Netatmo slaves and sniffs away all day

My Netatmo weather station bravely faces the Bangkok morning sun. All day and into the night it toils away collecting data every five minutes even how much CO2 we emit in bed.

Netatmo for sustainable tropical living

Night air conditioning use in a Bangkok condo high-rise. This graphical history represents moderation in air conditioning use over 12 days in August 2016 with a monthly electric bill of about fifty dollars US. Other units in the same building use ten times as much air conditioning. Why?

Temperature data are inside (blue) and outside (red) I turn the air conditioner on near or after midnight for a few hours when we are home and the bedroom temp is 28 or more. Set point is 24 deg C (75 deg F). Turn it off 3 or 4 am. This is what the thrifty Thai do.

Other thermophobic expats in Thailand prefer aircon 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Netatmo timestamp conversion to Excel 2011 Mac

This is for Netatmo weather station enthusiasts. It is one of those nuisance problems that caused me to waste a day.

Netatmo data downloads provide a Timestamp for each reading time. It is expressed as Unix time for your time zone (in my case Bangkok), a big number such as 1467025349. Because there has been a lot of messing around with time formats by Microsoft Excel over the years, there are dozens of conflicting formulas out there that are supposed to do this conversion.

I am working with the 2011 Mac version of Excel and after a lot of frustrating attempts finally arrived at a formula that does the conversion that matches Netatmo's conversion shown in the "Timezone: Asia Bangkok" column which for some reason doesn't import into Excel. These are the kind of headaches that make me long for the days of Lotus 123.

Excel date=((Timestamp+25200)/86400)+24107 

With the Timestamp example of 1467025349 this should yield (in Excel date language) 41086.75172 or 6/27/16 18:02.

Netatmo's help facilities are not the greatest when it comes to this kind of thing, so I hope this fills the gap for now.

Global warming: view from the village grandmother

She was already, in Thai terms, an old grandmother when I came the first time here to the village of Bu Hua Chang, fifty years ago this month. The Thai never seem to be very aware of just how old they are, but I make her age to be 91 years. She is a central part of our little neighborhood in the village, sitting in the public space on an ancient wood platform that seems to be reserved for women and children, busy with her little betel nut kit the way old village people have been forever, always a calm and quiet presence in the group of women and kids that sit under a big tamarind tree in our neighborhood. Nim and I enjoy visiting her and take encouragement from her bright conversation, she is twenty to forty years out ahead of us.

I ask her, “Grandmother do you think life was better in the old days or now?” Several of my neighbors are quietly observing this exchange.

“Old days,” she says. After thinking a bit and cutting some new pieces of betel nut.

Bun married a hill tribe man and she still knows the old mountain language, a wife was expected to learn the language of her mother-in-law. Her daughter Pow and great granddaughter Pat live next door to us, our neighbors and friends. The grandchildren pursue successful urban lives in the industrial towns north of Bangkok, accountants or something, leaving the kids back in the village with the old people. It's a good system, the kids learn the old courtesies and graces here, helping their grannies get onto the morning bus to the market in Takhop.

Are there any of the old hill people left?

Auntie Kian in nearby Bahn Takian, is one of them; her husband too, she says.  Nim and I resolve to pay them a visit.

I tell her the story of how my old friend Longmah fifty years ago said that if I ever saw a bear in the forest walking on his hind legs and holding a  tree branch like an umbrella, I should pass with a courteous greeting. Bears think they are the same as people, they have a lot of dignity, and can become quite angry at disrespect.

Yes, she says, they are fiercer than tigers when they are angry. She recalls the time when one of them was harassing the village nightly and everyone was afraid. Her neighbor, an old lady then like herself now, ran out of her house directly at the bear, lifting up her little shirt and flapping her dugs at the bear. 

The bear fled in great fear. Our neighbors respectfully listened to all of this, nodding their heads.

“And Grandmother, I remember there were so many big trees in the forest above the village before we moved the village to build the dam, that was fifty years ago, and there was water in the Lam Pra Plerng River then even in the dry season. I know you remember too.”

She thinks a bit. “Yes, too many people came here, and we cut the trees as if it was the same as the old days, we didn’t know what we were doing.” The Thai have a remarkable capacity for accepting responsibility, blame is less rarely heard. Is blame a western disease? I read of a Thai man who was struck down by a drunk driver but refused to take even insurance money for his medical expenses. He figured it must have been just punishment for his carelessness or past wrongs.

Next time: Grandmother's opinions on global warming

Another Netatmo benefit: use aircon but save energy

Shut down arcon at 3 am causes rise in CO2 in closed
bedroom from about 400 ppm atmospheric to almost 800 ppm

Many people leave air conditioning on all night. The thrifty Thai have a better idea.

Here are the data from last night, you can see that if I turn off the aircon at 3 am the temperature (pink) rises, then accelerates at about 7 am (sun on the sliding glass doors, heating the curtains), so I turn on the aircon again for experimental purposes and leave the room. Meanwhile CO2 (green) accumulates when the aircon is shut down, but falls again with aircon on, reaching atmospheric in about an hour.

Yes, a mystery. Isn't the air handler just circulating room air? Why is the CO2 flushed away with the doors and windows closed? I'm thinking that the intake duct is probably pulling some air from some building cavities that contain CO2-free air.

