rhythms. It's affected by the temperatures, affected by light.

Once the sun comes up, I can move around for a couple few hours before the sun gets at an angle to where, it's crushing my soul.

I can do a couple hours in the office, in the shade, walk quickly through through the sun to get to a shaded lunch nook that I set up with bamboo shade and have that ceremony.

Then, pretty much, for the rest of the day, feel like I've been punched in the face repeatedly, non stop for 16 hours.

My brain is melting. I wanna crawl out of my skin.

Now it's like that, 24/7.

I've taken various measures to stay cool with spray bottles and wraps on the head and the neck of damp cloths, which work very well.

I did take a look at some HVAC tutorial videos to just see the science of how they do this on the industrial scale, the commercial installations.

What are the principles are using? Discovering things such as the use of cooled water, refrigerated cooled water, that is that is run through a coil of metal pipe I would, imagine it's copper but I'm not sure.

I'm interested in this contained methods that are not going through some sort of aerosolized spray which has its own associated risks of legionnaires disease.

It's interesting to think about just to how to get those degrees of temperature down with airflow and fans and coiling metal.

I'm just thinking how can I adapt kind of a pre plastic more, down to earth strategy.

I did cut corners when installing the Earth tube cooled dome.

I would have preferred to use some sort of very sturdy ceramic or metal alternative to any kind of plastic. But what ended up being affordable and approximately to specification, was this high density poly ethylene, a solid drainage pipe, and running that a hundred feet plus underground to a semi underground dome and putting a fan that's blowing air, blowing hot air from the surface that would otherwise be burning my face.

That air goes underground gets cooled in those tubes as it exchanges heat with the soil underground, down about 3 ft.

By the time it travels about a hundred feet, it's shed enough of the heat from the surface air, however many degrees cooler? I can't get an exact reading on how much cooler it is, but it definitely is effective.

So that science experiment worked. And last time I talked about it, I said I was too afraid to try it. I did decide I would capitulate to that, to the heat and get in there and get in that dome and swing in that hammock and have that directed earth tube underground, piped cooled air.

I set it up with the angles of the couplers so that I could literally have it like an arm with joints that can twist and I can use it to sort of spot treat my face or my neck, or the armpits, the center mass, really spot treat areas and be blasting it with cool air.

Blessing myself with cool air, then also applying water on top of a thin layer of clothes.

That combination is a very low energy, very few moving parts to break as long as the solar panel system and battery system holds up, which has a relatively long lifespan, not too hard to fix or replace any parts.

There is a chip for the charge controllers, but they seem to be holding up well, and I doubt that there would be much of an issue at the scale that I'm operating on.

But then once cool air gets underground and sent out to me down there, it's a game changer to be able to be in that space and to know that this is probably what could get me through.

It's a mulch covered dome, so that it's basically an equivalent in survivalist bushcraft terms to a debris hut supported on a frame, like a climbing dome frame.

The mulch breathes, but luckily, it blocks a lot of the wind, but it's not pushing enough air to really change the temperature within that dome.

That cool air is hitting me, evaporating the moisture on my clothes, or on my face or my head, and then it's gone.

As long as I keep applying a bit of moisture, I can multiply that effect, and I can maintain within safe body temperatures.

That's the current state of my system, but I wanted to look into it more.

I wanted to research the materials that were off gasing, volatile organic compounds.

There is an odd smell coming from those pipes.

I couldn't really attribute it exactly to anything. It's has kind of a sweet, sour smell. It's not as foul as formaldehyde or paints. I'm very sensitive to that stuff. It makes me nauseous, gives me a headache.

So after spending whatever, a good hours to experiment with that whole cycle, basically, after lunch, spend the rest of the day experiencing what it's like to, to cycle through that until it gets dark and the fans shut off given the solar power system isn't powerful enough to continue past dusk.

There are people with much more experience and much more resources, who have come to the conclusion that part of the off grid lifestyle is that if the sun's not out, you just have to kind of minimize. You could have a full charge in those batteries, but they drain way faster than you would wish that they would.

