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Andrew DeGraff / Special to the Sun
Monday, July 12, 2010 | 2 a.m.
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Sun Coverage
They blasted dynamite holes in the ground to plant trees. The desert was too hard for shovels, but they needed the shade. This was Las Vegas before air conditioning. The trees were an early thermal coercion now quaint and crazy as the rest: People once hung wet sheets in their doorways to cool the air inside, families slept on porches, children chased the ice truck — the novelty of it, frozen water delivered! — grabbing dropped splinters off the hard dirt, stuffing them in their mouths.
None of it really worked. From roughly 3 in the afternoon until sundown, one early Vegas resident told historians, “We just suffered.”
Las Vegas today exists in large part because of air conditioning, which has enabled us to bend the desert to our demands. Our population has doubled almost every decade since 1930, when climate control first came to Clark County. Today, most of Nevada’s population, and almost all of its economy, is crunched into the hottest corner of our huge state — so to say that air conditioning is the backbone of our existence is as groundbreaking as the news that you find 115 degrees slightly uncomfortable.
What’s less obvious, however, is just how deeply air conditioning has shaped who we are, and what we may become. Climate control, some suggest, has altered much more than the temperature inside: Air conditioning has altered our social lives, our environment, our psyches, our architecture, development and physical health. These changes came as quickly as air conditioning spread and surround us now in much the same way — ubiquitously, so pervasive that we almost don’t recognize the changes, or see where things are headed.
Some of you, no doubt, love the heat. You stroll from your car to the grocery store in the middle of July. You do yard work midday, you grill on the patio, you tend to your tans. You scoff at the rest of us — moles, scurrying inside for the summer, where our temperature problems will only worsen.
Heat tolerance goes both ways. With exposure, the body becomes better at managing high temperatures. In a matter of days, sweat glands start working faster and harder, the body better regulates its core temperature, and we can spend longer times outdoors. This might explain how some Las Vegas residents work outside year-round without dropping like flies.
At the same time, people insulated from heat are less able to tolerate rising temperatures — an anti-acclimatization. And once they head inside, the comfort of air conditioning changes the body further.
Maintaining an average temperature of 98.6 degrees takes imperceptible energy, just like breathing, or keeping your heart beating. When it’s too cold, we shiver. When it’s too warm, we sweat. When it’s air-conditioned and comfortable, however, we do neither.
Thanks to climate control, most of us spend the majority of our time in what’s known as the “thermoneutral zone,” where our bodies don’t have to work to maintain temperature. This, scientists have suggested, may play a role in growing obesity rates — it’s not just the obvious fact that we spend more time indoors and less time moving around outside. It’s the idea that once inside, our bodies aren’t expending as much energy on a cellular level — the air conditioning is altering our physiology. And we’re eating more — studies show that people consume less when it’s hot, and more when they’re comfortable.
Of course, too hot is deadly. Heat kills more people in the U.S. than tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and lightning combined, according to the National Weather Service, which tallied six heat-related deaths in Clark County last year, and 19 in 2008. This is why, every summer, multiple “cooling stations” are opened throughout the valley to serve as air-conditioning hubs for the homeless.
These seasonal meat lockers speak to the madness of vast desert growth, and the cyclic relationship between climate control and development in hostile terrain. Air conditioning creates its own demand. The cooler we want it inside, the hotter it gets outside — not just because air conditioners must offload heat to function, but because the energy to power them creates loads of carbon dioxide — an amount equivalent to every household in the country purchasing a new car and driving it 7,000 miles annually, according to Stan Cox, whose book on air conditioning, “Losing Our Cool,” came out this year.
It’s a direct correlation — the more air conditioning we have, the more we need. But the feedback loop is actually much larger. Once air conditioning came to Las Vegas, the city was able to explode: Roads were paved, casinos went up, houses snaked into suburban sprawl, cars clogged the road. But the materials that make a metropolis also retain its heat, so cities can become warmer than surrounding rural areas by several degrees. This is known as the urban heat-island effect. The uptick in temperature is then bolstered by heat from electricity use, which brings us back around to air conditioners. Nationally, Cox writes, air conditioning accounts for almost 20 percent of energy consumption. Americans, he notes, use as much energy on air conditioning as Africa’s 930 million residents use to live.
