Pneumonia for Christmas

So I get to spend the holiday in a somewhat over- air conditioned room at Bangkok's Samitivej hospital, feasting on intravenious drip instead of enjoying a lovely Chaucer experience:

Janus sit by the Fyhr with Double Beerd

and Drinketh of his Bugle horn the Wyn

Beforn him stand the brawn of tuskid Swyn

And Noel crieth every lusty Man!

How to deal with the boredom of it all? Well, I suppose I can finally get around to investigating the truth of the Thai conviction, forcibly set forth by another pretty girl who pounds my chest twice a day, that people get sick in Thailand when the weather changes. This is a theory that might be checked out, a future task.

And enjoy a few crumbs of pleasure chirping in Thai to the cute nurses.

But the air conditioning chills my feverish skin. I turn it off, paying the price of damp sweat in the warming room. Finally, an accidental solution: coming across and meditating on some online photos of German and American soldiers in bleak winter landscapes in the Ardennes offensive -- Battle of the Bulge -- of WW 2, which I find on my ipad,  I coax out a feeling of relative comfort. You'll say psychological, no doubt! (can't stand the word).

Better yet, I get this nurse to bring a small pedestal fan to the room, directing at lowest speed not on me but along the wall, to keep the room air slightly stirring. Much better than the air conditioning!

Pneumonia for Christmas

So I get to spend the holiday in a somewhat over- air conditioned room at Bangkok's Samitivej hospital, feasting on intravenious drip instead of enjoying a lovely Chaucer experience:

Janus sit by the Fyhr with Double Beerd

and Drinketh of his Bugle horn the Wyn

Beforn him stand the brawn of tuskid Swyn

And Noel crieth every lusty Man!

How to deal with the boredom of it all? Well, I suppose I can finally get around to investigating the truth of the Thai conviction, forcibly set forth by another pretty girl who pounds my chest twice a day, that people get sick in Thailand when the weather changes. This is a theory that might be checked out, a future task.

And enjoy a few crumbs of pleasure chirping in Thai to the cute nurses.

But the air conditioning chills my feverish skin. I turn it off, paying the price of damp sweat in the warming room. Finally, an accidental solution: coming across and meditating on some online photos of German and American soldiers in bleak winter landscapes in the Ardennes offensive -- Battle of the Bulge -- of WW 2, which I find on my ipad,  I coax out a feeling of relative comfort. You'll say psychological, no doubt! (can't stand the word).

Better yet, I get this nurse to bring a small pedestal fan to the room, directing at lowest speed not on me but along the wall, to keep the room air slightly stirring. Much better than the air conditioning!

Bangkok temperature plunges to below freezing!

Sky radiant temperature in Bangkok
 -- surprisingly cool, even on a hot season afternoon.

Believe it or not, the sky temperature the last few days has dropped to 0 deg C or a little below. 

People who write learned papers and books about tropical architecture and comfort --Floridians, Singaporeans, Australians, and, God knows why, even some Norwegians -- talk of "dumping" building heat, ie trying to find places where the enthalpy is low to which unwanted building heat can be efficiently transferred.

Alas, this is not easily done in Thailand because there aren't any cool places to be found. With a mean temp over the year of nearly 28 degrees(82 F), the earth itself is warm -- about 28 degrees, which does not provide much of a "sink" for heat. 


The sky, which cools the overheated brow and the roof in the night desert  is fairly warm in the tropics, except for a few weeks in the low humidity "cool season", and efforts to radiate heat into the sky from buildings are not usually considered to yield much benefit, especially in the hot season.

But since we have recently seen that we are not asking for much cooling, just a few degrees, I've been taking some night sky temperature measurements* with my little Radio Shack radiant thermometer. Here are the results on the graph above. Evidently the night sky temperature is a function of sky moisture, or dew point. And in the hot season, when there is a lot of moisture in the air, the night sky becomes less effective as a heat sink.

But still. How much can we get from a night sky of 15 degrees?

According to radiant heat theory, we should be able to transfer about

k*(Troof^4-Tsky^4) watts/m2
where k= 5.6697xlO-8 w/m2-°K. T

which comes to about 50 to 80 watts per square meter of roof. This is enough to lower the roof temperture, suppress it as we say, by two or three degrees.

The question is, can we use this natural cooling to some good end?
-------------------------------
* I know that this instrument is not really measuring the temperature of anything in the sense of say a thermometer, rather it is feeling how much radiation is being emitted by whatever you point it at. Or whatever you point it's 30 degree "eye" at. It thinks that the emittance of everything is the same, maybe 0.9, which is not true or things like aluminum and skies. But since radiation is what we are talking about here, I'm just going to go ahead and figure the heat transfer as if the "temperature" of the sky was what the radiant thermometer says it is.

Bangkok temperature plunges to below freezing!

Sky radiant temperature in Bangkok
 -- surprisingly cool, even on a hot season afternoon.

Believe it or not, the sky temperature the last few days has dropped to 0 deg C or a little below. 

People who write learned papers and books about tropical architecture and comfort --Floridians, Singaporeans, Australians, and, God knows why, even some Norwegians -- talk of "dumping" building heat, ie trying to find places where the enthalpy is low to which unwanted building heat can be efficiently transferred.

Alas, this is not easily done in Thailand because there aren't any cool places to be found. With a mean temp over the year of nearly 28 degrees(82 F), the earth itself is warm -- about 28 degrees, which does not provide much of a "sink" for heat. 


The sky, which cools the overheated brow and the roof in the night desert  is fairly warm in the tropics, except for a few weeks in the low humidity "cool season", and efforts to radiate heat into the sky from buildings are not usually considered to yield much benefit, especially in the hot season.

But since we have recently seen that we are not asking for much cooling, just a few degrees, I've been taking some night sky temperature measurements* with my little Radio Shack radiant thermometer. Here are the results on the graph above. Evidently the night sky temperature is a function of sky moisture, or dew point. And in the hot season, when there is a lot of moisture in the air, the night sky becomes less effective as a heat sink.

But still. How much can we get from a night sky of 15 degrees?

According to radiant heat theory, we should be able to transfer about

k*(Troof^4-Tsky^4) watts/m2
where k= 5.6697xlO-8 w/m2-°K. T

which comes to about 50 to 80 watts per square meter of roof. This is enough to lower the roof temperture, suppress it as we say, by two or three degrees.

The question is, can we use this natural cooling to some good end?
-------------------------------
* I know that this instrument is not really measuring the temperature of anything in the sense of say a thermometer, rather it is feeling how much radiation is being emitted by whatever you point it at. Or whatever you point it's 30 degree "eye" at. It thinks that the emittance of everything is the same, maybe 0.9, which is not true or things like aluminum and skies. But since radiation is what we are talking about here, I'm just going to go ahead and figure the heat transfer as if the "temperature" of the sky was what the radiant thermometer says it is.