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and analysis of all the topics we talk about and in the future we'll have solar calculators and ev
calculators all kinds of cool stuff all coming soon tuba davinci.com hi i'm ricky and i'm on a
mission to build a net zero house which means making electricity ditch your natural gas and
eventually making our own water so today we're talking about electricity and staying cool this
summer and saving some money so in san diego it's officially summer time and all of a sudden after
a very cool spring it's getting really hot so i thought how about we make a video talking about
some of the interesting ways we're gonna try to stay cool and save money this summer let's go
all right so one of the first things you should always be thinking about in terms of staying cool
is a ceiling fan here is an example of what we have in our studio without that fan it
would be too hot in here for me to record and the reason why a fan is so great is because
it works no matter where you live in fact most of the world doesn't have air conditioning and
they opt for ceiling fans so right now even if the room was 85 degrees which is really hot if
there was a fan running and moving air over your skin you'd feel okay whereas you turn that fan off
and you'll start sweating because the air right by your skin starts warming up and you'll start
sweating and feeling uncomfortable so to stay cool this summer the first thing you probably
want to invest in is some stuff to measure heat so let's start with the cheapest thing this is
a company called switchbot i got these because they tell you the humidity and the temperature
and a four pack of these was only about 35 dollars next up you can get one of these this is an ir
kind of laser temperature gauge so it'll tell you how hot things are so it's about 80 degrees in
this room which is not particularly cold but this is pretty cool you can kind of get an idea of how
hot things are just from a distance and that can come in handy and if you want to take your game to
the next level then you can get a infrared camera like this this is a flir pro and this attaches to
your phone and gives you really cool images that you can record and take a look at here's
something really cool by the way you want to be a little mini detective if i step on this floor i'm
going to be heating it and if i step away you can still see my footprint next up is windows i have
double pane windows but if you see here they're really old they're like first generation double
pane windows so as a result the heat comes right through here especially this window when the sun
rises it feels like you're in like a tanning bed or something it's really bad so i got this this
is a window film it says it has like a titanium layer and it's supposed to block the sun's heat
says it rejects 72 percent of the sun's heat and 99 of uv rays so here's what it looks like by the
way can you see that it has a very reflective kind of look step one we'll clean the window
this is like a soap solution to help with the installation
i'm horrible at this this is going to turn out very poorly
i think my dreams of starting a window tinting service or shattering before my eyes you got it
we need new windows at some point but for a house like this it's about twenty four
thousand dollars and we're not going to do that anytime soon so for now we thought for 50 bucks
how well does this perform so this piece here has it installed this piece doesn't and i want
to show you how this looks on the flare camera the window is much hotter it's 108 degrees compared to
93 so about 15 degrees hotter on the window on the floor it's 96 degrees where there's no film
and 87 degrees about 9 degrees cooler and you can actually really tell if you stand here compared to
stand here big difference about 10 degrees so you might be thinking how does this work well
this film gets hot and prevents that heat from coming forward but this is hot and so now it's
going to radiate heat as well this would only work if that means that the outside of the window was
also hotter let's go take a look at that okay on the outside of the window it's the same story it's
about 109 on this class that has the film and 96 so about 13 degrees hotter on the outside of the
glass yeah this window is way hotter so that heat is transferring back through through the
the gap in between the panes of glass to the outside and then back out so that as the wind
hits it it'll take that heat out this stuff works really well but would i recommend it it depends on
how good you are with installing this film it's a little bit finicky right you have to have a clean
room and clean it and hold it up and cut and all that kind of stuff so if that's the kind
of thing that you're willing to do for 50 bucks you could really keep the heat rejection out of