Las Vegas has undeniably gotten warmer as it’s developed. Since 1940, our average temperature has risen by half a degree or more almost every decade. By 1960, when only 2 percent of national housing stock had central air conditioning, almost 25 percent of Las Vegas residents had it, according to Gail Cooper, author of “Air-Conditioning America.” To offset the cost of installing central air, when the technology was still somewhat novel, developers used cheaper construction materials that insulated less, and eliminated architectural details that would naturally make houses cooler: wide eaves, shaded porches, attic fans and floor plans that allowed for cross ventilation and central courtyards. To get air conditioning quickly and cheaply, Las Vegas traded architecture for EZ-cool boxes with roofs; homes that could swell to any size, face any direction, spread to any corner of the valley, all with the power of air conditioning. These homes, Cox writes, fundamentally defined how we view air conditioning — as a “space cooler” rather than a “people cooler,” altering our lives as a result.
Consider, for example, the potential effect of air conditioning on presidential politics. From 1960 to 2000, people migrating out of the cold East caused the Sun Belt states to gain 86 seats in the House of Representatives and Electoral College. During this warm weather migration, the South grew increasingly conservative — a pairing of circumstances Cox suggests could have tipped the 2000 and 2004 elections toward the GOP.
“If we could travel back to 2000 and have each state vote red or blue just as it did that year but with the relative populations and electoral votes distributed among states as they had been in the 1950s (before the big southward migration), Democrat Al Gore would defeat Republican George W. Bush by 18 electoral votes instead of losing by three.”
For some, the summer is ideally just a series of hot bursts; the seconds it takes to pump gas, check the mail, take out the trash. With air conditioning, the desert disappears — it becomes a sequence of box stores, windowless casinos. In his book on Las Vegas, “Zeropolis,” French philosopher Bruce Bégout described our chilled indoor lives, rather dramatically, as “cryogenized while still alive, like babies in a cellophane bubble trying their utmost to renew lost contact with reality.”
But who said we don’t adore our cold little bubble? In fact, we want more climate-controlled space to hide in when houses and offices don’t appeal. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our shopping malls. In just eight years, from 1995 to 2003, indoor footage occupied by malls increased 46 percent, Cox notes, while energy used to cool those retail spaces swelled 77 percent. And the more expensive the merchandise, it appears, the cooler the store — a correlation The New York Times reported in 2005, after surveying a number of retailers and finding, for example, that the thermostat at Bergdorf Goodman was set at 68.3 degrees, while Old Navy was set at 80.3. Coldness equated with status.
And heat equated with poverty. Many of the people killed by heat stress in Nevada were discovered in trailers or houses, and likely couldn’t afford to have the air conditioner running. When heat waves hit cities, it’s often the elderly, impoverished and isolated who die, and not only because climate control is expensive, but because they’re scared to open their windows and let in a breeze, or nobody knows they’re in danger.
When extreme heat becomes fatal, Brooklyn College professor Christian Warren told Cox: “What about isolation, economic stress, crime and paranoia about crime? You can easily imagine a couple staying shut away in their air-conditioned apartment during a hot spell, uninterested in checking on their elderly next-door neighbor, who could be dying of heat stroke.”
Only, being shut in an air-conditioned home has its own ramifications. Neighborhoods become ghost towns. Children, Warren says, learn about nature on television, in abstract, and become “detached and fatalistic.” People retreating inward, Cox writes, are living in the “modern equivalent of prehistoric ancestors’ caves.”
And outside, in cities where air conditioning has made rapid growth possible, everything begins to look the same. This uniformity is not just from neighborhood to neighborhood — it’s from state to state. In his 1984 essay on the effect of air conditioning in the South, Raymond Arsenault describes a kind of urban development that will sound familiar to anybody who lives in Las Vegas, Phoenix, the Sun Belt: “Thanks in part to air conditioning,” Arsenault wrote, the South “has been overwhelmed by an almost endless string of look-alike chain stores, tract houses, glassed-in high rises, and, perhaps most important, enclosed shopping malls.”
