Well, today marks the official start of the air conditioning season.

Despite getting the roof on our house sprayed with a reflective paint, today we fired up the Blueway split inverter air conditioner in the living area of our house. Most of our Northern Hemisphere friends would probably be starting up their boilers or furnaces right about now, but not us.

Today hit 31C and about 60% humidity. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s certainly felt warm today. I remember when I used to live in Canada we would look forward to the days that it would hit 30C, heck, we were excited when it broke 25C if I remember correctly. I guess that things are a bit different living in the tropics.

We still have a few more things to do to the house to help to passively cool it. I prefer to run the air conditioner as little as possible, but it really does get unbearable here during the summer. Here are a few of the things that we are doing to passively cool the house:

• Roof insulation
• Louvers at the back to catch the breeze
• Window hoods (still to be installed)
• Screening all the windows so we can open them (still have one window in the living room to screen)
• Trees to shade the side of the house (we had to cut down a bunch that were hitting the power line and one that was rotted out, we need to replace those)

Unfortunately because our house is a traditional 1870’s minor’s cottage there are no overhangs on the roof on the sides of the house. This means that the sun is always on the side of the house heating up the walls. It would be great to extend the eves, but given everything else that we need to do I don’t think it is very practical to be considering that.