Re: How you design an off-grid home to deal with extreme heat

[Anonymous]

We have been trying to deal with the AC problem for years. Our biggest concern here in the south is humidity. We can’t open windows at night when it is high because we have no way to remove it without adding heat to our home. We have thought about trying a wholehouse dessicant dehumidifier that also does some cooling. Without humidity we can simply use fans to keep us cool till about 80 degrees. Another problem is we don’t have any duct work in our home. We thought we could use our wholehouse fan at night so we never installed any. Boy do I regret it now. 3 days ago we set the all time record high for heat here. Ductwork would at least help with the humidity. No way yet to run central air, uses to much power. Geo-thermal is too expensive.We need to invent an AC unit to run on DC…so solar panels could run it all day…don’t need it at night so much if it stayed cool all day!