These standardized cities are monuments to our modern placelessness. As we move indoors, as we live increasingly online, as the actual climate plays less and less a role in our comfort, Las Vegas vanishes. Planting trees with dynamite? Sleeping on the porch? The past becomes increasingly unrecognizable and unimaginable. Air-conditioned, we could be anywhere.
A version of this story appears in this week’s Las Vegas Weekly, a sister publication of the Sun.
The city I live in is almost as hot as Las Vegas. One thing I have found out lately, when income is down, one quick way to cut expenses is to cut back on air conditioning. Opening up the windows in late at night allows a cool breeze to flow through. Yes, if it's too hot we do need to run it, but not 24/7 like so many do. Turning it on for 15-20 minutes (windows open the first few minutes) gives the place a cooling that lasts a few hours. Keeping doors and vents closed in rooms we don't use saves a lot of energy (and cost). Call me cheap if you want, but I'm saving energy and paying my bills, even while the job situation is slow, which is more than most can say.
Great article!
Bakersfield... that might work in the spring/fall, but in the summer opening the windows won't help when the low is 90. (check the 10 day forecast this week).
Very good article .
I was living there in the 80's and was in Property Mgmt & Maint. Sometimes we would have tenants that refuse to pay their last months rent
because they were moving at the end of the month anyway.
Those that decided to make that mistake in June, July, August or September moved out sooner than they anticipated (usually in 1 or 2 days). Somehow the disconnect on their rooftop A/C unit got turned off ????
As I explained to them " I have several tenants who refused to pay their rent and I can't afford to have a HVAC Tech called in to take a look, at this time !"
Gore would have still lost to Bush. Back in the 50's, people had more common sense and would have called BS on Gore's self-proclamations (father of the internet???).
With LEED taking hold in building construction and retrofit, there are more energy conserving and "human-friendly" strategies getting implemented. Wish LEED could have been launched 50 years ago...
Where did that picture come from?? -- That picture looks almost EXACTLY like the opening scene to The Blue Man Group show.
Most of what Bakersfield said is right concerning keeping a home comfortable; however, in one area he was wrong. With an air conditioning system, the unit and the ductwork are sized to cool the entire home. If the homeowner blocks selected vents of some of the room, the heat load into the evaporator coil is reduced because of a reduction of airflow across the evaporator. This has the unfortunate effect of causing the evaporator coil temperature to decrease below the freezing point of water, and the humidity in the room will condense on the evaporator coil and freeze into ice. In addition, as not all the refrigerant is boiled off in the evaporator, it also becomes possible for the compressor to see some fully saturated refrigerant, that lacks superheat, get back to the compressor. This condition is called slugging, and as the name implies this condition will cause a compressor failure. Now, if Bakersfield was speaking of an evaporative cooler (swamp cooler) then none of what I just said . . . applies.
There will be a day, maybe today maybe years from now. There will be a day, on that day the power will go down.
People in Vegas, 2 million people, really do not know how close to the edge they live. On that day, and yes it will be a very hot day, the power goes off all over the region. At first you will complain and wait for the electricity to come on. As it gets hot and hours become days they will start telling you to check on your neighbors they will proclaim "no outside watering". Soon they will let you know there is very little water, since it can not be pumped and treated without electricity.
And it stays hot and you are afraid and water is becoming scarce. You will want to leave and get out of the heat but the gas pumps do not work and even if they did the gas pipeline, like the water pipelines, have been down and now you are stuck.
Many will head up to Mt. Charleston, too many in fact and there is no water there. Others will flock to Lake Mead, it will be chaos something akin to a Mel Gibson movie.
It will happen.
And we gave Gore a Nobel Peace prize? They only thing HE was seeing "warming up" was his little "Girlfriend"...
Awesome article! Please post more like it!
One thing however that wasn't mentioned is another negative effect that energy efficient houses and air conditioning have on our health: They result in high indoor pollution levels. With older homes that tried to aid cooling by constantly pumping air from the outside into the home (be it simple ventilation or swamp coolers), it also constantly flushed out pollutants and kept the environment inside healthy. That's not the case any more, especially with the abundance of today's household chemicals, and homes that are built more like sealed refrigerators.