your house from all your windows and honestly if you want to make it easier just do the part
facing the sun so here this is the south part of our of our house so we're just going to put
the film on the south facing windows pretty easy way to keep some of that heat out in the summer
so you ever wondered why homes are hot even at night when it's cooled off well your entire attic
is hot and it stays hot for quite a while so as a result that heat radiates down into the main house
and that's why you want blown insulation and whatever else you can to prevent that
so speaking of hot addicts there's two things you can do to tackle that and both are fairly
cheap the first is gable fans so if you look around your house you probably have gable
attic ports and if you get a fan on one of them you can blow in fresh air and blow all that hot
air out of the attic keeping your attic cooler if you do that the wood and all the other parts
in the attic will be cooler and radiate less heat down into your house the second thing i
mentioned obviously is insulation and the third is a whole house fan so this is something i had on my
previous house and i loved it i use it all the time so what a whole house fan does is it takes
all the air in your house and blows it up into your attic then the attic gets pressurized and
it pushes all that hot air out through the vents and cools your attic as well our current house
we don't have a whole house fan just yet but i think as the summer has officially kicked in
we need to start to do that next up let's talk about an evaporative cooler
not that heavy liftable evaporative coolers come in all kinds of sizes they even make
little tiny ones that are kind of for your face but this is a massive 2000 square foot house size
fan so if you look up close here if you get in here you'll see these are the little grills that
the water will trickle down and so the idea is to have a lot of surface area and as the water goes
over these coils some of it will evaporate cool in the air and giving you nice cold air on the inside
so this is the outside of the unit and this is the inside this was about one was about 660 dollars at
home depot and uh let's try to get installed in this window right here a little lower
all the way over right
i just want to see how strong this fan is
so this is not exactly how you're supposed to install this because you're supposed
to have a vertical window but we just put two pieces of wood offset a little bit so there's
a lip on this side to catch this and this lip should go into the window let's see how we did
cool so we're not out of the woods yet
cool idea right one
and the beautiful look very shabby chic my wife is all about that i think oh it
feels cool i'm freezing and the water parts not even running yet all right
let's go do that brim so with this piece it'll hold this ledge from collapsing
here we go and
that's perfect wait wait wait wait
that just happened
now there's more suction all right so here's an anemometer it actually has the wind speed
and temperature it's 87 degrees outside which is pretty warm and it's uh not especially windy so
let's now let's fill this up because after all it is an evaporative cooler brim water it actually
is supposed to be filled at this port but i don't have that connection just yet so we'll fill it up
here all right so now we have water let's get back inside and see how much cooling effect we
actually get so the way an evaporative cooler works is it cycles water through
those little coils you saw back there to slowly evaporate some of that water and as a result
taking water from liquid to gaseous form absorbs energy and as a result the air in that area
cools off really quickly as it comes through but to put all that to practice let's figure this out
we have 85 degree temperatures in here right now and about 47 humidity relative humidity and the
reason i'm checking the humidity is because this is going to make the room more humid but let's go
ahead and let's try this out and here's a flir camera recording you can see we're looking at
about 82 degrees in the fan area so now let's see if i can turn it on remotely i can okay so this
is just fan mode uh the wind speed is about three meters per second even out here it's kind of cool
right but you can see that the air is not any colder and that's because while we're
just moving the air that's outside and bring it in here but it still feels good to the
skin for the reason any fan does now let's go to cool mode you see the turning blue
the fan area is turning blue so if you look here now we're at 77 degrees
and you can see that the the surrounding room is warmer than the the fan area
and the motor is right there in the middle and that's why that's a little bit warmer
and should i go to high speed let's get crazy yeah hey look at that 74. we'll go to high speed
73.
