Forget AC! Cool Your Home Naturally

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Air Flow and Your Home

Now look at your house to assess how air moves through it. You can make basic observations on your own, but you may want to bring in a professional for a more technical assessment. Consider the following points:

• What kind of windows does your house have: casements, double-hung or fixed?
• Does your house have other ventilation openings (that is, vents, exhaust fans or turbine ventilators, a cupola)?
• Are there operable windows or other vents on opposite ends of your house? Are some high and some low?
• Can you open enough windows to provide good ventilation in hot weather?
• Does your landscaping funnel breezes to your house in summer and protect it from cold winter winds?
• Does your house’s enclosure have cracks that admit cold air in winter or hot air in summer?
• How high are your ceilings? Do they allow warm air to collect high in the room, which can be a blessing in summer and a problem in winter?
• Do vents or fans exhaust unwanted air, such as unpleasant smells and excess moisture?
• Even with windows open, are there “dead air” zones in your house?

Natural Ventilation Techniques

Once you’ve mapped your local wind patterns and your home’s airflow characteristics, you can use a host of tricks to improve ventilation for cooling. If your home has appreciable thermal mass (dense materials that conduct heat slowly, such as stone, concrete, brick or ceramic tile), or if you choose to add some, you will want to use these ventilation techniques to cool the mass at night in the hot season, so it can absorb unwanted heat from the air and away from your body during the day.

The openings that allow air to pass through your home needn’t always be windows. We ask windows to do many things: admit light, welcome solar heat, frame views and provide ventilation. But these functions often have conflicting requirements. In hot arid climates, for example, breezes are more desirable than sunlight. Sometimes the best solution — particularly in a remodel situation — is to provide vents that are separate from windows. Adding sun protection, insect screens, louvers, insulated doors or a combination of these will allow you to fine-tune your new vents. A good example from historical buildings is a cupola with louvered vents all around that allow warm air to escape as it rises, inducing air movement through the whole house.

We can learn a lot from vernacular buildings that make the best use of nature’s cooling ventilation for their particular climate. In the South, shuttered verandas, high ceilings, operable transoms, two-story porches and dogtrot houses with open breezeways down the center maximize both cross ventilation and shade to counter the humid heat. In the Midwest, summer kitchens keep the heat of cooking out of the home, while screened sleeping porches put warm human bodies in the path of nighttime breezes. In desert regions, the thick earthen walls of adobe homes protect the interior from harsh sun during the day; at night the cool breezes sweep away any lingering warm air.

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