So running a high powered, basically a box fan all night is not gonna work.

At this stage in the development of the project, what that earth tube cooling system, what the current phase of this system is capable of, is just guaranteeing that I have an extra extreme temperature buffer strategy that would keep me alive if temperatures actually get to a point where there's nothing you can do.

I'm realizing there may not be a big shift in from peak temperatures more than five or ten degrees if I'm lucky. But most importantly, if I know I can survive up to 120F and not have my brain damaged to the point where I can't do what I'm doing right now, which is make sentences and record this episode...

I've survived those temperatures. I have that strategy to buffer even more extreme temperatures.

But it is still a work in progress and it's prompting me to do more research.

So one beautiful discovery that was made because I'm looking into this HVAC stuff I watched a documentary where they talked about the history of this technology and the science and, I'm really fascinated now by the the history of air conditioning.

I realize we're in a sci fi reality where we're gonna have to hack up and mash up all kinds of different strategies just to survive.

So if those strategies can be ones that that use motors and batteries and coiled wire and just stuff that you can Macgyver and that you can pull out of a junkyard...to me, that is a more sustainable outlook than buying the fanciest, newest, most high tech system.

So I really wanna figure out how I can have this sort of rustic AC scenario.

You could build unmotorized, powerful fans that would, somehow do the job, even if you could funnel that down from a very large to a very small point, to where small movement of a large fan creates lots of movement of a small fan.

I'm realizing that it's about smaller spaces to keep warm and to keep cool and focusing very directly on the body itself.

So from that research, looking at the history of even the first fans that were built and the designs of them, is very interesting.

But something that immediately was applicable from that research was when they shared the fact that in India, the strategy to cool palaces was to take damp fabric mats and hang them over the doorways and soak them in water.

That's exactly what I had hoped would be possible in some fashion, is that beyond just wrapping a bandana that's been dunked in water and rung out and tying damp socks around my neck which I've been doing.

It's possible that I can somehow get that blasting hot air that's killing me from that box fan to actually be moistened, to be cooled, and therefore do its job the way that it normally would if the temperatures were below 90 degrees.

I realized that somewhere around 80 to 90 degrees is my estimation of where a fan stops working other than to blast hot air at you and and make you more uncomfortable than you would have otherwise. I'm not sure the science of whether or not it's doing more harm than good to your core body temperature. But it's certainly making it totally uncomfortable on the surface.

So the fan, it was disappointing realizing last year that these fans are nullified, because when you need them the most, all they're gonna do is is cook you even worse.

So I tried things like spraying the fan blades with a water bottle, then realizing the futility of if I use the spray bottle and spray consecutively, one spray after the next, that'll do that job, that will moisten the air, take the heat out of that. It will be doing its job and cooling me.

I'm just trying to think about how not to be spending all day, every day spraying myself constantly so that there's a constant mist, so to drastically reduce that inefficient use of water, given my water budget...

After learning about that India Palace technique, I immediately said to myself, that is what I gotta do. I will dampen a very thin strip of bed sheet material just very water absorbent and very easy to work with and very light.

Take a rectangle cutting of that material and then clip it so that it is intercepting that box fan blasting hot air.

And then what? And then, yes, it was an approximation of the effect that they would achieve, because what gave them the cooling effect was the wind coming through the doorways, hitting that soaked fabric mat that would cool the air.

It's also a factor of just the movement of the moisture particles and how those moisture particles suck the heat out of the air in the room, so multiple different physics factors at play.

But most importantly, for me, the fact that I can hang up this segment of sheet, and enough air is going through it...

The emergent property is it can get to a point of feeling like a cool breeze.

It's not as dramatic real blasting AC. But, a lot of people know the experience of, their AC not being really what it was in the beginning, or it's sort of fading a little bit. It still works enough to where you are not suffering in your car while you're driving. You're not sweating, it's working just to keep you from being extremely fussy about how uncomfortable the temperature is. That's better than nothing, and it's, it's enough to more than keep you alive, but it keeps you from being very agitated.