the ambient air was 80 i think we started 81 so we've dropped 8 degrees brim check it out look
at how blue look at how dark that area is it is 9 degrees colder right now all right we'll come
back in 10 minutes let's say the reason why this is popular is because it's way less electricity
than air conditioning so my air conditioning runs on about 4 500 watts 4.5 kilowatts right
this runs on 400 watts one tenth of the power but now this requires water as well how much well on
low about two gallons an hour and on high about four gallons an hour four gallons of
water you have to supply it'll evaporate and that moisture comes into the house
let me show you something here all right using this little switchbot thermostat and
uh moisture meter humidity meter i have some data that i want to show you real quick
so yesterday around 11 o'clock the house right here in this section got to 84.5 degrees
and once we turned the evaporative cooler on it sank to 73 degrees in about in about 30 minutes
which is pretty amazing but the problem is in that same period the humidity went from
30 percent to 60 percent you can think of the air as a big sponge and as there's more water in the
air its potential for holding more water decreases and as a result it can't evaporate as much and
once that happens it becomes very humid indoors and the cooling effect is largely neutralized also
i touched the floors and the carpets and rugs it was kind of damp which is the scary part here in
san diego we don't have mold issues because it's pretty dry but the minute you introduce that kind
of humidity you've got that miami problem where mold can start to grow so that's the one reason
why i'm on the fence about this thing it does work really well and depending on where you live if you
live in the high desert it might work for you also if you want to mitigate some of those problems you
can turn the cooling on and off turn it on cool the temperatures and then as soon as it's colder
outside turn the water element off and just run it as a fan and that fan will push air back in and
kind of bring the humidity back down so there's a very clear picture here you're basically trading
temperature for humidity that's what you're doing so if you live in miami you live in hawaii humid
areas this won't work because there's no more capacity in the air for extra water so as a result
nothing will evaporate and it won't work very well but if you live in las vegas or san diego
somewhere arid and dry one of these can save you a ton of money like i said it's about one-tenth
the electricity to run also if you wanted you could run on one of these for a couple of hours
and then turn on your air conditioning which will take the humidity back out of the air and kind of
cycle back and forth between the two so if that makes sense for you it makes sense which is cool
but in san diego with our water shortages and our droughts do we really want to be spending four
gallons an hour to run one of these i don't know i think once we have solar panels i would just run
my air conditioning and run it on solar and and not do one of these but this is something that's
interesting and i'll put more of a write-up in locations of where it makes sense for you
but you can factor that the effect of this is going to be a function of how much
humidity you have where you live if you live in a place where there's a lot of humidity and it's
really hot most of the time and there's nothing you can do but air conditioning there are some
choices so here in the office we have a window air conditioner that we just put in in fact we haven't
finished sealing it all up but this is a great option too this runs on about a thousand watts
right so the evaporative cooler is 400 a big whole house ac is about 4 500. this is about 1 000 watts
and it'll cool a room like this pretty well it keeps this whole entire office pretty cool so
even if you want to save money and still run air conditioning think about putting one of these in
rooms where you're sitting in more often like an office during the day or your bedroom at night
because if you live upstairs the heat rises and our bedroom is uninhabitable without one of these
so we just run this around seven o'clock at night that way it cools off by the time we go to bed
and it's way cheaper than running the whole house ac and if you have to run your whole
house ac that's totally fine too there are still things you can do if you have time of use billing
where electricity is cheaper at certain times of the day what you could do is you could charge
your house up by running air conditioning when it's cheapest so for us from midnight to 6 a.m
electricity is way cheaper and so what you could do is you can program your thermostat to get crazy
cold around that time so when you wake up your house is like freezing which means your house
stays comfortable longer into the day it'll take longer for that heat to find its way in and maybe
you might find that you don't have to run air conditioning again until after your peak hours
in fact this entire office is running on solar and batteries thanks to our smart home panel from
ecoflow so we have 14 kilowatt hours of storage and about 2 000 watts of solar that's coming in
now this is temporary it's just on the ground for now but until we get up on the roof
i had solar panels laying around i thought let's just hook them up and start making energy
so this house hasn't been on the grid in days so we're going to air conditioning all we want
without any worry which gets to one other point which is if you want to stay cool and save money
get solar right solar panels will keep your attic and your roof cooler and it'll make so much energy
that you can just run your ac and not worry about it i can't wait for that because here in san diego
our bills are so high and i've been paying 500 a month without air conditioning while it was cool
so i don't want to think about how much money it will be when i have to run air conditioning so i
got to get solar as quickly as possible all right so in conclusion air conditioning is always going
to make sense for you depending where you live a evaporative cooler might make sense if you live
in a dry desert kind of climate the window film is pretty awesome i think almost everybody could
benefit from it depending on how comfortable you are installing it and then a whole house
fan makes sense if you have cool evenings if after the sun goes down it's cool outside where you live
a whole house fan can save you a ton of money alright i'm ricky with two davinci thank
you so much for watching oh and i just remembered give a pool just jump in easy way to stay cool
i am cool i'll tell you that