Best way I always found to ventilate the house was to shut off the A/C, open every window, and take a nap in the warm breeze. A good sweat always feels good, as does the shower afterwards. Plus it does help you acclimatize better to the heat so that when you go outside it's not as harsh on your body, as well you get used to setting the thermostat higher which always save you money.
Also the "Heat Island" effect proposed by author Stan Cox, is interesting, but it's not accurate in the least, and you can even experience why at night for yourself. Once the sun goes down, walk across cement and pavement, and you'll still be able to feel the massive heat. Then if you're near a field, walk across it. It's simple: Asphalt and Cement retain more heat than simple dirt, and will do it for a far longer period of time. That's why it stays hot in the city, but you can end up with a 40 degree drop at night out in the desert. Further proof is if you drive I-15 in a convertible at night. The air will of course be hot, but every time you drive under a bridge, you'll be blasted with the heat radiating off of the concrete above.
Furthermore while more homes are consuming electricity, we're beginning to curb the individual consumption of the homes themselves through the use of smart electronics as well as alternative lighting. Compact Fluorescent Bulbs have really put a dent into energy consumption, and now as more and more cities also swap out gaseous bulbs and transformers for simple LED lamps that are brighter and consume a fraction of the energy. With Stan Cox's logic, we should be getting cooler as energy consumption is dropping, but we're not. Power Companies have started initiating rate hikes on service fees and base Kilowatt/Hour prices since homes are consuming less. Alternative energy forms that do not produce CO2 are on the rise with more wind generation, geothermal, direct solar, solar heated steam plants, etc. Even gasoline consumption is down! But we're still getting warmer. Tying a half-witted theory into a popular buzzword doesn't validate it at all.
The only reason someone would open windows is if they don't have AC, or if it is any other season besides Summer. If you don't have AC, your house can heat up like a car, getting up to 150 degrees or more. Its best to deal with 110 or 115 than it is to cook at 150 without realizing it.
@peaches - Would you please enlighten us, as to why you believe the power will be shut down for days, putting into motion the apocalypse?
It will not be the "apocalypse", it will not even start with the drama of 2012.
Maybe there will be a natural cause, like a flare from the sun. More likely it will be human error, a programing mistake or a technological cause. It will begin subtle, power just goes off no alarms no mayhem; maybe the southwest possibly just Vegas.
People do not remember the last regional power outage in the 90's. It took only a few hours to overcome that one. But when 60 hertz is 90 hertz and the interstate transformers fry in mass and replacements are months away....
During the summer months Vegas lives in a 3 day window. Water, fuel, even food but make no mistake food will be the least of our worries without water.
Electricity, power transmission and distribution are all connected, like your central nervous system and all it takes is for a bug, a blip, a spider bite to cause the whole system to shut down.
Like I said, maybe today, maybe years from today but like everything man makes the power system is less than perfect. Yet we humans, living in the desert, with air conditioning and running water bet our lives on just one thing, electricity.
As the article makes clear, people lived in Las Vegas before A/C; the Paiutes moved to Mt Charleston every summer. The hardy new settlers survived and built a modern city, making it easy for the soft-in-the-middle masses to move here. Currently, we have 250,000 more residents than we can sustain financially, and probably 1 million more than we should have ecologically. If a (temporary) "electricity apocalypse" happens, maybe it will shake out some of that overrun.
Good observation James.
The key word is "temporary"; days, weeks or months. Truth is with in a few days fuel and water would begin to arrive by truck. And the mass exodus would occur.
@peaches
You are truly showing your ignorance of infrastructure.
First off, Water Pressure isn't generated by electric pumps. It's basic physics that still dates back to before the Roman Empire. Water Towers & Tanks hold extra water, and it is the weight of that water pressing down that generates hydraulic pressure that forces the flow out of your faucet. Electric pumps run at a continuous, slow rate so that when consumption dramatically drops off at night, the tanks replenish what is lost. And at no time are they ever in danger of going dry within a single, or even a few days.
