... Ohio for the summer is a solar driven dehumidifier. Heat that is fine indoors in the shade with a ceiling fan at 20% humidity drives you to turn on the AC if you want to get anything done at 80% humidity.

The two approaches that come to mind are adaptions of AC technology.

A common solar AC technology uses evaporative cooling by using solar heat to drive moisture out of a dessicant, which then revolves in its big pie pan to the other chamber where it sucks the moisture out of the air from outside that is blown across it. After making the air very dry, an evaporative cooling unit can then cool the air.

So the idea there would be to do the same thing, but w/out the swamp cooler stage.

The second one is the geothermal. If you just run air through a radiator filled with water circulated from below the surface temperature zone, the chill of the water will cool the air and force it to drop some of its humidity (which will bead on the radiator, so it has to be designed to sit in a tub that collects the water for sumping out). Put that air into vents into the house.

Actually, a third alternative that is a wrinkle on the second would force air from outside through a pipe that goes below the thermal layer, which would definitely make it dump its humidity ... but I don't know how you'd sump the water out of the pipe.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.