I enjoy this wonderful Netatmo setup and the CO2 data fluctuations lend themselves to all kinds of interesting experiments.

I've talked to various low-budget Thai people who use aircon sparingly as I do. Turn it on at bedtime when the interior is 29 or more, set to 25 C, and then off in the early hours, switching to a fan, which keeps the temp below 29 for the night. This appears to be optimum for energy conservation if you are ok with 29 which works if you use the fan.

Unquestionably original sun screen, albeit not to everyone's taste

Here is a guy who gets an "A" for originality, if not for esthetics or universal applicability.

I have discussed in my book the usefulness of black or green netting as a sunscreen, with shading factors of 50-80%. This corner shophouse in my Thonglor neighborhood was originally the same as its neighbor to the left, with east-facing recessed windows providing some protection except in the early morning as shown here. The owner apparently liked this sun screen effect provided by plastic netting, so he went all the way, building an exterior frame to support the netting over the entire building facade.

Ecologically beautiful or ridiculous? As the Thai would say, "up to you".

Cool roofs: a discouraging technology

I can only suggest that the reader review the Wikipedia article on roof reflectance to see the current low state of public knowledge on anything to do with climate. By that I mean that it seems to me that everyone who enters the arena, whether it be commercial lobbyists, government bureaucracies, academic research institutions, not to speak of politicians, is trying to sell something in a spirit of cynical self interest. This leaves any serious inquirer trying to find some truth needing to study the primary literature on the subject in a spirit of complete scepticism, after the fashion of medical statistician John Ionnidis  who would have us believe that most medical research findings are false. Why even do the research? Ionnidis' view:  it's about careers, grants, publications, and salaries.

Clinton? Trump? Who can you believe in these days? I'm inclined to say no one, except possibly Robert Shiller and Mickey Rourke. Oh yeah, Cormac McCarthy, I believe him. And Winston Churchill, he was certainly right about the Russians. And my friend John, who tells me to invest my small retirement funds in something that pays dividends.

But let's look at a practical example, a "cool roof"outside my condo.

I hate the guy who did this, see the picture above, and his architect and contractor. Sending the worst of their junk heat right back at me. I read in some BS US government publication that cool roofs reflect excess heat "back into the sky." What "scientist" wrote that lie when they know better?

Oh yes, is it true too that cool roofs reduces rainfall by half?

This is what happens when instead of doubling the price of electricity you throw the "solution" to science and free markets. A lot like medical care in the US, eh?

Good and bad shading in Bangkok fashion area

These two examples of east-facing condos in one of Bangkok's most fashionable districts show different attention to thermal detail that has great impact on interior comfort.

The first building is an older expensive building with an impressive street level facade but little upper floor protection against strong morning sun. As you can see many of the rooms have no provision for shading. Interior curtains will rapidly rise to 40 degrees or more soon after sunrise, subsequently transferring by convection alone 100 watts or more per square meter of window into the interior air. If as it appears the entire wall or most of it is glass, it will take all the cooling an air conditioner can provide to offset morning warming. This makes for highly uncomfortable conditions especially if the room is a bedroom.

People who buy units like this are impressed by views. But in truth once they occupy the place they realize that they actually don't care for the glare and lack of privacy so they leave the curtains closed all or much of the time, leaving the room with no natural light. This irrational consumer behavior is exemplified by the old American advertising saying, "they buy the sizzle, not the steak."

The second building is a more utilitarian modern design with smaller east-facing windows. The building long axis is roughly east-west so the views from the units are north and south, and the sun strikes the living space windows at a sharp angle -- less exposed area and higher reflection coefficients (for glass). Note however that some of the northerly windows have no shading from decks. With the early sun now at this time of year (August) well to the north of the long axis of the building (the building axis is 102 deg east, not 90 deg) significant heating will occur in the early morning hours in those rooms or spaces. Other windows, probably the living areas, are well shaded by being recessed. I will show this in another entry, using my own building as an example backed up by Netatmo weather station data.

The showroom near street level strikes me as a solar oven. Sometimes tinted glass is used to attempt to mitigate this solar heating but it should be remembered that dark glass absorbs solar heat. The glass itself gets hot, and this heat, or a significant amount of it, is convected into the interior.

Condo facing: key to sustainable tropical cooling?

Studies today indicate big impact of building azimuth on aircon costs. Short book useful to guide tropical condo buyers?

Morning heat in new condo

East-facing new Bangkok condos, 9 am October 1, 2015. Direct sun at an altitude of 40 degrees delivering about 400 watts per square meter net to interiors, or about 3 kw to room interior, say 10 kw-hrs cooling every non-cloudy morning. Curtains are deceptive from a thermal point of view: they keep out the light, but not the heat.

This is equivalent to four floor radiant room heaters blazing away in the room. Cooling power requirement for air conditioners to offset this solar gain will be about 3 kw-hrs electric, or 15 baht ($0.50) daily and the room interior comfort will be further diminished by radiant warm curtains and a need to keep windows shut without benefit of mildly refreshing morning air. ("I feel suffocate", my Thai wife says.)

But what is the fashion in condos these days? Glass, glass, more glass.....!

I talked to the salesman in this place. "Thai people do not like the west facing, too hot in the afternoon," he said. But what about the morning? Do you want a hot bedroom at 8 am?