Further more your basic, most important infrastructure ALWAYS has generator backup. Be it Natural Gas, or Diesel fueled. Water processing & Treatment Facilities, let alone all hospitals and law enforcement and government services, let alone your local utilities all run back up generators.
If there was a massive power outage like many other cities have experied in the summertime, all that would happen is Cooling Centers with Air Conditioning, Fluid, and Medical Resources would simply be made available to every one. Big Deal.
Oh, and to also answer your question about fuel, Las Vegas is served by numerous pipelines that supply Natural Gas, Gasoline, Diesel, and Jet Fuel that are already pumped here from other states. And guess what? They too have generator back up. That's why US-95 & I-15 are not clogged to the gills with Tanker Trucks already. Decades ago the infrastructure was installed. We also have reserve storage tanks that also collect the fuel to serve our consumption as well in case the pipelines get shut down. And it has happened before due to maintenance and even problems. And yet gas stations didn't shut down, did they?
As for EMI, I don't think that you even grasp how that works. Even in the summertime in the heat of the day, electrical transformers regularly start to over head from the load placed onto them. Which is exactly why our Power Grid is designed to constantly re-route power to shut of circuits in order to allow equipment to cool down. Not to mention the "Dead Man's Hand" that shuts things down to prevent damage from equipment being left on. And even if all the computers suddenly locked up, a quick reboot of the servers, and a staged restarting of the equipment would bring everything back online within no time.
As for the big outage back in the 90's, I remember it very well. All the neighbors gathered around and played cards in the garage and we joked until the power came back on. We didn't immediately don body armor made from used tires, and drive up and down the roads killing people for food and fuel. Grow up. Your ideas sound like a really bad script that was conceived on a laptop after a couple of mocha frappuchinos and an entire day leaching bandwidth in the corner of some coffee house.
I think peaches has watched a little bit too much James Burke. He even sounds like him. lol
watch a clip of the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSxL8GUn...
Plus if you all like the article, you might be interested in checking out Marshall McLuhan's work. Even better stuff about how life changes because of technology.
Artfully presented, DMCVegas.
From the peach yogurt dressing on the salad all the way to the peach pie, I couldn't a slurped one smoother or with such a frappe splendor.
Especially enjoyed the coffeeshop scene. Thanks for your factual display of myth -popping acumen on things real and physical. We needed that!
In January, 2011, Nevada begins energy audits as part of Real Estate transfer.
We will discover stuff like:
* 32% of our homes have significant duct leakage (we pay to cool it and then blow it through holes in the ducts and start over with fresh outside 100+ degree air)
* Whole-house pressure diagnostics means better indoor air quality, lower bills, pin-pointed energy retrofits and
* JOBS for: carpenters, Insulators, window folks, electricians, energy auditors and energy-raters, HVAC specialists, lenders aware of Energy Efficient Mortgages, etc.
Not to worry.
An energy audit can help sellers because:
* IF they have an energy efficient house to sell, this is the chance to showcase all its features and resulting low-costs of operation and maintenance, warranties, etc. Buyers can get En. Eff. Mortgage!
* If audit shows weaknesses, it also shows costs and savings and buyer can remedy shortfalls and roll the cost into Energy Upgrade Mortgage.
Energy audits help buyers because:
* They know what they're getting into before it gets into them!
* Building performance, efficiency and comfort are quantifiable, measurable factors that have huge impact of quality of life. Look before ya leap!
This law was enacted 07 as if they could foresee a busted well-head in the gulf. As if energy mattered.
PS. Plaudits for "placelessness.'
Superb article. You had me from dynamite.
Get an audit for special spatial perspectives with energy in your eyes.
And a fixed gaze on a shelter to call home.
DMC.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Vegas gets 95% of it's gas, jet fuel and diesel from the one and only pipeline (two pipes side by side) owned by Kinder Morgan that pipeline brings it in from So Cal. Their tank farm in NLV usually has two to three days of storage capacity, but at times it is zero.
Vegas does get natural gas from two pipelines but that is not significant because if there is no water to boil so what about more heat.
