Yakhchāl - off grid A/C and refrigeration (for the off grid folks)

For the off grid folks who want A/C or refrigeration, look at this design:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l

Should work well with permaculture schema's too.

Interesting design, thanks for sharing that!  Being an evaporative cooler, I wonder if it would it still work in a humid climate?

Artie Scott wrote:Interesting design, thanks for sharing that!  Being an evaporative cooler, I wonder if it would it still work in a humid climate?

You're welcome!

Kind of surprised that they do not have a permanent thread for off gridders. Off grid usually would mean using permaculture for sustenance.

From the story I read, it uses wind to draw air from a water tunnel underground. That air is obviously much cooler than the humid hot air. Sort of like drawing air across cold water. The cold should remove much of the excess humidity.

There was a similar one I saw a long while back that used a similar principle and the walls got so cold they had frost on them. Wish I could find it again.

Stately homes in England often had ice houses, u derground strucures with double airlocks and domes rooves. When the lake froze over in the winter, the staff would club the ice and drag the ice out with hooks and boats, then send it down a chute into the ice house. Branches were laid across the bottom to aid drainage. There would often be ice left when the next freeze came.

Wow, this looks like great ancient cooling technology, thanks for posting! In these days of global warming, not a bad thing to pay attention to.

While reading the Wikipedia article, I got curious about this material they talked about, called sarooj, to line the entire inside of these enormous ice pits.

The yakhchāl is built of a unique water resistant mortar called sarooj, composed of sand, clay, egg whites, lime, goat hair, and ash in specific proportions, that is resistant to heat transfer and is thought to be completely water impenetrable

And I thought, wow, that is a substance that deserves playing around with!!

If anyone wants to see how to make it, I found a video in Turkish with English subtitles, but they are making the "traditional Iranian" recipe, sans egg whites.

Just gotta love those ancient peoples.

They figured all that out without a modern computer and electricity too.

Yeah, and without using any of the toxic gick and unsustainable hydrocarbons that seems to be in "modern"... everything.

It seems like the "official" opinion to have is that we live way better than anyone ever did in history. But the more I see the ingenious stuff that many people way back when came up with, the more I think we have a lot to learn.

I mean, to think that in Ancient Persia, they basically had air conditioning and got to eat snow cones... (shave ice for you Hawaiians!)...