this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
18 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
53670 readers
353 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Anker solix battery and some solar panels to charge it, you could do most of your house off that. Not sure which brand is best to go with but that at least let's you look up some example products. That gives you a plug and play type of setup for the solar/battery system but it will may cost more than building your own.
How would you reduce energy consumption without using less energy? Not sure if this counts as obviously it is using less energy... Either way, turn the heating down for the house, even more in rooms you don't use often. Then get a heated blanket or hot water bottle to warm your self up.
Firewood might be a cheap energy source to look at. Heat a bunch of water (or any large mass) with a short clean high temp fire and then let the water keep an area warm for a long time. Like a giant water bottle really, you could pump it through a radiator depending on the scale you want. You can heat yourself or an entire house like this if you want to but that depends on your DIY skills or what quality of workmanship you see as acceptable.
You can get easy to use plastic pipes and quick attach fittings that are very easy to use your self at home. Check their temp limit, 60c seems like a common maximum so I would heat up a water barrel that can take that or more and use a thermometer to check it's not going over the limit for the pipes. If you go copper them you can go until it starts to boil.
Thanks for the recommendations! The silica is a little out of my budget but definitely more affordable than installing solar for your house.
That heating idea sounds cool, but I can’t DIY something like that anytime soon. Also sounds high maintenance and risky. Where I’m at most energy consumption goes towards cooling instead of heating. Any cooling tips?
EDIT: Solix, not silica
You can try a swamp cooler, which works best when it's not as humid, put a beach towel or blanket over an open windown with it's end in a pot of water, so the water soaks up through it. The evaporation produces a cooling effect. Try to put one in a window the air is coming into.
Hm that sounds interesting. I’ll give it a try. Thanks!
Create shade wherever the sun shines, on the outside before the sun even hits the house. Focus especially on shading the glass and metall parts of your house. Make it angled and with some distance from the house so it still allows air flow. Mesh will shade less but allow more airflow and tarp will block pretty much all wind byt also pretty much all sun, so experiment with the tradeoff for different parts of the house like near windows or over the roof.
Where I live that's enough to keep me reasonably, so thats all I know. Probably need to learn more with the more extreme weather we have now.
I agree. Def need more shade over and around the house. Any tips for budget mounting shades?
Never gets hot enough to need more than a fan here really, but similar ideas should still apply. Cool the person instead of the house. So I've bottle or a small heat pump (old fridge, aquarium chiller) to cool water and pipe it around you in some way.
Downside is condensation, but not sure how bad that is if you have low humidity as we are always high humidity.
What do you mean pipe it around you?
Pipe the coolant around yourself so it is more directly cooling you rather than the house. Exactly how is up to you. Could sit on cold a hose pipe, or send it through a heat exchanger with a fan pointed at you. Like a computer water cooling fan/radiator.