Water pressure, you amaze me. All our water is pumped up hill from Lake Mead and or a few wells. The water tank capacity is two days typical usage, thus the order to stop "outside" watering and that would buy Vegas a little time in specific areas of the valley.
But all of this depends on the day of the week and the time of day. You see the water tank system is drawn down during the day and refilled during night when electric prices are less, so an outage beginning, say late in the day on July 5th would be a real problem since all the water and fuel tanks would be depleted.
As for your back up generation argument. Yes a few buildings have diesel generators, and some even have 24 hours of fuel on site. Casinos, like most buildings, back up gen-sets are only for emergency circuits and do not have the output to run central plants thus air conditioning.
I lived in Detroit in 2004 when much of the Midwest and Northeast lost power for three to four days. There was NO water pressure in most of the city. There were no backup generators in most businesses.
Only a handful of gas stations could pump gas. Nearly all business shut down, the few that were open could only take cash for payment. No ATM's were working. Credit cards were worthless. If you were low on gas in your car and had no cash, you were out of luck.
I now have a thousand dollars cash hidden in my house in case it ever happens in Vegas. Without electricity, we become a cash and bartering society very quickly.
@ peaches
Wrong again. And when you ignore my talking points, I'll accept that as your concession that I'm right.
Even in 2004 when the pipelines that feed both Southern Nevada, as well as Arizona, were shut down, there was no metropolitan supply shortage in either place. As for your statement that the storage tanks are always on empty, such a great claim also needs great proof.
We also now have a Bio-Diesel refinery here as well that fuels the CCSD's School Bus fleet, but can always be re-appropriated for whatever the need may be.
Oh, and don't forget to cleverly ignore the fact that we still have a Natural Gas pipeline that feeds in from the North side of the valley too, on the complete opposite end.
As for water, while Lake Mead is in fact at a lower elevation than the entire Las Vegas Valley, the pumps that bring the water up do NOT create the line pressure that forces the flow of water. The water is pumped into storage tanks that in turn create the hydraulic pressure in the lines solely by their own weight. This is what water towers do, and the water storage tanks around town accomplish. So no, if the pumps turn off, we are not going to suddenly lose all of our water. And Water Towers and tanks don't refill at night because the electricity prices are cheaper! It's because water consumption drops significantly at night, thus supply exceeds demand. The tanks fill constantly.
Furthermore, Las Vegas is spanish for "The Meadows", due to the natural springs that provided life in the area where the Las Vegas Springs Preserve currently is. Which is also convenient because on that site, as well as around town, especially in North Las Vegas, there are several aquifers that also are tapped into in order to supply us water. Even the Bellagio has a well left over from the Dunes that it taps into to help fill the lake out front. So we do get water from other places as well, and if the LVVWD wins in court, Northern Nevada soon too, and that'll probably be a gravity feed using siphon pressure like William Mulholland devised that doesn't even use any pumps at all.
And yes, the back up Generator systems for Casinos also power their HVAC and related systems. If they didn't, people in the towers and casino would die from suffocation.
There is nothing that could permanently disable our power grid, as well as rupture our pipes or whatever else you can manage to think of and make it happen all at once, let alone at all. If by some chance there was enough of an EMI discharge to reset computers, it would only be temporary. Even so the only reason we get interference from sunspots is because satellites are positioned 22,000 miles above earth. Far above our own atmosphere that blocks out most radiation. Even so it's just radio interference, the electronic equipment doesn't cease operation. For the type of EMI discharge you're talking about, we would need a nuclear detonation. And the blast would do more damage than EMI could ever.
Grow up.
Good grief!!!
STILL the doubting Thomas's on climate change.
Did you genius's even read the article?
WHO CARES how much of climate change/global warming is man made, and how much is naturally occuring. If we're gonna FRY OR FREEZE, ought we not take a crack at MODERATING the situation???
Al Gore aside, deniers be damned, it's pretty well accepted science, kids.
DMC what a tool.
I tell you what the Bio diesel facility in NLV has been shut down since 2008. In fact the same biodiesel facility is the one that got involved with Ensign and his "friends with benefits" deal, google, P2SA and/or Greg Paulk. Live and learn you simpleton.