Inside and outside temps in a Bangkok condo: a family history

This chart represents an elementary study of urban tropical temperatures in the rainy season using Netatmo data. It compares the daily cycle of temperatures inside and outside a condo bedroom, in the city of Bangkok. The condo is empty for the first three days of the study and occupied in the last two days.

One would expect the inside temperature to be damped and lagged version of the outside temperature during the first three days with no occupancy. However this is not exactly the case. The inside morning temperature rises quite quickly, parallel with the outside temperature rather than being delayed as one might expect. After a couple of hours it stops tracking the outside temperature and then seems uninfluenced thereafter by outside temperature. What is happening here is that the morning sun enters the condo through the large sliding glass doors, heating the curtains. As soon as the window is shaded later in the morning this heat source disappears and the outside air temperature influence is not strong enough to cause it rise further. We see that direct sun through windows is the enemy of comfort, not outside air temps. Curtains keep out the light do little to help with heat gain when the room has large sliding glass doors.

Another surprising thing about the first three days is the average temperature of the condo seems to be steadily below the outside temperature average. How can this be if there is no apparent cooling source inside the condo when it is unoccupied? the answer is that the interior of the condo likely borrows cooling transmitted through the walls from the adjoining unit. In fact the radiant temperatures of those walls are typically about 2° below the floor and ceiling temps; the adjoining neighbor likes to use air-conditioning during the day.

On the second day a welcome thunderstorm breaks the heat mid-afternoon.

Returning to the condo Saturday mid day after a long drive from our farm, we take a bit of a midafternoon nap. With the bedroom temp at 30 (86 F), we turn on the aircon with a set temp of 24 (75 F). Later I am early to bed without aircon, but my Thai wife, oddly less tolerant of heat than I am, turns on the aircon sneakily a little after midnight (T=29) when she retires. I turn it off again in the predawn while up doing my old man things. Thus the story of all marriages of long term?

Lessons learned:

1. Interior curtains block light but not heat. Small windows better?

2. Nothing wrong with benefitting a bit from your neighbor's aircon!

Major breakthrough indoor thermal studies

This remarkable and inexpensive instrument fills the difficult data gaps in room air exchange and metabolic heat contributions (via precision CO2 tracking). A major breakthrough indoor thermal studies. I plan to use it to study issues in building air leakage in the tropics, which effects I have long believed to be widely exaggerated in connection with cooling needs for tropical climates.

Rain: I feel so good

Tonight my wife Nim tells me about her memory of rain as the thunder crackles sharply outside our condo in west Bangkok, Sukhumvit. Tonight we can forget the air conditioning. We don't pay much, but today I paid the electric bill, 3600 baht, $100, for last month. Normally half or less in the cool season. Our use of air con is sparse, nights only.

"I always think how good I feel when it rain."

"Why?"

"Because privacy. In my life, my home town, even outside one hundred people talking all the time, in the rain they go home and I can go to my room alone and not worry about anyone. I feel wonderful."

My wife is now fifty years old. Lately she praises anonymity, How she loves living in Bangkok because "I don' have to go anyone funeral".

What is it about tropical thunderstorms that spurs remembrance of things past?

Here in Thailand, we await the rains.....

That angry rising sun

Absent rain, the hot season deepens, even dangerously. Here I am driven to indulge in what was once a serious sin in English prose composition, the pathetic fallacy, attributing human feelings to the sun itself. Why should the sun be angry? Because we have messed up its little sister, the earth?

Anyway there are some serious points to be made here.

First, note that the sun is rising not directly to the east, but slightly -- five degrees -- to the north of east. This means that the twin condo tower on the right is not going to protect my bedroom from ascending sun over the next few hours, the way I imagined it might back ten years ago when I bought this place. It will become hot to the point where I will either get up and head out for coffee, or hit the aircon button and flop back into bed. A dollar or two of electricity for the latter course.

Record breaking discomfort in humid Bangkok

Thick haze at dawn in Bangkok with record high dew point at 29 C and daily low of 31 C dry bulb. Must check whether this breaks 60 year records for discomfort extending into the insufferable for the rest of the day. Yesterday 5/12 was the record Thailand aircon power consumption mid afternoon about 2 pm, brownouts abounding, and in the Gulf of Thailand water temps exceeded records at 32 C. In Bangkok many people fanning themselves on the sidewalk. We could be heading into a day of extreme discomfort. Or do the 8 am cloud masses show here signal a merciful break point?

Auspicious signs of rain from today's ploughing ceremony?

Today the famous ploughing ceremony described 200 years ago by a visiting Englishman:

Specimens of all the principal fruits of the earth are collected together in a field, and an ox is turned loose amongst them, and the particular product which he selects to feed upon, is, on the authority of this experiment, to be considered as the scarcest fruit of the ensuing season, and therefore entitled to the especial care of the husbandman.

The idea is that the success of the rains and coming agricultural season can be foretold on this day. The question is whether I can do better with my wonderful database of daily weather since the 1950s.

Reportedly today's ceremony led to promise of a prosperous upcoming 2016 season, but that was true last year and the result has been serious drought.

Auspicious signs of rain from today's ploughing ceremony?

Today the famous ploughing ceremony described 200 years ago by a visiting Englishman:

Specimens of all the principal fruits of the earth are collected together in a field, and an ox is turned loose amongst them, and the particular product which he selects to feed upon, is, on the authority of this experiment, to be considered as the scarcest fruit of the ensuing season, and therefore entitled to the especial care of the husbandman.

