I was wrong about the timing and having discussed it with you before; it was Prophit & some others back then. My mistake.
If you do a search on "solar cookers" on PN, we had several threads on them at one time or another.
As far as "being into" things, I'm "into" anything that may help me keep my wife & kids alive if the dominoes collapse. Guns, primitive cooking, same concept in my little head.
Anyway, on the "cooling with fire" thing...
I have no idea where I came across it, but it was almost certainly the result of some primitive survival or passive-solar search.
I’ll try to describe it. For simplicity's sake, this is a one-fire setup I’m describing, but in the house I saw, it was repeated multiple times, to multiply the effect.
Picture a two-story sand-brick “house” in the desert; a square-shaped place. In it, picture a duct that runs from the bottom floor, up through both floors, ending in a roof chimney. In this case, the duct work was encased in the walls themselves; just open chases in the masonry walls. In the roof chimney, just below the outlet for the top end of the duct work, there’s a firebox with an access door; think normal wood stove-type firebox, with a short open chimney on top. Main difference is that once the fire is lit and the access door is closed, the only source of air for the fire is through the ductwork below, like a snorkel feeding air to the fire. The fire itself was gas in this example, iirc, but could be any fuel source.
Air inlet for the firebox's ductwork on the first floor is on the inside of the house, near the ceiling on the “sun” side. As the fire draws air to feed itself, it must pull air from this inlet, INSIDE the house. Open vents in the wall on the opposite (shade) side of the house, near ground level, allow replacement air into the house. Being low on the shade side, means this air is the coolest available naturally, and due to the draft or ‘suction’ of the fire feeding itself, it creates a breeze through the house, with this cooler air.
Not enough cool breeze? Turn up the fire. Too much cold breeze? Turn the fire down. Weird, huh...?
Also, since the ductwork is located within the wall(s), it acts to cool the wall itself as the air flows through it. So in addition to the cool-air breeze you feel, it also provides the secondary benefit of a reduction in temperature in the huge thermal mass of the masonry walls themselves. The duct work was run in an "S" shape through the walls, to maximize the length of the pathway.
There was also discussion of improving efficiency, by having the incoming air flow around or thru a water vessel or water pipes, to provide an evaporative-cooling effect. (Evaporative coolers create a mold problem in a lot of old homes in the USA, but probably not a mold concern in the desert.)
Even without the firebox, just the vertically-run duct in the warm wall should create some amount of draft by convection, by virtue of being warmed by the sun.
Hope that makes some kind of sense…….