Sorry no bio diesel and frankly that is one story I am the expert.
As for water pressure, ever siphon gas as a kid? Seems you just kept sucking because you forgot to put (or went to school in vegas and never learned) to put the hose lower than the tank! LOL! (just to make it understandable for DMC lower than than the lake).
Now I respect your expertise as a current or former disaster management engineer for BP's deep rig drilling operations....but my like not so much friend you are out of your league here!
@ nightmare
You're talking about Detroit: A place that doesn't even have money to keep schools open, and is practically a 3rd world country in itself, yet you expect them to have cash enough to have the equipment in place to handle a power outage?
Besides that, you don't have to be a Mormon to keep a fully stocked pantry and house full of food. Never mind a power outage, there are plenty of reasons you might be stuck at home. And keeping cash on hand in a safe is something that EVERYONE should always do anyways!
Most important of all you seem to have "survived" alright. I mean I don't know how since only SOME of the gas stations could pump gas, and after all I don't know if food ran out and Detroit fell into cannibalism for a couple of days... But I'm willing to bet that the biggest *disaster* that any one encountered was a lack of convenience for a brief period of time.
If a person can't get through that, then I just don't know how they're able to even cope with life as a whole.
Right now, today the power goes out. It is hot and getting hotter. Come on folks, first you deal with the heat. ok in your garage with the neighbors.
But then what, it is hot and getting hotter! You have water but what if?
Right now, today if the power goes out. What is it like in the morning? What is is like tomorrow at this same time? Do not be stupid! You know what happens!
Detroit and NY existed long before "air conditioning".
DMZ or C? is a tool!
I am truly sorry that the posts on this subject appear to have gotten off track. Having studied vernacular housing and communities in the arid desert for years, I can say that much of what Ms. Goldman wrote is correct. In particular, the courtyard style home, with its cooler courtyard microclimate along with earth construction to moderate temperature changes has been used for centuries in arid climates much hotter than Las Vegas. Those interested may want to study the works of Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian Architect at the following web link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Fath...
Where Ms. Goldman is on shaky ground is the idea that human caused carbon dioxide is a major factor in climate change. Far too many questions as to the validly of that, can we even say, science? Now, in the southwest the concepts of New Urbanism can work, if we include the age old idea of pedestrian malls similar to a Bazaar and the idea that public walk ways be provided well ventilated shade when ever possible. So many ideas, that don't include the use of energy exist, that would make urban living in the arid desert comfortable. For those who follow the link, enjoy!
lemahj, what you said regarding overtaxing the condenser, compressor, etc. is true if you run the thing all day long. However, I can close the vents in unused rooms and run it for 20 minutes and cool the areas we are living in which will stay cool for several hours. 20 minutes is not enough time for all of those ill affects you speak of to occur.
Fortunately in Bakersfield, It still drops below 80 at night, nice cool breeze to take advantage of. I once lived in Phoenix, I know all about not cooling at night, still over 100 at 1 a.m.
I agree that you don't want to run the unit for sustained times while several vents are closed.
Also, for others who commented, once it is over say, 105, the short burst doesn't apply. then it's cool the place down and pay (but we still never run it overnight).
The one thing some people do wrong is to close up all the windows before turning it on. If you turn it on, wait a few minutes then close the windows, it will give it a chance to blow out the hot air. (Try it in your car, get in, roll all the windows down, turn on the A.C. and then close the windows after just a minute. It cools down 20-30 degrees in that minute so the A/C doesn't have to work as hard).
Visitor.....112 degrees at Lake Mead last week was beautiful....Water was very cool...I was always wondering if anyone in Vegas doesn't have AC. Let me know how you stay cool without AC. I was amazed how hot 107 degrees felt.
I found this article to be an exaggeration from beginning to end, peppered with occasional truths so you could tie your agenda and exploit your political views.
No matter most people are too dumb or too disinterested to bother to investigate and find out facts for themselves.