The idea is that the success of the rains and coming agricultural season can be foretold on this day. The question is whether I can do better with my wonderful database of daily weather since the 1950s.

Reportedly today's ceremony led to promise of a prosperous upcoming 2016 season, but that was true last year and the result has been serious drought.

People asking to be shot

Yesterday the heat began to seep back into the city, late morning was not nice in Bangkok: 

Ricky Roma: They say that it was so hot in the city today, grown men were walking up to cops on street corners begging them to shoot them. Glengary Glen Ross, David Mamet

but some errant breeze picked up in late afternoon and  I was able to walk from Emporium to Thonglor without sweat. The rains the day before appear to have broken the back of the hot season.

Near death, we thank you Emporium

What I do here is trace the natural history of a cubic meter of Bangkok air which you might find around, say, Benjasiri Park at 6 am when folks are out there doing Tai-Chi and aerobics. The moisture, temperature, dew point, and enthalpy of the air at 6 am on a reasonably cool March morning is shown as the starting point of the day's oddyssey. The wet bulb temp, ie the temperature of all those dewy flowers across the street at Villa supermarket, is about 24 C, and the enthalpy (ie energy) is a little over 70 KJ per cubic meter. With a relative humidity of about 80 percent, those joggers are going to start to sweat pretty quickly.

It always struck me as curious that the Bangkok air does not change its energy content much over the day, i.e. it is isenthalpic, by afternoon it's a lot hotter but a little drier so energy is much the same. But look what happens to that air if it is lucky enough to get sucked up in the Emporium air con engines which blast off at about 10 am. This air will be cooled down to its saturation point (ie the dew point) and then with further cooling dump about half of it's moisture, so that the nice icy feeling you get when you go into the mall is your own dear sweat getting sucked up by this dry hungry air. It's not the air that's so cold, it's your own vaporizing sweat!
Having said that we can look ahead with delicious dread at the daily cycle at the peak of the hot season now at the end of April, shown in red away up on the diagram. Above the red line, it begins to get dangerous. When and it the morning dew point or daily minimum dry bulb hit 35C, we're all dead.

The colored zones on the chart are so-called comfort zones, green where everyone is happy, yellow where some international experts say folks in "undeveloped" tropical countries should be happy (so they don't use so much of that fuel meant to fire up our big SUVs). Everyone is unhappy in the red zone.

Thank you, Emporium, I think we'll all go shopping!

Watching the girls, an overhead sun, once a year

Solar noon.

Yesterday the noon sun was directly overhead at noon, allowing for this fine photo (which I am sorry to say I did not take). This is a once-a-year event (usually) because the other day when it occurs, in August, is usually cloudy. But today the sky is clear with no sign of rain, so the heat may continue to increase.

Hot season peak

Yesterday one of my neighbors remarked that the heat this year was the worst in her experience in Thailand, and there were similar comments around the table at a neighborhood Thai restaurant where last night we enjoyed drinking some Singha beer and eating a light but tasty gaprow with some friends.

We know that the Songkran holidays and the peak of solar intensity (when the noon sun is directly overhead), both come along in late April,  marking via astrology or astronomy, respectively  the peak of the hot season in Bangkok. But this does not mean that the worst discomfort is necessarily over in late April. I surmise that a certain amount of thermal momentum and also the time of onset of clouds and rain are major factors in thermal misery and this can be seen in this graph of maximum daily temperatures, shown in red. It is evident that in especially bad years like 1983 the temperatures kept rising after the quarter point of the year in late April. In other years they are truncated earlier. The reasons for the truncation are a big factor in how bad we perceive the hot season and are worth further exploration in this blog.

Yesterday, April 27, the sun passed directly overhead at noon (i.e. the declination of the sun and Bangkok itself being at 13.7 degrees), which yields a theoretical maximum solar noon intensity. There were no shadows at noon. Interestingly or coincidentally, the clouds are building today. According to my reckoning, if the rains don't arrive soon, the discomfort is likely to increase even further over the next couple of weeks.

Waiting in the heat for the rain

People interested in weather tend to be number people; I am one myself. So I am going to bring you some stats from time to time. Right now we are experiencing some hot weather, but today I see some big clouds in the morning and yesterday my taxi driver said he smelled rain on the way. Based on the wonderful dataset of weather from 60 years at Don Muang -- some 22000 days of records -- the annual march of heat and rain are shown on the chart. We see that maximum daily temps have a ceiling of about 40 deg C (we had a 39 last week). This is 104 deg F. But after mid May we see high temps are increasingly rare. Meanwhile rains enough for local flooding can occur as early as March but are most likely in May or June. The rains put an end to the high temps. To my surprise the rains in April through June  are statistically more likely to be larger than the rains later in the season, beginning in September.

This year I have found the outdoor heat to be particularly overwhelming, even though it is not statistically exceptional. A matter of age?

In days past when I lived in Isan some fifty years ago, Songkran was followed by weeks of sultry heat -- more severe than Bangkok -- when people often slept away the afternoons beneath their houses. The land was dry and cracked, the air smoking with burned rice stalks, and everyone stored up energy for the rains which turned the rice paddies to soft black mud which allowed for ploughing and planting.