We're in this climate emergency world, is it possible to create some sort of automated cycle of water?

You think about all the water just going to waste and fountains and just evaporating into nothing, and it's beautiful, and it's great but perhaps more could be done.

I'm retrofitting my own microclimate, my own settlement.

Whereas before I tried things like spraying water at the fan and realizing that that was very inefficient and futile ultimately.

Then doing things like when I did fully dampen a sheet of that fabric, drop it on top of the fan, put it behind the fan, drape it over the fan and that wasn't doing anything, but hanging it a couple of feet away was magical.

It's a game changer now, so I'm very interested in how I can scale that out, in some way automate that, because with just some sort of drip then you don't need a mister which wastes a lot of that water too.

So what I discovered is that relative to how much water I would have to use to be comfortable with a spray bottle and a box fan, I could use the spray bottle to spray down that fabric.

Then periodically, as it would dry out, as you would expect it would as if you were drying clothes and it's being evaporated in the heat, even though it's in the shade, it's a little bit slower, but it still dries out pretty damn quick, and it's pretty thin.

But the effect is such that it's worth it. It's way more efficient to dampen that fabric every half an hour to an hour, and just do that a few times.

That's a game changer, so that's happening on one dimension on me.

What if I could now scale that to two dimensions or angles?

So now I think, what if I could get a hexagon of those fans, and piping that would consistently drip and maintain the moisture level on those fabrics?

Then I could have a tent within a dome or a tent within a tent that's a very small area just around me that would allow me to not feel heat exhaustion.

That's a very interesting concept to start to, to scale down to the minimum which is where it's at now, and scale that up to maybe where, again, relatively low energy, relatively low water input and relatively low manufacturing input.

Without grid power or generator power, or lots of water supply, people don't have to push to the limits and outer edges of the most minimalist possible strategy to get the job done.

But it's interesting to get pushed to those limits of the most minimalistic way to get the job done.

I think about how you could actually scale up from that without crossing the boundary of needing a lot more investment of capital.

I am making use of this precious moment where there has just been a very small amount of rain, but enough to get me to enact a rain catchment drill and open the hatches and try to get everything I could possibly capture.

Sadly it was not a continuous rainfall. But it was enough to at least test the roof integrity and to run through that drill of remembering things.

I've pretty much set things up so that it's not a headache. It's not a big chore. It's just a few tasks. It's just a little mini conversion of a few things like, okay, well, I'm gonna remove the shade from the dome garden, because obviously, with cloud cover, it's not gonna get burnt by the sun.

So I have at least until until tomorrow to leave that shade down. It's just canvas material, which would allow droplets to go through it, but I don't wanna risk that that runs off, away from the garden beds.

It made me think about just what people do sailing. I know nothing about the science of that but have seen enough footage of the activities to where they're just being very dynamic and responsive.

It's cool to have a bit of a drill and to know and realize, you have a few things already in muscle memory.

Because of the temperature, it's not winter, it's middle of summer, I'm trying to get as much of that warm rain water on me as possible. It's a beautiful experience to catch one drop of rain and put it to use in a garden.

Knowing that it's gonna get some of those drops just naturally, even better, knowing that the roof over my head, the very small, very humble, tiny home roof over my head is working as it's engineered with its corrugated metal, wired together onto a rain chain that goes down to a galvanized pot.

It's nice not buying a bunch of expensive, brand new, hyper engineered, hyper plastic, whatever it is. There's all kinds of fancy stuff out there. And I'm not gonna say I don't use some modern contraptions for things, but I'm weaning myself off more and more every day and if I can get the job done, even with materials that are destined to rust out, given the fact it's a desert and it barely rains at all. I can stretch that timeline quite a ways.

So less plastic, less over engineered, expensive sustainability stuff.

What a cowboy could have done on the range a hundred years ago or whatever.

It's a very beautiful, centering, meditative experience just to be greeted on the skin by the drops of rain.

