This is both a shower thought and a stupid question but I think it fits this community better.

Since air conditioning is apparently heating the local environment while cooling down a house I was asking myself whether it would be possible to basically either build a layer of glass/plexiglass right over the actual outer structure of a house, leaving a tiny gap between wall and glass, or at least put a house in a kind of glasshouse dome with a double glass wall. And consequently inject a sulfur compound, calcite etc into that “gap”, basically creating a very tiny micro-atmosphere that has that sun blocking effect.

Would that work, just logically/technically? Would the environment heat up less, more, or just the same as with geoengineering in the stratosphere? Would it even cool down a house/keep it cool at all?

  • southsamurai
    1•2 months ago

    I mean, anything that reduces incoming heat is going to keep the interior cooler; the question is by how much? You’d still have to have a door of some kind, so it would never be perfect.

    But there’s houses that are built all or partially underground, or have roofs that either reflect sunlight or otherwise reduce/eliminate its ability to heat the interior of the house. So the idea is not that far off from the same principle.

    Hell, just using a roof that does something with the heat reduces interior temps a good bit. I’ve seen a house with solar water heating on the roof stay a few degrees cooler, and that’s only the roof that’s insulating anything. I suppose you could do that on every surface and get a bit better results.

    But direct sun is only part of what makes an interior hotter. You can have a house surrounded by trees that gets a bare minimum of sun and it’ll still be within maybe five degrees of the outside air. Our house is mostly shaded, and we do stay a little cooler than neighbors that don’t have big ol’ trees playing bouncer for sunlight. If it weren’t for humidity, we’d use the AC a lot less. A few days ago it was 90 outside, and “only” 85 inside, after a nice rain where we had shut the AC off and opened the windows to enjoy it. It wasn’t truly comfortable, but it wasn’t so bad as to be unlivable for short spans either.

    Wouldn’t try that on most days though.