this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Mildly Interesting
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I had a crazy thought. What if you used depressurization to cool interiors?
Not as in depressurize the room and potentially kill the people inside, but in a way similar to soundproofing where you create an airtight gap in your walls, depressurize it to create a partial vacuum and effectively restrict both heat and sound transfer. That way it would be much easier to control internal temperature.
The only two problems I can see with it is expense (pumping air out of the gaps between your walls could be pricey), and the potential of explosive repressurization if something were to break the wall.
Wall isolation is pretty fine as it is, main weaknesses are windows and thermal bridging.
We still have the issue that a perfectly isolated house will need to lose the heat created by humans and electric systems, so actual cooling is required.
And how do you get fresh air in? Also the problem of heat transfer is never by gaps in the walls, at least not for buildings in western and central Europe. The problem is heat conduction through the window panes. And that is with isolated windows already. Also it is impossible to get a brick wall air tight. Leave alone you create a great environment for water to leak in and damage everything.
A building needs to be able to "breathe" in order to get rid of the humidity that is generated inside.
I would not explode, it would implode.