In the garden, and RAIN!!!!
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, December 25, 2025 04:27
VIEWED: 1005090
PAGE 219 of 1154
Suppose to rain today. But pretty bright right now.
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It got down to 77 before I closed the windows for the day. 
Starting the process of going through and organizing all of my tools so I can take an inventory and hopefully find those missing countersink parts. Won't be painting or mowing the lawn with all the rain we've had so far.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Basement is supposed to hold around 55 degrees. Unless it is exposed, not in dirt, the ground.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
78 degrees on the 2nd floor as I write this.
So... I didn't quite get down to an equal temperature outside. The low last night was 74 degrees a few hours ago, but only for that hour. Right now it's around 76 degrees. It might be impossible to get it completely even without any actual cooling forces at work. You've got to figure that there are heated up areas, particularly in the shell of the house that's exposed to the sun all day long, that are just not going to have all of the airflow necessary to cool off completely in the time between sundown and sun up.
Seeing a temp in the 70's is still amazing though, given how hot it was yesterday and how it didn't drop that low last night. I do believe that the next few days will be entirely manageable without A/C, even if they aren't 100% comfortable.
I actually woke up at some point in the middle of the night and with the box fan on me I was so chilly I had to pull up my blanket!
It was 85 degrees on the second floor at around 9:30PM when I first turned it on for the whole night. By that time, since I had already run it about 20 minutes earlier, the attic was already much cooler than it normally would have gotten until around 4:00AM. I figure that compared to my average night here without the new system in place, I got an extra 4 degrees of cooling on that 2nd floor thermostat than I would have in the livable space. The attic is just as cool now, which never happens. It's unknown how much effect this will have though.
My hope is, that overall, the temperature on the 2nd floor thermostat doesn't go over 83 today with the windows closed, even though it will get to 94 outside. Fingers crossed.
...
I would have already shut it off now, but we're having a thunderstorm and the humidity is plunging a bit in the next 1 1/2 or so. Maybe I can get a little of that drier air in the house before I button it up for the day.
Next 3 days will be the real test. High of 94, Low of 79. High of 98, low of 79. High of 93, low of 73.
After that, the highs all seem to be in the 80's with the lows in the 60s. I won't count on that until it happens though.
Oh... and the house has probably never smelled so nice. I'd imagine that there were parts of the house that haven't seen much if any airflow in decades that got all that fresh cool air.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
That IS your A/C, I'm thinking geothermal is the term, but I might be wrong there.
If you get your attic down to mid 70's, then 2nd floor should be up to 10 degrees cooler, and 1st floor another 10 degrees cooler. That runs out of scale on the thermometer, so it's likely closer to 75, 68, 61, 55. But you suck in humidity from outside, middle of the night.
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Little tired. Emptied some more boxes.
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SIX, that's great news about the attic fan! What you've done is install a "whole house fan" which does a great job pulling cool air from the outside and venting hot air out the top! One of these days I'm going to try something similar. Yes, we have AC and solar but the attic must be about 130 F up there during the day, and for sure it heats the ceiling and just radiates heat into the house. I'm really glad you got that figured out because I read somewhere that you're going thru a heat wave about now, right?
Quote:I stumbled on that a bit too, but was too busy to figure it out. Bleach is sodium hypochlorite IIRC NaClO. (sodium, chlorine, and oxygen) Ammonia is NH3 - nitrogen, hydrogen. Cyanide is HCN - hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen. You can't make cyanide out of bleach and ammonia because cyanide contains something that neither one contains (carbon). Since there's no source of carbon with the starting ingredients, cyanide can't be created.
You are trying to create cyanide by mixing bleach and ammonia.
*****
Hubby, dear daughter and I moved most of our big stuff back into the newly-painted, re-windowed bedroom and newly-cleaned bathroom. I bought some new shower fixtures for hubby ... he's been looking for that feeling of standing in a warm rain since whenever ... and fortunately the shower head and wand turned out exactly right. We unearthed a "Purple" mattress that I bought a while back ... we have both been looking for a mattress that we can BOTH sleep on and not wake up with an aching back (not enough support) and sore shoulders and hips (too hard), and so far this mattress works for both of us.
The next thing to do is move some metal shelving from the garage to the spot in the hallway and set it up as our "mud room" - not that we have a lot of mud, but a place to hang keys, sun hat, dog leash, umbrellas and to set down purse, grocery bags, shoes, outgoing mail etc. It'll be great to have that all in one spot.
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Did a little more. Ow!
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Basement is supposed to hold around 55 degrees. Unless it is exposed, not in dirt, the ground.
It's exposed, completely. Tri-level layout. Half of the house is a 2.5 foot tall dirt crawl space with a vapor barrier. It's definately cooler down there, but after a few days with temps near 100 degrees there's no way it's 55 degrees.
Quote:
That IS your A/C, I'm thinking geothermal is the term, but I might be wrong there.
Until yesterday, that's the only thing I had. And it didn't work good because of the tri-level layout.
Quote:
If you get your attic down to mid 70's, then 2nd floor should be up to 10 degrees cooler, and 1st floor another 10 degrees cooler. That runs out of scale on the thermometer, so it's likely closer to 75, 68, 61, 55. But you suck in humidity from outside, middle of the night.
I don't think you can go by anything with a typical house layout for a tri-level layout. Especially since the previous owners did things like put up drywall and carpet in the attic space to make it "livable" and there's hardly any insulation as a result.
Thermostat is on the 2nd floor at the top of the stairs. It read 78 degrees this morning, and the attic felt the same temperature until the sun came out in the afternoon.
I don't have thermometers up anywhere except for the thermostat since I can't find the one I was using during the winter after getting rid of a lot of stuff and moving stuff around. I need to find it.
