It occurs to me that if there was an easy way to remove an AC unit from a roof that construction companies would be a little less blase’ about putting them there. However once buildings get past a certain height you’d need a Sikorsky Sky Crane to make off with these babies and as you might imagine having a heavy lift helicopter hovering above your building is going to attract attention.
The bad thing about putting things on the outside of buildings is that you can’t insulate them. It’s rather like having your kidney hanging outside your body and saying ’sorry I don’t have the space for it inside’. However there are good reasons for having the functional organs of a building inside. Various studies have shown that putting the AC unit in a cool place increases its efficiency. It kinda makes sense doesn’t it? After all if you put a cooling unit in the hottest part of the building such as say, on the bare concrete roof roof beneath a blazing Tokyo sun, it’s easy to see how it will have a hard time cooling anything when you could fry an egg on it’s blistering surface. On the other hand it would make the perfect location for a barbecue. How do you like your AC unit, well done perhaps?
AC units and the infrastructure to support them, the pipes, mounting brackets, control equipment, wiring etc costs a small fortune but you’d figure in Tokyo few things could be more necessary. After all, sitting in your office chair resembling nothing so much as a boiled ham in a business suit isn’t going to be good for for your bottom line, unless of course that bottom line has been thoroughly sprinkled with talcum powder and sprayed with anti-perspirant. However, hot as Tokyo is in Summer you’d probably agree that it’s not as hot as Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. You might then be surprised to learn that there’s an office building in Zimbabwe which doesn’t have an AC system installed but is a cool place to work, in more ways than one, nonetheless.
This office building is built to mimic the cooling system of termite mounds. Termites are the white ants that you see on TV getting torn into small individually wriggling pieces by nastier surface dwelling black ants. They live in large mud towers, in much the same way as many Tokyo citizens live in apartments, well except for the fact that they don’t need armed guards at the door. For that you need to go to a public school in the USA. Please leave your UZI at the door.
Anyway, termites make a living by growing fungus inside their dark mounds. In order to do this they need to precisely regulate the internal temperature since if it gets too hot or too cold the fungus wont grow well and everyone goes hungry. So the termites use the heat generated by the tower itself in sunshine to create cooling airflow from the base of the mound to the top. They open and close vents to warm or cool the internal chambers as required.
Yes, but termites are dumb animals aren’t they?
