My wife hates air conditioning. Believes it is unhealthy, unnatural, whatever. So there is a constant battle in the family about using AC on hot days (say when it’s going to be 90F+).
We will get her to agree to turn on the AC at 11am when the temperature outside is 81 and it’s also 81 inside. She will set the thermostat at 78. In a couple of hours it is 88 outside and 78 inside. She is seething. By 7pm it is 84 outside and she’s standing by the thermostat. By 9pm it is 78 outside and she turns off the AC and opens some windows. By 11pm it is 81 in the house and still climbing. No one can sleep. She says we are just hallucinating and the thermometers (both the electronic ones on the thermostats and the simple one hanging on the wall) are “not working”. By 1am it can be 5-6 degrees warmer inside than outside.
What is the mechanism by which it keeps getting warmer in the house for hours after the outside temperature is lower than indoors. I think it’s just the heat stored in the structure itself and in the air in the attic (I once measured 113F in the attic when it was in the 80s outside).
(Bolding mine). No, I think you answered your own question.
A/C doesn’t just improve comfort by cooling the air-- it also dehumidifies. 80 degrees and low humidity might be tolerable, while the same temp and high humidity feels sticky and uncomfortable. If your A/C has a “dehumidify only” setting maybe you could run just that part of the time as a compromise with your wife…?
At night when the outside temp is relatively cool and you open windows, it would help if you could use fans to get some circulation going. Just opening windows won’t do a whole lot to cool a hot house, at least not quickly enough. Maybe put a box fan in one window blowing in and another in a window at the other end of the house blowing out.
There are also heat sources inside the house (people, lights, computers, cooking appliances), though I have a hard time seeing those making a 5 degree difference with open windows.
Haha, I have box fans in the basement bought for exactly this purpose that I’m not allowed to use, because the unnatural draft it creates is bad for you in some bizarre conception of health.
This is coming from the same culture/mindset where when it is (literally) 100F+ you are offered boiling hot soup to cool you down! She will just freak out if you drink an ice cold drink, even just water. Nothing below 80 degrees should enter your body except raw fruits and vegetables.
Note that being cold in the winter is not a problem. When it’s 50 degrees outside in February during a warm spell, she’ll turn the heat off and open the windows. Which isn’t so bad because I can bundle up. We go hiking when it’s below freezing around here all the time. Walking through the snow.
So it is not being cold that is the problem it is ARTIFICIALLY cooling down or generating breeze.
Or get a window unit, and keep the room that you want to stay in at your temperature preference.
But yeah, opening up the house at night just makes it harder to cool the next day. Also makes it feel much warmer than it was when the humidity was lower, even if the temperature is the same.
The moisture content of the air actually takes as much or more energy to remove than it takes to just cool the air. Letting all that humidity in that you spent all day pulling out wastes about half of the energy that went into your air conditioner.
I was also thinking of a window unit to at least keep one room cool. Though this could create more friction if you spend all day in there, especially if you have kids and they spend all day in there as well.
If she’d be okay with running a dehumidifier, it will both make the house feel cooler as well as allowing the AC to remove the heat even faster when she does let you run it.
This is, of course, assuming the dehumidifier is large enough to make a difference and the windows are kept closed anytime the outside humidity is higher than the inside humidity and that you’re not hacking together any DIY swamp coolers ie fans blowing over open buckets of ice water or fans with wet rags on them.
That’s not actually as crazy as it sounds. The fact that it’s liquid matters a great deal more than the fact that it’s hot. It being hot wouldn’t actually be a benefit, but the tradition probably stems from a time not very long ago when liquids safe to drink were either hot or high-proof.
I can’t explain it. It’s apparently based in thousands of years of Chinese culture and tradition. I just roll with it. The crazy “heating/stimulating foods” and “cooling/calming foods” stuff is equally impenetrable to me.
I’ve heard of Chinese culture having an issue with a ceiling fan in a closed room, but never an issue with a central AC running. Fan Death (though it’s apparently South Korea, not China, so maybe it’s unrelated).
My (Chinese) wife is a big believer in the invigorating power of “fresh air” instead of using AC, although this summer she has been turning on the AC more often. Of course, this involves closing 50 windows immediately before turning on the AC and opening 50 windows immediately after turning off the AC.
In our case, she is the one who likes electric fans and I’m the one who dislikes them (I find the noise, vibration, and pressure on my skin to be off-putting).