I hope that anybody listening who has more rain in their life and takes it for granted that, well, you probably don't have to appreciate it as much as I do.

I'm not spoiled with rain. It's just amazing experience, to behold. And it always makes me think about all the rain that I squandered, and that what I was spoiled with, and all the places that I've lived that were rainier and more temperate climates.

Thinking back of how many years I've lost, of not having planted fruit and nut trees in a food forest decades ago.

How much more time I personally could have had to get ahead of the game of growing my own food on my own land. That's a fact of life being a landless peasant for most of my life until last year and that's true for a lot of people in the world.

I planted a lot of fruit and nut trees on other people's property as a professional designer, installer, on various crews and gigs and community projects and all kinds of places.

To be trying to keep these few trees I've got out here alive under these extreme conditions, under such extreme shifts in the planet, geopolitically and climatologically.

All I can say is that I'm glad that I had all the training that I've had, and I hope it really kicks in as I need it, and that it serves me well, and that, as I can afford to, I'm scaling out from this very, almost like a scale model in a lab.

It's a simple functioning scale model of a one man ecosystem and just keeping that alive studying the effects of frost kill in the winter.

And now this is the first summer where I've had crops to sustain.

Last year it was only in the fall that I got the first crops going.

Seeing the trees struggle in the heat and desiccating winds, making sure to keep them hydrated so we pull through, keeping the fish fed and their water level up because there's a lot of evaporation in the heat.

Holding on to my cognitive function despite sleep disruption due to temperatures.

I've done the research now a little bit studying what's going on with sleep disruption.

When temperatures at night are above 87 degrees, your body is going to have a very difficult, if not impossible, time trying to do what it needs to do.

It's just a fascinating part of the physiology of sleep. In order to sleep properly, the body actually will thermo-regulate, and drop the core temperature down about two degrees at night for sleeping.

That's part of circadian rhythms. It's affected by the temperatures, affected by light.

Once the sun comes up, I can move around for a couple few hours before the sun gets at an angle to where, it's crushing my soul.

I can do a couple hours in the office, in the shade, walk quickly through through the sun to get to a shaded lunch nook that I set up with bamboo shade and have that ceremony.

Then, pretty much, for the rest of the day, feel like I've been punched in the face repeatedly, non stop for 16 hours.

My brain is melting. I wanna crawl out of my skin.

Now it's like that, 24/7.

I've taken various measures to stay cool with spray bottles and wraps on the head and the neck of damp cloths, which work very well.

I did take a look at some HVAC tutorial videos to just see the science of how they do this on the industrial scale, the commercial installations.

What are the principles are using? Discovering things such as the use of cooled water, refrigerated cooled water, that is that is run through a coil of metal pipe I would, imagine it's copper but I'm not sure.

I'm interested in this contained methods that are not going through some sort of aerosolized spray which has its own associated risks of legionnaires disease.

It's interesting to think about just to how to get those degrees of temperature down with airflow and fans and coiling metal.

I'm just thinking how can I adapt kind of a pre plastic more, down to earth strategy.

I did cut corners when installing the Earth tube cooled dome.

I would have preferred to use some sort of very sturdy ceramic or metal alternative to any kind of plastic. But what ended up being affordable and approximately to specification, was this high density poly ethylene, a solid drainage pipe, and running that a hundred feet plus underground to a semi underground dome and putting a fan that's blowing air, blowing hot air from the surface that would otherwise be burning my face.

That air goes underground gets cooled in those tubes as it exchanges heat with the soil underground, down about 3 ft.

By the time it travels about a hundred feet, it's shed enough of the heat from the surface air, however many degrees cooler? I can't get an exact reading on how much cooler it is, but it definitely is effective.

So that science experiment worked. And last time I talked about it, I said I was too afraid to try it. I did decide I would capitulate to that, to the heat and get in there and get in that dome and swing in that hammock and have that directed earth tube underground, piped cooled air.