If there was any balance in your story you might mention that much of our power comes from hydro sources which produce zero carbon pollution, you fail to mention that although we suffer a few months out of the year most people can get my with little to no heat 6-8 months of the year while your beloved easterners consume huge amounts of fuel, carbon creating fuel, far more than western areas consume in our hot months.
And although I agree that a/c helped build LV as a 5th generation native I for one would welcome a return to the old version, the oasis of farms and ranches, orchards and trees, all naturally along the surface above the natural aquifers, properly spread out. The heat island effect meant nothing to them. Most of your descriptions at the beginning of the article only happened far into the 20th century. And suburban sprawl? You mean the parts of the city that stretch out and plant trees bring oxygen and cooling the area, it's the urban dwellers you generate most of the heat, not the suburbs which have been proven to cool some of the cities heat.
Bakersfeild, we are on the same page when you describe what amounts to a hot pull down of an air conditioning system . . . i.e. using the AC unit to cool a room from 85 plus degrees Fahrenheit to about 75 degrees Fahrenheit over about 20 minutes. Because the air of that room is hotter than normal, the evaporator is loaded properly, in particular when the air flow across the evaporator is reduced. Your comments about a hot pull down in a car are also spot on. When I turn on a AC unit in a hot car, I also open the windows and put the fan at low speed for the first several minutes. After the air inside of the car begins to cool, the windows go up, and the fan goes to a higher speed. It is ironic, that this method actually cools the car more quickly, as opposed to just letting the fan run at high.
Wow, this is way too dramatic. I love how the news makes people insane. Instead of planning for the end of the world, why don't we all just turn our air up 3 degrees. The collective effort will help the grid and we can live our daily lives instead of daydreaming of a blockbuster movie disaster. Air conditioners are 100 times more efficient then they were 30 years ago.
I just love all the A/C experts on here,maybe thats why there is such high turnover with techs in this town
Can you say LATENCY
Can you say short cycling
Can you say a/c displaces warm air,therefore creating false cooling environment
an a/c blowing cold air is only relative to the stagnant air youre replacing
you see warm air rises,,and cold air drops,thereby creating a stratified layer of air,which depending on the vaporization,and /or heat latency,you will feel the effects,and therefore satisfy your T-Stat setting.
just kidding,thank god san diego is only 4 hours away on the weekends,,after the marine layer burns off,its only about 75-80 there
i have to go to work now,you see i work on top of the mgm,and have some 60 ton filters,and change the percentage settings on the economizers,because who wants to draw all that 100 degree air in right service guys?
peace out
lemahj, Thanks, trust me, I learned from what you had to say. I'm old enough to remember going to a school without A.C. Now they have A.C. and if it's over 95 outside, they send the kids home early because of the heat. Regarding the car, what you and I both said, added to the fact that the first block or 2 you move with the windows down will do wonders to suck the hot air out of the car so the A/C can take effect much quicker. It is amazing how many people haven't figured that out, just jump in, close the door quickly and full blast ahead, cooling the 130 degree car of with only A/C. Thanks for the info.
That's it dipstick. Way to go.
Hoy dia es un buen dia, 100 grados al sombre.
Hoy dia es muy caliente. Tienes tiempo para una siesta tambien?
Saludos,
Banana_Joe
Psst...anybody wanna buy some water? Water here ! Clean, cool fresh Great Lakes drinking water hear, the best on Earth...
Brought straight in from my connections back in Chicago.
I would like to commend Peaches and DMC for their words on this subject. Peaches got me a bit worried at first, then DMC got my logical side in order. I am siding with DMC on this issue. Las Vegas is not just a few days away from some sort of "Mad Max" / "Road Warrior" existence. Come on now. Maybe Peaches has watched that "Life After People" show too many times?
What is interesting is that Peaches point of view is very similiar to the hysteria created in the 1970's with the over population scare and the global cooling/ice age nonsense.
In both of those issues, very educated people claimed the end of the earth was upon us because of human behavior and destruction of the environment.
Peaches reminded me so much of the rantings of a college professor I had years ago in a class called "Population and the Environment." In this class the professor predicted massive worldwide starvation by 2010 with half the world's population wiped out by 2020.
lemahj,
I thank you for your link and always liked your attitude. Way to be.