I live in Tampa, Florida so no matter what materials, design specs that home I live in is constructed with, having no AC is brutal from April to October...
One of the main reasons Florida was lightly populated before the advent of AC and became a winter vacation state is the summers are simply too hot and humid....
One of the main reasons Florida was lightly populated before the advent of AC and became a winter vacation state is the summers are simply too hot and humid.... Read an interesting article that it was NOT Sam Colt that tamed the West, but the Carrier brothers. Very enlightening.
Yeah, Eastern South Carolina is not that different from Florida and you can’t build anything that totally solves the problem for sure but there are ways to build that make it far less miserable than a modern home is when the a/c breaks down. People knew these things thousands of years ago but once a/c came around it didn’t seem worth the bother. Even the old wood frame houses that used to be built on many farms made it far more bearable than today’s houses are without a/c. They had high ceilings, a “breezeway” oriented East to West which was a hallway with a door on each end, in the summer the screen door was closed to keep out insects and the main door left open. Other rooms opened off the breezeway and windows were left open in hot weather with screens over them. The roof overhang was sufficient to shade the windows from direct sun and the layout allowed any breeze that blew to pass down the breezeway and pull air in through the windows. There were porches on the East and North side and maybe the South side as well. The kitchen was often in a separate building to keep the heat away from the rest of the house and to prevent kitchen fires from burning the entire house down.
A house with eight foot ceilings, insulated walls, little or no roof overhang, no porches and no shade trees that are large enough to really help is a death trap without a/c, you are much better off on the ground outside under a shade tree if you can keep the bugs off. Modern conveniences are great until a disaster happens and then, until they are restored, people may be vastly worse off than if they had never had them. People sometimes comment on how no one uses a front porch the way that they used to, the real reason people used to sit on the porch so much was that it was cooler than being in the house, especially when there was a sudden rain, you could go out on the porch and it was like going from a sauna into a refrigerator when a downpour started.