But I'd guess at around 9AM when I closed the windows up it was 80 in the attic, 78 on the 2nd floor, 72 on the first floor and 66 in the basement.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, that's great news about the attic fan! What you've done is install a "whole house fan" which does a great job pulling cool air from the outside and venting hot air out the top! One of these days I'm going to try something similar. Yes, we have AC and solar but the attic must be about 130 F up there during the day, and for sure it heats the ceiling and just radiates heat into the house. I'm really glad you got that figured out because I read somewhere that you're going thru a heat wave about now, right?
Yeah. Pretty bad heat wave for a few more days. I think the high today was only around 90 because of the thunderstorm but the heat index reached over 100 degrees. 96 tomorrow and 98 on Saturday before it cools off again.
I was really looking forward to using it again tonight, but I don't think it would make any sense really. Last night did so well getting the temps down that even after being heated all day the house is still relitevly comfortable. It's even not half bad in the attic. So until 2 hours from now, the temperature outside isn't going to even be lower than what I'm reading on the first floor currently (81 degrees), and it's only dropping to 79 for an hour or two early this morning before rising again.
Other than just moving the air around, I don't think I'd be accomplishing anything tonight other than wasting energy and possibly bringing in more humidity than is already in the house.
So that leaves me starting tomorrow morning off 4 degrees warmer than I did this morning.
Not the end of the world though. Since the attic was cooled and never got super hot today, the total rise in temp was less than it usually would have been, on top of the fact that I was able to cool it in the living space about 5 degrees more than I would have without the fan. Starting the morning off at 81 isn't bad considering it would probably have been closer to 88 to 90 degrees in the house right now and probably would have only dropped to around 86 to 87 before I had to close them in the morning.
Temps look to be around the same tomorrow night, but I probably will have the fan on at least half of the night though since I will probably end up being around 86 to 87 by the end of the day tomorrow night.
I highly recommend a whole house fan. Especially if you can afford to have a professional do it that really knows what they're doing. I really just half-assed it here with very little knowledge and spare parts I had out in my garage. It's amazing. It's probably not super cost effective though the way I've got it set up. If you had a real pro job done you could probably have the same results by only needing to have the fan do the work during the cooliest 2 or so hours in the early morning instead of leaving a 20-30 year old furnace blower motor running for 11 hours straight.
Quote:
Hubby, dear daughter and I moved most of our big stuff back into the newly-painted, re-windowed bedroom and newly-cleaned bathroom. I bought some new shower fixtures for hubby ... he's been looking for that feeling of standing in a warm rain since whenever ... and fortunately the shower head and wand turned out exactly right. We unearthed a "Purple" mattress that I bought a while back ... we have both been looking for a mattress that we can BOTH sleep on and not wake up with an aching back (not enough support) and sore shoulders and hips (too hard), and so far this mattress works for both of us.
The next thing to do is move some metal shelving from the garage to the spot in the hallway and set it up as our "mud room" - not that we have a lot of mud, but a place to hang keys, sun hat, dog leash, umbrellas and to set down purse, grocery bags, shoes, outgoing mail etc. It'll be great to have that all in one spot.
Good to hear. It's nice when you start making your house work for you.
Bet you're kicking yourself for not doing
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Yuck...
It's 82 upstairs right now... It shouldn't be going up when the sun's been down for 4 hours already.
Thought about opening up the windows now and turning it back on just to get the airflow going, since weather.com says it's only 81 outside. But it also says it feels like 90 and they're not kidding with that humidity. I just stepped outside and it's like a sauna out there.
It's actually cooler in my attic right now than it is outside at 1AM.
The lowest "feels like" temp all night is 3 degrees warmer than it is on my 2nd floor right now.
Pretty safe to say the windows are staying closed until tomorrow night. I don't think I'll be needing the blanket again for a few nights.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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So, I have a lot of experience with heat and no AC. I know I get a lot of heat gain through the roof even though I have a 'cool roof' and it's helped quite a bit (I'd say ~15F cooler). But I also get a lot of heat gain through my sun-exposed south and west walls despite being well insulated. By around 3PM in summer, most of the west interior walls gets significantly warm to the touch. The exceptions are the west walls of the bathroom, and family room, which stay very nicely cool. And that's because a coast live oak (evergreen) tree
planted itself many years ago and is now a substantial source of wall shading. So shading the walls helps.
Some people here will take a porch roller shade, but instead of hanging it around a porch or patio
they'll hang it from an exterior wall overhang, to keep the sun off the walls. When I've seen it, it looks nice to me. A coworker did that with their house and said it helped the house stay cooler.
That's one of the things I'm going to work on soon, after I get the security/screen door installed on the side door, and the gopher out of my yard (which probably came off the wild hill across the street).
When it comes to daily heat cycles, even this far inland we often get an ocean breeze starting anywhere between 3PM and 6PM, for about an hour and a half. Sometimes it's earlier, sometimes later; sometimes cooler, sometimes not as cool; sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker; sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. Still, it cools the house down as long as it's breezing and the windows are open. But when it stops, the temperature inside the house can go up as much as 10F because the structure itself is really warm. And that heat radiates in from the ceiling and the walls. The other thing I've noticed, like in this last heat wave where temps were always above 95F and never below 75F, is that the structure builds heat day by day. So every day the house starts out warmer, and fails to cool down quite as well compared to the previous day.
At some point I'm going to have at least an attic fan installed, but I'm hoping to have a solar one with battery and thermostat, to avoid having to run wiring.
Many years ago, when I was the newbie kid on the block and all the old people (like in their 80's) had been here at least 4 decades before me, I asked one of them what they did in the days before AC. (I was hoping for tips on livability.) And she said with a laugh - 'we just moved slower'.
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