Orwell had it right on today's awful heat

Here is George Orwell describing days like today in Bangkok (but in Burma):

The heat was growing worse and worse. April was nearly over, but there was no hope of rain for another three weeks, five weeks it might be. Even the lovely transient dawns were spoiled by the thought of the long, blinding hours to come, when one's head would ache, and the glare would penetrate through every covering and glue up one's eyelids with restless sleep. No one, Oriental or European, could keep awake in the heat of day without a struggle. -- George Orwell, Burmese Days

My vote for the worst aspect is the white glare, inescapable. In fact, by eliminating that and using the thermal mass of my condo, I have no inclination to turn on the air conditioning even in the late afternoon. 

But outside....miserable!! 

Next entry I will show the relationship between the continuing ascending heat and the hoped-for rains.

Record temperatures in Bangkok this week?

Don Muang airport maximum daily
temps higher than 38C (102F) since 1951.

So how is Songkran, the hot season water festival week looking in regard to Bangkok hot weather this year ? Yesterday temperatures reached 39 degrees C (102F) at the old Don Muang airport, and the historical record I got from the Department of Meteorology shows that this is not a common occurrence, it happens in about 1 in 4 years over the last 65 years (1951-2013). But then, it is not all that special either, there are a fair number of readings over 39.5 and a few even over 40, especially in the late 1990s.

Do you see a long time trend in maximun temps at Bangkok here? I don't. But then, given the urbanization around the airport, which was surrounded by rice fields when I first arrived here in 1963, we should be surprised that there has not been a steady upward march of hot recordings over the past half century, even aside from any global warming, it having been known for a century that urban areas are generally warmer by 5 degrees or so than country areas.

So if we are looking for evidence of global warming in this record we are not finding it. It is worth considering that most of the records which people are using in this heated debate over temperature trends are also taken in and around airports. Do "climate scientists" pay much attention to microclimate?

For that matter if we are worried about human misery in the tropics, we should look at other weather indications like dew pount which better reflect our capacity to survive in hot weather. We die at dew points of 35 because we cannot dump heat at that level.

The southerly breezes in Bangkok were recently -- about 2 hours before -- flowing northward over the Gulf of Thailand, so along with local microclimatic ground heating from paving and other materials that capture heat, we should look to surface sea temperatures in that shallow gulf for explanations of downtown or airport temperatures.

Radiative cooling in the humid tropics II: special for psychrometriphiles

Today's entry is the second in an ongoing series on radiative cooling for the tropics and is mainly for readers who understand psychometric charts. I show today's very typical hot season trajectory of Bangkok air properties from dawn to mid afternoon (red arrow) superimposed on a handy old chart I use to aid my judgment on matters of thermal comfort.  The daily process is essentially isenthalmic (constant-enthalpy). Our Bangkok day is way outside of US standards of comfort (with which I disagree) and also within the "danger zone" (justifiably so) that was established by the US military after scandalous heat deaths of marine recruits during basic training. Having also done my basic training in the sweaty Virginia summer near Richmond, I am proud to have survived at least the heat battle of a forced march before reforms were instituted (but I recall an ambulance did trail our ragged column), though I never did hear a shot fired in Vietnam.

Today's Bangkok wet bulb temperature (surrogate for enthalpy) was 28C (82F). Wet bulb temps above 30 were recorded with deadly results in Pakistan last year and are considered very dangerous in military training. The wet bulb temp should be close to the surface sea temp (also 28 in the Gulf of Siam as recorded yesterday) and has never been seen to exceed 35. Wet bulb temps of about 32-33C have been recorded in Bangkok and also (surprisingly) in the middle of cornfields in Appleton Wisconsin. Our wet bulb today is about at the 1% summer design level for US hotspots such as Pensacola, Galveston, and El Centro.

Note from the chart that the afternoon and evening dew point temperatures drop to about 25C  and relative humidity to 50% so a cooled surface at that temperature would not attract condensation.

Damp laundry in the morning heat

This hazy warm morning  at 7:30 am while checking my still damp laundry (high humidity at dawn) I measured a wet bulb temp of 28.2C (82F), as high as I can recall here in Bangkok. The daily pattern has been the same for a week now, typical hot season weather. Humid dawns with air, wet bulb, and dew point temperatures converging at about 27-28C, followed by warming  to about 38C (100F) midafternoon. Increasing relief from southerly breezes off the Gulf of Siam throughout the day and evening, offsetting to some degree the rising temperature. Much like late summer Gulf Coast Texas weather. Greater afternoon discomfort has more to do with glare and radiant heat from hot streets and sidewalks  than 100F air temperature. Average daily temps about 33C. Checking back over the years records I find that it was a bit warmer in the early 1990s, with daily average temps sometimes 34 or above, hence whatever people want to think we are not experiencing anything extraordinary so far this year. For the last week, check out this chart from Weather Underground (note the superelevated bump in dew point this morning):

April 2016, typical hot season, breeze from the south

Air conditioning, frat sex, and self reliance

These days the world thinks, mistakenly I believe, that it is high class to have air conditioning. Not always true, as an old Boston lawyer friend writes me:

My first experience with A/C was when I was employed during Law School as a clerk at a major Boston law firm, in the early 1960’s. The firm had no A/C generally although many of the Partners had individual units in their offices which then had windows that could be raised or opened in the Office Tower on State St  Boston. There was an obvious moral tone exhibited by several of the more Senior Partners who eschewed the individual units. On the opposite side having an  A/C unit was all but a necessity for the more Junior Partners to mark their newly acquired status in the firm. The library which served as my Office was a veritable oven, nevertheless I concluded that  the older lawyers  were basically right. Mick Jagger  (attendee – London School of Economics ) confirmed this essential truth to me 20 years later - “ You can’t always get what you want, but you may find out you have what you need “.

