Ancient Iranian Air Conditioning
Ancient Iran had air conditioning - Lemmy.world
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Absolutely. Lots of societies have used passive heating and cooling systems, well-suited to local climates. And we could learn a lot from them to help decrease our energy use.
There's a lot of places you can build (partially) underground to take advantage of relatively stable ground temperature and natural insulation, too. Ain't just fictional hobbits that lived in holes in the ground.
This works fine in low humidity environments (deserts), but not in humid environments where the water cannot evaporate to absorb heat from air. And humid, hot environments are the most dangerous (see wet bulb temperature).
There are plenty of tutorials that explain and teach to build a swamp cooler—basically, all you need is a bucket with lid, a fan, wadding and water.
When a wind tower is integrated with a quanat system, it works even in humid.
The key is drawing in air through underground passages - either irrigation channels or just cellars. The ground acts as a cold store (heat sink), cooling incoming air before it enters the house.
The tower + wind catcher has no thermal role - it must simply create low pressure and keep the draft going.
Then it's not really a swamp cooler, but using the soil/rock as a giant heatsink to conduct heat from the air. That heat of course will warm up the rock over time reducing efficiency, but this could be countered by letting water flow through these channels. Giving a hybrid between evaporative/swamp cooling and heatsink. I'm sure some physicist who knows thermodynamics could elaborate further how well such a system would work.
