Adrian Andronache

Jason Manning wrote:
It might be better to investigate using an insulated outer wall that using water cooled by buried water pipes to cool the inner walls and floors?...

Yes. Insulate the house (even with natural materials like straw, but in humid climate may be damaged quickly) and cool the interior walls with water pipes from the water table. If is 26-28 celsius, will be better than 40, for sure. The pipes need to be spaced apart with a distance wich is a bit difficult to calculate because depends with: temperature differences, insulation thickness and transfer coefficient, walls thickness and thermal transfer coefficient...

As an example, I did this in the past and got 1 meter apart for 1 inch poly pipes running through 15cm concrete walls (very good conductor of heat) insulated with 80cm of straw bales, in winter; pipes water is 28 celsius (used for heating), internal room temp is 24 and outside is minus ten.

Jason Manning wrote:....... In my (limited) defense I do live in Thailand and endure 40 degree temperatures for much of the year.
..........A young designer designed passive fridges for use in rural Africa, using a twin skinned container with the cavity filled with saturated sand. The fridges are put out in the sun and the water is allowed to evaporate through holes in the outside skin, cooling the inner chamber......

These are working with limitation: Need dry and windy air to work.
In Thailand I'm pretty sure that the air is not dry but very humid, am I right?
If the dry and windy condition is got, these can get cooled down with 6-7 Celsius below environment. Not really cool in your 40 deg...  but may be helpful if the "dry and windy" conditions both are satisfied...

Just another idea:

In short, i am starting building my house this year. Romania, Transilvania, in the mountains, around 750 meters altitude. Quite cold, a very long winter.
My heating energy source will be a bioreactor made using the ideas (with some modifications) of a scientist published in this site: http://mb-soft.com/public3/globalzo.html


The composter will be in the basement. Toilet and kitchen waste will go directly to the composter. Every mid-winter day I will need around 15-20 kilograms of dry material to "burn" in the composter (dry straw, dry hay, dry leaves.) (House is extremely insulated, 80 cm of straw bale thickness, and will need very little thermal energy, some 36kWh/day in the mid-winter). The additional urine and "humanure" will be a small added quantity over this, and will easily absorb the three-four liters of water produced by two persons per day plus some additional running water. (Normally the initial dry organic material need to have at least 40-60% added water for "reaction" to work).
Even in summer the composter will still run every day, to produce heated water for showers and domestic use. Adding 10-15 kilos of dry organic material to it every day will not be a problem.

Hello, friends,

I made this account specially to reply to this thread
I'm from Romania, but i have lot of experience with CFL-s. I work as electrician for a france-nigerian joint venture.

Yes, they are not as good as the claims are.
But still are some brands who make good quality - not perfect, because these CFL-s are simply too new to be perfect.
It was already shown up in this thread that the lifespan is decreased by the number of switching's.
The lifespan for an Osram reached 20000 switching's for a 24W model 3U, warm white, and have a life expectancy of 10000 hours; They are really try to do these things better. On the other way, Philips were dissapointing me - the last batches of CFL's didn't last more than 2 years in places where the time per day was approx 4 hours and 4 switching operations per day

The light is 4 times more than incandescent for the first half life of the product, and than decrease to three times, slowly till the end of life.
As it was specified in a post previously, the life span declared is an average half-life, like that what is used for measuring the decay of radioactive isothopes. That is, if you have 100 bulbs or CFL-s rated for 5000 hours, after 5000 hours will be 50 bulbs alive; and should be 25 after 10000 hours - but here this ratio is really not so applicable....

The switching process remove material from the cathodes - this will short the life span. Osram simply put more matherial on their cathodes, this made bulbs to have a life longer.
The heat destroy the electrolytic capacitors inside the bulb. As an average capacitor is rated to survive 2000 hours at 105 degree celsius, if is good quality - or 85 degree for other cheaper family of capacitors. But also heat will reduce the lifespan of semiconductors, by electromigration and difussion of connection materials inside the lattice of semiconductor.
Osram made a good product.

Well, now about new tendencies.

Cree, a big LED manufacturer, have worked on the LED issues, and after a few years of improvement and finally just arrived with something good and cheap as dirt (for me, really that's cheap - and i'm not a rich man):
Check these on google: CXA-2011 and XM-L family - if you want to build LED lamps, try these, but choose the warm white - for me, cold is simply too actinic and nasty.

I've tried one CXA-2011 on a processor heatsink, it's very easy to mount; supplied by a special current supply - not VOLTAGE supply; a current supply will simply deliver a constant current regardless of voltage absorbed by the load
well, it was a 40....50V at fix 1 Ampere power supply; the light amount is simply amazing, is approaching that of a 300 W HALOGEN LINEAR BULB. it was not exactly that amount, but close; i can approximate it as a 200W equivalent halogen. I know the eye is logarithmic, i worked years as photographer when i was young.

Ok, CFL-Era is simply come to the end - now it's the time for LED's

Greetings,
Adrian