I completely agree about better ventilation in older houses. Our current house has terrible air flow.
When we were kids we didn't have air and we always had some nights when we would all sleep on sheets in the living room with the front door open and all the windows open, too. One of my most powerful memories was sitting up in the living room with everything open watching Joe Pine on TV during the Watts riots.
Now we use our air conditioner cause the heat makes me sick. I keep the house at 78 during the day and then move the thermostat down a couple of degrees as the night goes on. If I'm still up at 4 am, it goes to 72. If we could open our windows at night we probably wouldn't have to air condition all the time, but we can't because we don't feel safe enough. Also we use a lot of fans...needless to say in my 13th moon phase I have a lot of trouble thermoregulating. That plus chronic fatigue makes every summer night an adventure!!!
When we design our house for Arizona, I keep thinking about all these things to try to be as energy efficient as possible as air conditioning is out...we won't have the power for it. But we really shouldn't need it if we site the windows and so forth properly. This is what I think about when I'm awake at night.
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When we were kids we didn't have air and we always had some nights when we would all sleep on sheets in the living room with the front door open and all the windows open, too. One of my most powerful memories was sitting up in the living room with everything open watching Joe Pine on TV during the Watts riots.
Now we use our air conditioner cause the heat makes me sick. I keep the house at 78 during the day and then move the thermostat down a couple of degrees as the night goes on. If I'm still up at 4 am, it goes to 72. If we could open our windows at night we probably wouldn't have to air condition all the time, but we can't because we don't feel safe enough. Also we use a lot of fans...needless to say in my 13th moon phase I have a lot of trouble thermoregulating. That plus chronic fatigue makes every summer night an adventure!!!
When we design our house for Arizona, I keep thinking about all these things to try to be as energy efficient as possible as air conditioning is out...we won't have the power for it. But we really shouldn't need it if we site the windows and so forth properly. This is what I think about when I'm awake at night.