Take the conditions seriously
It’s warm over here on the west coast.
Extreme heat continues to inflict wide swaths of the U.S. This weekend, the brunt of the hot temperatures is falling on the West Coast and parts of the East Coast.
Afflict, not inflict.
In total, over 132 million people were under some form of a heat warning as of Saturday evening, according to Heat.gov. “These conditions will be extremely dangerous and potentially deadly if not taken seriously,” the National Weather Service said on Saturday.
Human-caused climate change is fueling longer and more intense heat waves, and making dangerously high temperatures more common.
And even now, after all this time to get familiar with hot weather, Seattle people don’t understand air conditioning. Grocery stores still fasten their doors open when it gets hot. I don’t have enough eye rolls to deal with it.
I was in Las Vegas last week for a conference. (Pro tip: don’t hold your conference in a desert in the summer.)
Daytime temp was 105 to 110 all four days I was there. Nighttime temps barely broke below 100.
I was walking around at 11:00 PM, two hours after sunset, clear skies, 20% relative humidity. The city should have been radiating huge amounts of heat to the sky, yet somehow it didn’t get any cooler.
Say what? They run the AC and the also keep the doors open? I’ve heard of people keeping the doors open to avoid using AC, but not in some insane attempt to cool off the outside air with inside AC.
Well, let me modify that slightly; there are cold rooms in Costco that have a high-force air stream at the entrance to the room, that keeps most of the cold air inside the room without closing a door. I’m betting that the stores in question are not doing anything like that.
Yes, they do. It drives me NUTS. Has for literally decades. I tried a couple of times to persuade a manager or boss or whatever to grasp how AC works but to no avail. I do not understand it.
Aha. Redditt has an explanation. It draws people in. $$.
https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/1dbi8vj/why_do_some_businesses_leave_their_doors_open/
Are they using refrigerated or evaporative cooling?
Here in South Australia with our very hot low humidity summers, we use evaporative cooling (swampies). It is about 20% of the cost of refrigerated (reverse cycle) both to install and to run. BUT it does require doors and windows to be at least partially opened so the cool air being drawn in can expel the hot air and keep humidity low.
Swampies work by drawing hot air through water soaked pads and blowing it into the building. These are a thing of beauty in hot, low humidity climates, but don’t work in places like Queensland where humidity is far higher.
Take a look at this.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=evaporative+air+conditioning&pn=1&iax=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DH_uwck0O0cI&ia=videos
Huh, I don’t know.
@Rev David Brindley
I doubt they’re using swamp coolers in Seattle… I mean, maybe some salesperson talked a good talk, or maybe the technology has improved somehow, or maybe our climate really is just so borked that humidity has plummeted there, but swamp coolers aren’t much use in the Pacific Northwest (which technically is temperate rainforest).
Well I. The summer it tends to be bone dry, so I could see swamp coolers being of some use. I know our heat pump can only really do so much.
Can’t wait to spend the rest of the week in my tent and having my portable cooling unit fight against both high ambient temps and the red hot metal inside my vacuum chamber.