I set it up with the angles of the couplers so that I could literally have it like an arm with joints that can twist and I can use it to sort of spot treat my face or my neck, or the armpits, the center mass, really spot treat areas and be blasting it with cool air.

Blessing myself with cool air, then also applying water on top of a thin layer of clothes.

That combination is a very low energy, very few moving parts to break as long as the solar panel system and battery system holds up, which has a relatively long lifespan, not too hard to fix or replace any parts.

There is a chip for the charge controllers, but they seem to be holding up well, and I doubt that there would be much of an issue at the scale that I'm operating on.

But then once cool air gets underground and sent out to me down there, it's a game changer to be able to be in that space and to know that this is probably what could get me through.

It's a mulch covered dome, so that it's basically an equivalent in survivalist bushcraft terms to a debris hut supported on a frame, like a climbing dome frame.

The mulch breathes, but luckily, it blocks a lot of the wind, but it's not pushing enough air to really change the temperature within that dome.

That cool air is hitting me, evaporating the moisture on my clothes, or on my face or my head, and then it's gone.

As long as I keep applying a bit of moisture, I can multiply that effect, and I can maintain within safe body temperatures.

That's the current state of my system, but I wanted to look into it more.

I wanted to research the materials that were off gasing, volatile organic compounds.

There is an odd smell coming from those pipes.

I couldn't really attribute it exactly to anything. It's has kind of a sweet, sour smell. It's not as foul as formaldehyde or paints. I'm very sensitive to that stuff. It makes me nauseous, gives me a headache.

So after spending whatever, a good hours to experiment with that whole cycle, basically, after lunch, spend the rest of the day experiencing what it's like to, to cycle through that until it gets dark and the fans shut off given the solar power system isn't powerful enough to continue past dusk.

There are people with much more experience and much more resources, who have come to the conclusion that part of the off grid lifestyle is that if the sun's not out, you just have to kind of minimize. You could have a full charge in those batteries, but they drain way faster than you would wish that they would.

So running a high powered, basically a box fan all night is not gonna work.

At this stage in the development of the project, what that earth tube cooling system, what the current phase of this system is capable of, is just guaranteeing that I have an extra extreme temperature buffer strategy that would keep me alive if temperatures actually get to a point where there's nothing you can do.

I'm realizing there may not be a big shift in from peak temperatures more than five or ten degrees if I'm lucky. But most importantly, if I know I can survive up to 120F and not have my brain damaged to the point where I can't do what I'm doing right now, which is make sentences and record this episode...

I've survived those temperatures. I have that strategy to buffer even more extreme temperatures.

But it is still a work in progress and it's prompting me to do more research.

So one beautiful discovery that was made because I'm looking into this HVAC stuff I watched a documentary where they talked about the history of this technology and the science and, I'm really fascinated now by the the history of air conditioning.

I realize we're in a sci fi reality where we're gonna have to hack up and mash up all kinds of different strategies just to survive.

So if those strategies can be ones that that use motors and batteries and coiled wire and just stuff that you can Macgyver and that you can pull out of a junkyard...to me, that is a more sustainable outlook than buying the fanciest, newest, most high tech system.

So I really wanna figure out how I can have this sort of rustic AC scenario.

You could build unmotorized, powerful fans that would, somehow do the job, even if you could funnel that down from a very large to a very small point, to where small movement of a large fan creates lots of movement of a small fan.

I'm realizing that it's about smaller spaces to keep warm and to keep cool and focusing very directly on the body itself.

So from that research, looking at the history of even the first fans that were built and the designs of them, is very interesting.

But something that immediately was applicable from that research was when they shared the fact that in India, the strategy to cool palaces was to take damp fabric mats and hang them over the doorways and soak them in water.

That's exactly what I had hoped would be possible in some fashion, is that beyond just wrapping a bandana that's been dunked in water and rung out and tying damp socks around my neck which I've been doing.

It's possible that I can somehow get that blasting hot air that's killing me from that box fan to actually be moistened, to be cooled, and therefore do its job the way that it normally would if the temperatures were below 90 degrees.

