I hope these cooling stations are just something they are planning to buy and run, not something they are designing. Arizona has the second worst run infrastructure teams in North America in my experience dealing with them.
Areas are flooding that are not supposed to be flooding, equipment is overheating that shouldn’t. It’s a big deal in this sector now especially because the dumb shit PEs don’t want to account for it.
They water the air in Sedona. Let that sink in for a minute. They use machines to spray water into the air, and no, I’m not talking about a humidifier. Like over-the-door air conditioning units that just piss water all over the sidewalk, except it evaporates before it ever makes it to the concrete, just to keep people from passing out while walking to the corner store.
That’s just evaporative cooling. People have been doing that for thousands of years. It’s pretty damn effective at lowering the temperature a good amount in dry climates.
That’s evaporative cooling, and it’s been used for hundreds of years in cultures worldwide to help reduce heat. Adding humidity into dry air naturally reduces the heat index. It’s not supposed to make it to the ground, the entire point is for it to evaporate and increase ambient humidity in the air.
It’s extremely energy efficient, but is limited to very dry environments. Above about 30% ambient humidity it quickly stops being effective at cooling the air, and at around 60% ambient humidity it’s just no longer noticeable. So for a desert area, it is an ideal, cheap and easy way to cool an area.
There are evaporative systems designed for homes and businesses that use the same principle. A box with an opening on one side for airflow, a large wet pad and a fan combined with ducting, will cool an entire home. It uses remarkably little water, and power only to run a simple pump to keep the pad wet and the fan spinning. It uses a fraction of the power and air conditioner uses and is a lot more effective when humidity is low.
For most of the summer an air conditioner isn’t even needed to cool a home. Central ducting with an evaporative cooler will work for 90% of the summer. Only during the monsoons where the humidity is too high for it to be effective is an AC system really necessary.
Source: I live in AZ and my home has both an evaporative cooler and an air conditioner.
Discrete units but both attached to the same ductwork.
Since A/C needs to operate on a closed system there’s a one-way damper just below the Evaporative cooler where it attached to the duct work. The evaporative cooler on the other hand works best in an open system, so you can direct airflow best by opening windows in rooms that need more cooling.
Two separate controls as well. The A/C is attached to a standard thermostat. The Evaporative cooler is simple by comparison, just a manual knob with Off, High Fan, Low Fan, High Cool, Low Cool, and Pump only. The last three run the pump to keep the pad wet.
At night, Low Fan might be all that’s needed even in the summer, just moving air. The cooler moves A LOT more air around the house than the A/C does since it has a massive spinning drum fan and an open airflow system.
That’s a clever arrangement! Thanks for sharing. I’m in Colorado and we get dry enough that evaporative cooling is effective, but home came with AC, which means everything just gets dry and you static shock all your electronics to death as your power bill spins up to infinity. I never considered that one could have a dual system to switch between. What is your temperature differential with the evap operational? 20 degrees or so?
Yeah about 15-20 normally, but can get up around 30 around peak summer with zero humidity. Above about 100 outside though it just can’t keep up and the AC is needed even with low humidity.
So basically above 100 and above about 40% or so humidity, the AC is needed, otherwise the evap cools better and is a lot cheaper to run.
I meant “like” as in similar to, not as a filler word. I know they’re not air conditioners. I was likening the design for descriptive purposes for people who live in less arid regions. It was especially surprising to see them aimed outdoors when I visited. When I asked a shop attendant about them, he said they were to keep tourists from passing out because they drink too much alcohol and not enough water. Haha
Yup. Evaporative cooling was popular in AZ before electricity was available. In the late 1800s to early 1900s there were many homes and building with cooling towers on them. People would hang wet sheets across them and the cooling effect would create a current as it fell down the tower which would on turn create more draft across the cooling cloth.
While I’m all for helping avert the inevitable disaster from human caused climate change. Most of the parts of Arizona where it gets hot AF have always been deadly and like this. The difference for a long time was less concrete and asphalt, and less people. Honestly a lot of the areas around here in the Nevada/California/Arizona desert regions were nomadic areas with people coming to live here during more pleasant winter months. Living here in the summer is still a bad idea.
It was never abandoned. The valley was steadily habitated for thousands of years by a number of tribes before American settlers forces the Yaqui from the land.
None of them had air conditioning, and they thrived until a foreign invader took their land by force.
I don’t know the history here, but wouldn’t a nomadic people that leave when the heat / drought gets bad, still count as “abandoning”, in a sense? Or were they more or less a permanent settlement?
To me, “abandonment” means they have no plans to return. It sounds like what they did was more similar to what retirees do with winter homes in Florida/Arizona and summer homes in the midwest/northeast.
Sure, but the context was that one person asserted that Pheonix was a terrible place to place to have a permanent settlement because of heat and drought, and someone else refuted with an “Ackchyually” style response.
If the native people relocated regularly to avoid heat and drought, then that strengthens the first assertion that it’s a bad place to support a permanent population.
But again, I don’t know the actual habits of these specific natives. Maybe they weren’t nomadic and found ways to survive where Pheonix now stands. I asked because I’m curious to the history.
They survived by digging a canal system to bring water from rivers far away. Those same canals are what feeds Phoenix it’s water a milenia later. We just added cement to them.
Seems like archeologists think that they were most likely wiped out by a population boom followed by a bad drought, though. Still, I had no idea that level of agriculture existed at the time. Pretty interesting.
That level of agriculture is nothing compared to what civilizations like the Aztecs, who figured out how to grow crops in the middle of a lake, and the Inca, who figured out how to freeze-dry crops they grew on landscaped, terraced mountainsides.
The Maya were also really excellent at hydraulic engineering out of necessity because there were no lakes or rivers in much of their domain.
And then there’s the plant we call corn or maize today. This is what it started as (teosinte) before people in Mexico started selectively breeding it over thousands of years:
People really need to understand that ‘stone age’ (or bronze age in the case of the Inca) does not actually mean they were unable to understand how to do really complicated things. People look at an expertly-knapped mesolithic hand axe and think they could do it themselves in 20 minutes with any rock they picked up.
What they did is so much worse than repealing something. They crafted a new law making it illegal for local city/county governments to enact their own protections for workers during extreme heat. They literally took away these people’s agency to make decisions for themselves just to get some headlines before the election.
John Browns spirit is still marching as well. The problem is that those who march in contrast are cowards who hide behond legalism and state sponsored thugs. Used to be you could just kill them and their bitches, now thered be an investigation and thats assuming they dont catch ya thrpugh security cameras or some shit
He was hung by that bastard Lee, the failure of Brown was neither spirit or tactics it was method. He shouldve kept at bleeding the slavers and eventually he may have killed enough to succeed at starting a slave revolt. The problem is he jumped two steps ahead.
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