Old law partners learned
 to keep cool the hard way

The idea that it was once classier and a source of pride to not have air conditioning, as with these senior partners, is mostly forgotten and even unimaginable to the world, all the more so in upwardly striving Bangkok with its ethic of conspicuous consumption. It's a bit like boats without engines or wood coffee tables with ancient dents, burns, and saw marks which were once seen as far more distinguished than motorized yachts and that crappy plastic Euro furniture that people want in Asia now. 

But I'll bet those old Boston partners shrewdly figured out the offices that didn't get late August afternoon sun. This intelligent planning never occurs to anyone now and few apartment or condo buyers here in this part of the world ever think of sun exposure when they buy a unit. Just go ahead and pay a 300 dollar a month electric bill later. Hardly a sustainable way of life.

This reminds me of Camille Paglia's comments on the current date-rape campus hysteria. She says that girls once knew that it was not smart to walk around mostly undressed and drunk at 2 am frat parties. So now instead when they think the day after that maybe after the party they may have had sex with a frat boy while in a drunken stupor they are demanding a new layer of rape investigation and disciplinary adjudication to be dispensed by campus committees of students and professors as naive as they are themselves. The police and the courts, of course, wouldn't understand their pain.

Surely the decline of the traditionally powerful societies in the face of leaner and tougher people is in large part a loss of individual foresight and self reliance, an aggregation of expectations that the company or the employer or the state or the college will take responsibility for everyone's lack of foresight and mistakes in the face of reality.

Mango shower

Mangos on our deck at Ekkamai

Yesterday my wife brought a couple of nice fresh yellow mangos in from the big old tree that pokes through our deck at our teak house here in Bangkok, and sure enough last night we had our first mango shower which broke the recent hot weather and, as one of our local twitter wits points out, gave our poor air conditioners a rest. This mango showers is an old and romantic weather term used from India to Cambodia, I remember it from my early days in Thailand fifty years ago. It refers to small afternoon or evening rains that begin usually in March, come along every week or two, sometimes with a growl of thunder, and take the edge off the hot season which bears down on us at this time of year.

Boston scorchers: will aircon strip away our best memories?

From the free download chapter

We are much inclined to think that air conditioning is a necessity, but I have to wonder these days whether this and much of the other technology said to be so wonderful is really important at all. One of the chapters in the book that was fun to write was my memories of those days old people in Boston used to call scorchers, though my mother preferred the ancient term dog days. On those canicules my grandmother would take me on the streetcar from her walk-up South Huntington Avenue in Jamaica Plain downtown to the Boston Common. I still enjoy looking at the details in this photo, the necktie, the newspaper. Was this man a bum? An unemployed veteran? If so, he made an effort to dress properly. Or was he just a lower paid adjuster from one of the insurance companies that dominated the skyline, lacking in those days even the first John Hancock building behind the Boston Common? 

To this day nothing beats the shade appreciated by this fellow, even here, in the tropics. Were they elms, those great feathery trees? From this same place you could hear the shouts of boys splashing about roughly in the Frog Pond.

Many of these most vivid memories serve as backdrops for the wonderful dreams that entertain my sleep these days, three quarters of a century later. They would not exist if the "benefit" of aircon had existed in those times, the mid 1940s. Will they now be as satisfactorily replaced by memories of sitting in air conditioned "family rooms" watching TV?

Bangkok weather BS I: heat wave

We read today in our morning Bangkok Post how the temperature is going to be 41 (104F) today, with various Thai experts competing to explain why that will come to pass. No surprise to this observer that it is 33 with max 34 anticipated now at 11 am. Oh yes, it "feels like 41" whatever that means (it always feels like 41 when it's really 33 in Bangkok?)

Why this nonsense? The public discourse on weather and climate in Bangkok is becoming so foolish that it warrants a special series of posts here, beginning with this one, with some more coming up on such matters as the evidence for drastic warming in SE Asia, the coming drowning of Bangkok, etc.

I have a farm up in Isan, the elevation is about 200 meters. Last year my neighbor asked me if there was a danger of the sea reaching this height. 

You might think that only simple Asian peasants would think this way, but I can assure you that many of the people at a dinner party I attended last year in Atherton, California, richest town in the world, had pretty much the same idea.

Free air conditioning from neighbors: role for radiant cooling in the tropics?

Hot muggy weather these March mornings, the hot season is moving in to smother us. Wet bulb temperature 27C (81F) all morning. 

I have discussed elsewhere in this book the wonderful after-effect of my condo neighbor's air conditioning: cool walls in my condo that make air conditioning unnecessary for me during the hot afternoons now approaching. This raises some interesting questions, one of them being the possibility of radiant cooling in Bangkok's steamy hot season.