I realized that somewhere around 80 to 90 degrees is my estimation of where a fan stops working other than to blast hot air at you and and make you more uncomfortable than you would have otherwise. I'm not sure the science of whether or not it's doing more harm than good to your core body temperature. But it's certainly making it totally uncomfortable on the surface.

So the fan, it was disappointing realizing last year that these fans are nullified, because when you need them the most, all they're gonna do is is cook you even worse.

So I tried things like spraying the fan blades with a water bottle, then realizing the futility of if I use the spray bottle and spray consecutively, one spray after the next, that'll do that job, that will moisten the air, take the heat out of that. It will be doing its job and cooling me.

I'm just trying to think about how not to be spending all day, every day spraying myself constantly so that there's a constant mist, so to drastically reduce that inefficient use of water, given my water budget...

After learning about that India Palace technique, I immediately said to myself, that is what I gotta do. I will dampen a very thin strip of bed sheet material just very water absorbent and very easy to work with and very light.

Take a rectangle cutting of that material and then clip it so that it is intercepting that box fan blasting hot air.

And then what? And then, yes, it was an approximation of the effect that they would achieve, because what gave them the cooling effect was the wind coming through the doorways, hitting that soaked fabric mat that would cool the air.

It's also a factor of just the movement of the moisture particles and how those moisture particles suck the heat out of the air in the room, so multiple different physics factors at play.

But most importantly, for me, the fact that I can hang up this segment of sheet, and enough air is going through it...

The emergent property is it can get to a point of feeling like a cool breeze.

It's not as dramatic real blasting AC. But, a lot of people know the experience of, their AC not being really what it was in the beginning, or it's sort of fading a little bit. It still works enough to where you are not suffering in your car while you're driving. You're not sweating, it's working just to keep you from being extremely fussy about how uncomfortable the temperature is. That's better than nothing, and it's, it's enough to more than keep you alive, but it keeps you from being very agitated.

We're in this climate emergency world, is it possible to create some sort of automated cycle of water?

You think about all the water just going to waste and fountains and just evaporating into nothing, and it's beautiful, and it's great but perhaps more could be done.

I'm retrofitting my own microclimate, my own settlement.

Whereas before I tried things like spraying water at the fan and realizing that that was very inefficient and futile ultimately.

Then doing things like when I did fully dampen a sheet of that fabric, drop it on top of the fan, put it behind the fan, drape it over the fan and that wasn't doing anything, but hanging it a couple of feet away was magical.

It's a game changer now, so I'm very interested in how I can scale that out, in some way automate that, because with just some sort of drip then you don't need a mister which wastes a lot of that water too.

So what I discovered is that relative to how much water I would have to use to be comfortable with a spray bottle and a box fan, I could use the spray bottle to spray down that fabric.

Then periodically, as it would dry out, as you would expect it would as if you were drying clothes and it's being evaporated in the heat, even though it's in the shade, it's a little bit slower, but it still dries out pretty damn quick, and it's pretty thin.

But the effect is such that it's worth it. It's way more efficient to dampen that fabric every half an hour to an hour, and just do that a few times.

That's a game changer, so that's happening on one dimension on me.

What if I could now scale that to two dimensions or angles?

So now I think, what if I could get a hexagon of those fans, and piping that would consistently drip and maintain the moisture level on those fabrics?

Then I could have a tent within a dome or a tent within a tent that's a very small area just around me that would allow me to not feel heat exhaustion.

That's a very interesting concept to start to, to scale down to the minimum which is where it's at now, and scale that up to maybe where, again, relatively low energy, relatively low water input and relatively low manufacturing input.

Without grid power or generator power, or lots of water supply, people don't have to push to the limits and outer edges of the most minimalist possible strategy to get the job done.

But it's interesting to get pushed to those limits of the most minimalistic way to get the job done.

I think about how you could actually scale up from that without crossing the boundary of needing a lot more investment of capital.