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?