We recognize that the humidity here is very high, with dew points in the upper 20sC (mid 80sF), rare in temperate climates.  If we don't deal with humidity (impractical in most condo/apartment buildings)  and also want to avoid condensation on cool surfaces, a general no-no, we are limited to cooling surfaces at or above the dew point which for the hot spell last early May would mean no lower than 80F:

Bangkok May 2015; red=Tdb, green=Tdp

You might say that an 80 deg (27C) cooling panel is useless, but I will claim that this is an assertion worth questioning in the particular environment we have in the tropics. We plan to reexamine this issue  in some upcoming posts during the coming hot season.

Hospital air: pleasing but unhealthy?

Although they have solar panels on the roof below my room on the sixth floor of Samitivej Hospital, which I take to be a manifestation of political correctness, they also blast air conditioning all over the place. I expect that it would take more than 30 square meters of panels on a typical hot but murky Bangkok afternoon (with about 200 watts/sm of sun power) to power my 24000 BTU room aircon machine. Whether it's the temperature or dryness of the air, it hurts my skin. 

Solution: call for a 30 watt fan, which they readily bring.

Number 2 setting, blowing off the quarter or whatever sailors call it when they are tacking against the wind. Much better!

Hot places, USA: You wouldn't have seen it if you hadn't believed it.

Curious research finding: people who live on the US Gulf Coast see evidence of warm days based more on their politics than on the temperature. "Political orientations rather than local conditions drive perceptions of local weather conditions and these perceptions—rather than objectively measured weather conditions—influence climate-related attitudes." -- Shao, W. and Goidel, K. (2016), Seeing is Believing? An Examination of Perceptions of Local Weather Conditions and Climate Change Among Residents in the U.S. Gulf Coast. Risk Analysis. doi:10.1111/risa.12571

Night ventilation: a marginal benefit in the tropical condo

Greasy black soot everywhere....

I discuss certain exceptions in the book: when my wife cooks her aromatic fish fries, for example...the doors and windows fly open.

But for the most part night ventilation doesn't do much for us here in our condo in Bangkok's hot season, now approaching. Outside air is warm and humid -- sometimes approaching 80 deg F db (27 deg C) and 100% RH at dawn -- but most of all, it is the dirt that bothers us. Even when we lived in our Thai-style house, pleasantly surrounded by shady greenery, keeping windows open nonetheless soon resulted in a layer of black grimy soot everywhere, I assume vehicular hydrocarbons from the local traffic.

On the seventeenth floor in our condo, the dust is more brown and gritty after several days with partly open windows or sliding doors, the floors sprinkled with odds bits of debris. I never knew the air was so dirty a couple of hundred feet above the ground. And as for necessary minimal air changes, the usual breeze, height, and leaky sliding doors throughout seem to take care of that without any need for auxiliary venting.

Newly arrived expats like to talk of the delights of ventilation and natural breezes, but those of us who have been here a while tend to close everything 24/7. Would it be the same if we were on the coast? Keep in mind that our surface sea temperatures here are about 30 degrees C (86F) in the warmer months, so there will be no cooling from those breezes.

Bangkok's cool malls: sucking more watts than entire provinces

It's no secret that it takes  lot of juice to keep places like Emquartier cold even with the thin traffic they have there these days. But it tells you a lot about Thailand today that energy use to keep these fripperies iced down is greater than what is used for some of the kingdom's provinces. Here is a comparison from the site Mekong Commons.

My Thai wife tried to turn my Bangkok condo into a farm

My wife in her childhood days

At least she didn't put a rice paddy in the second bathroom. But it all turned out OK in the end and made good use of floor space that is usually wasted in tropical high-rise architecture -- outside decks which are useless for living but really function mainly to create shade. This is not to say we are promoting the idea of "vertical farming" as it is sometimes imagined -- heavy duty ag in interior spaces apparently patterned after, and possibly conceived of, while under the influence. You can see our approach in this short video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgoILoIVwG8

Climate, sinusitis, and the dreaded antimicrobial resistance

Now as the hot humid weather returns I am entering after two months the fifth stage of antibiotic treatment for pneumonia and sinusitis. I fear in my own case this condition is becoming dangerously chronic. The subject of rising microbial resistance in Southeast Asia is both scary and fascinating and should be a new chapter in my pneumonia-book-in-progress -- assuming I have the good luck to live to finish it! The bigger and more important question is whether antimicrobial resistant infection -- the superbug nightmare -- is emerging suddenly and globally in the last few months. How many of your global trevelling friends are currently suffering from a persistent respiratory problem? For my part, about 75 percent! Most to the point, are their daily habits -- diet, alcohol, family living, fitness routines -- adding acutely to the danger?

Carrier pulls the plug

Another sad day in the rust belt last week when Wilfred Carrier's company pulls the plug and decides to move its operations to Mexico. Carrier himself, while not the inventor of air conditioning, worked tirelessly to improve and promote the technology while conscientiously calling for moderation in its use, a message largely forgotten today.

Bangkok heat, humidity.... and better health?

Everyone commenting about the heat as hot muggy air drowns Bangkok the last couple of days. The cool season now ending. But coincidently or not, my post-pneumonia sinus problems are much alleviated. But symptoms reactivate after sitting below a (probably) dirty air conditioner for a couple of hours. Will have to ask around at the gym whether fellow sufferers having similar experience. Respiratory problems including pneumonia tied to cooler drier weather? New York study over many years says "yes". Thai as always say it's all about "change in weather."

