daily survival blog

The daily survival blog, Bison Survival Blog, www.bisonsurvivalblog.blogspot.com

FRUGAL AIR CONDITIONING

Remember when you were a young teenager? You had just gotten a license to partake in using up the last of the earth's resources in metal and petroleum in order to aimlessly wander around and try to impress your friends with a brand spanking new automobile. Actually, judging from fighting the traffic past the High School in the mornings it looks like parents are trying to out perform the Jones' by equipping their spawn with the latest and greatest ( well, as good as it gets for American sheet metal ) from Detroit in order to make themselves look good. Oooooh!!! Look at me. I'm Mr. Big Shot Hot To Trot Super Lawyer Yuppie Bastard. I can afford to give my irresponsible, long hair hippie drug using pants hanging past his ass crack mascara wearing son a thirty thousand dollar vehicle so his lazy carcass doesn't have to pedal a bike three miles to school like a dirty lower class poor proletarian swine. Now, in theory, if Dad isn't as worthless as the son or as big of a canker on the rectal wall of society like most Yuppie's are, he will warn him before he gets behind the wheel.

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Don't drive too fast. Don't pick up stray tramps from the other side of the tracks ( Yuppie tramps are okay-their families have the medical insurance to combat VD ). Don't drink and drive. So what happens? Junior, once thought to be first in line to the family fortune, now totally and beyond doubt proves how idiotic he is and gets plastered while being pleasured by a syphilitic whore, goes driving into a telephone pole at ninety miles an hour. The moral of the story, listen to those older and wiser than you. Now, I know, you know, and Ross Perot knows that almost none of you listen to me. You are reliving your teenage years all over again. You are living in a two hundred thousand dollar house, driving a thirty grand SUV, stock MRE's and I am sure that after you get done reading Rawles Survival Blog you go into your subterranean lair and caress your two thousand dollar semi-automatic battle rifle. Yes. Yes, my pretty. Soon. Soon we will emerge and rule the world. You and me, my love. You will be my queen! I would make sweet love to you now, but unfortunately your seven millimeter orifice is too large for my manhood.

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So, I figure, you need a break from my incessant chatter on cutting back expenses and living a cruel existence of deprivation and misery surrounded by a sea of plenty. I'm going to take pity on you today and throw you a bone. Instead of being forced to live on the front porch for half the year to get a bit of shade and a breeze, how about some real air conditioning? Not mechanical. We still need to concern ourselves with the grid crashing and the oil running out. But air conditioning nonetheless. And no water is needed, so desert dwellers can partake in this luxury. You don't even need to have an underground home. I should have written about this sooner, but I was in the grip of a cold winter ( for here, anyway ) and I was focused on warm, not cool. I first ran across this idea when I read "How To Live Without Electricity, And Like It" ( of course available through my Amazon books page www.bisonpress.com ). But the Internet is full of articles on it. Just do a search on underground cooling tubes.

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The directions on utilizing a small ( 50x50 ) yard and getting maximum cooling from it are a bit more expensive than I care for, about a thousand dollars. Essentially you rent a trencher and make a lot of ditches and bundle pipe together, maximizing the surface of pipe that is exposed to the cool ground. If you take the average winter temperature at your location and the average summer temperature and average them you get the year round ground temperature. In other words, thirty in winter and seventy in summer equal fifty degrees ground temp. All the time. This is the temperature air you can draw in the summer. So almost any area outside of Florida and south Texas will give you under 72 degree cool air for the summer. But even there, eighty in the house is better than 100. The fancy way costs almost a thousand bucks. You're talking almost eight hundred feet of pipe to get a house to feel like a meat packing plant. Of course, it is a one time expense, and electrical costs are only going to go up. It seems a shame for anyone who has at least a fifty by fifty foot yard not to do this. You might even be able to get just one summer to pay for itself. But let's talk about the cheaper way. Under a hundred bucks.

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If you own a small dwelling, say a trailer of a shack, this is perfect. Take at least a four inch PVC pipe and bury it at least four feet down for at least a hundred feet. The outside pipe rises from the ground to a higher level than the inside pipe. You have a U shape. Straight down into the ground, turn toward the house and running towards it underground, then up into the house. Make sure to paint to keep the pipe from becoming sun damaged. Screen the intake and find a way to keep the rain out. When you want to stop the process have a cap to place over the intake pipe. Air is drawn in from the pipe, travels down the earth cooled pipe, and enters the building much colder than when it entered. A natural cooling tube, without electricity. Can you get much simpler? Sure, the digging is going to suck. But then you only need to buy pipe, not rent a back hoe or ditch witch. If you don't like the idea of digging, at least buy the pipe and store it. One day you might have no choice if you want cooling. And of course don't neglect shade and insulation. One pipe does not equal a big AC unit. More likely a few rotary fans.

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