Bangkok heat, humidity.... and better health?

Everyone commenting about the heat as hot muggy air drowns Bangkok the last couple of days. The cool season now ending. But coincidently or not, my post-pneumonia sinus problems are much alleviated. But symptoms reactivate after sitting below a (probably) dirty air conditioner for a couple of hours. Will have to ask around at the gym whether fellow sufferers having similar experience. Respiratory problems including pneumonia tied to cooler drier weather? New York study over many years says "yes". Thai as always say it's all about "change in weather."

Coolest day of the year

This morning the dawn temperature down to 16 C (61 F) with lovely morning temps in the low 70s. Sky temperature (radiant) at noon is -7 C. Yes, that's right MINUS 7 CENTIGRADE!

Coolest day of the year

This morning the dawn temperature down to 16 C (61 F) with lovely morning temps in the low 70s. Sky temperature (radiant) at noon is -7 C. Yes, that's right MINUS 7 CENTIGRADE!

Florida v. Bangkok air conditioning

Florida test house for air conditioning studies.

Seeking some comparisons between Bangkok and American cities I came across a collection of studies of typical residential air conditioning use in southern Florida, by Danny Parker and colleagues at Florida Solar Energy Center, probably the best single source that I have found for good contemporary research material available for southern US practices and potentials.

 This particular study focussed on several houses in South Florida, and I set out to compare the A/C use there with my own condo here in Bangkok. The structural properties of the two structures are not vastly different, though the Florida houses have to handle a significant heat load from the roof which does not affect us here in Thailand because we are on the 17th floor of a 23 floor building. On the other hand we get some free cooling from the cool party walls between us and our neighbors, who keep their place cold.

I earlier made some comparison of local cooling demand (based on my own high thermostat set point recommendation) as shown following. 

Cooling degree days per month for one year

Bangkok is clearly the queen of heat and humidity, but similar to Houston later in the summer. Miami comes in at about half the daily demand in late summer. The studies by Parker et al are for a group of single family tract houses with about 1000 square foot air-conditioned area, typically four or more residents, and about twice the air-conditioning capacity (2 to 2.5 ton) as my condo here in Bangkok. The Florida homes air-conditioning power use is typically 15 to 20 kwh per day with interior temperatures of 24 C, very close to Bangkok for air conditioned space in residences here (though I beg to differ).

For comparison I have earlier described our minimal condo use of air conditioning – one 250 ft.² bedroom with night use only at 25C, at an energy price about 10 kwh per day. In the Florida houses the more extensive use and larger area of the houses pushes the energy up to about 20 kwh per day. In both cases, Florida and Bangkok hot-season energy use amounts to about half of the electric bill, with a premium cost in the hot season (Bangkok) at about about ten cents US per kilowatt hour, in the range of about $1-$2 per day. On the other hand some of our well-to-condo neighbors reportedly have hot season electric bills of up to $30 per day because they air condition their spaces (some sun-facing, see previous entries) 24/7! 

Ref: Monitored Energy Use Patterns In Low-Income Housing In A Hot And Humid Climate. Danny S. Parker, Maria D. Mazzara, and John R. Sherwin 

Florida v. Bangkok air conditioning

Florida test house for air conditioning studies.

Seeking some comparisons between Bangkok and American cities I came across a collection of studies of typical residential air conditioning use in southern Florida, by Danny Parker and colleagues at Florida Solar Energy Center, probably the best single source that I have found for good contemporary research material available for southern US practices and potentials.

 This particular study focussed on several houses in South Florida, and I set out to compare the A/C use there with my own condo here in Bangkok. The structural properties of the two structures are not vastly different, though the Florida houses have to handle a significant heat load from the roof which does not affect us here in Thailand because we are on the 17th floor of a 23 floor building. On the other hand we get some free cooling from the cool party walls between us and our neighbors, who keep their place cold.

I earlier made some comparison of local cooling demand (based on my own high thermostat set point recommendation) as shown following. 

Cooling degree days per month for one year

Bangkok is clearly the queen of heat and humidity, but similar to Houston later in the summer. Miami comes in at about half the daily demand in late summer. The studies by Parker et al are for a group of single family tract houses with about 1000 square foot air-conditioned area, typically four or more residents, and about twice the air-conditioning capacity (2 to 2.5 ton) as my condo here in Bangkok. The Florida homes air-conditioning power use is typically 15 to 20 kwh per day with interior temperatures of 24 C, very close to Bangkok for air conditioned space in residences here (though I beg to differ).

For comparison I have earlier described our minimal condo use of air conditioning – one 250 ft.² bedroom with night use only at 25C, at an energy price about 10 kwh per day. In the Florida houses the more extensive use and larger area of the houses pushes the energy up to about 20 kwh per day. In both cases, Florida and Bangkok hot-season energy use amounts to about half of the electric bill, with a premium cost in the hot season (Bangkok) at about about ten cents US per kilowatt hour, in the range of about $1-$2 per day. On the other hand some of our well-to-condo neighbors reportedly have hot season electric bills of up to $30 per day because they air condition their spaces (some sun-facing, see previous entries) 24/7! 

Ref: Monitored Energy Use Patterns In Low-Income Housing In A Hot And Humid Climate. Danny S. Parker, Maria D. Mazzara, and John R. Sherwin