Asklemmy

I live in one of the coldest places and most of us don't have air conditioners, but in recent years summers have been uncomfortably warm. I got myself a cheap portable AC and I keep one room cool, it only uses 400W so it barely affects the electric bill. Wet underwear and ice cream help too. I have a small fan with a battery when I need to be in the kitchen.

In our home we have "coolers" (the big kind with metal bodies and large water storage, and padded, perforforated walls). It is outside our house and blowing air inwards. We try our best to seal the area around window with lots of cardboard, fibre sheet and thermocol, and then depending on time of day, confining the space (by closing other doors in home). It is not AC cool, nor is it really effictive when it is hot (50+ C) outside, but other time it works fine. In the nights it does a pretty good job (good enough that i have caught a cold right now). When we do not want the noise, we just run the water pump, so occasional winds from outside come and are cooled by the running water. Water usage is slightly high (we usually require one filling a day, which would be 40-50 litre water i guess), but we sometimes keep cycling between pump on and off to conserve some more water. If noise is a big concern to you, you can try to basically cover whole of the front (with some sound insulating material, like fibre sheets(the polymer ones often found in packaging)) and then make some side channels for air. Or something more simple is using lighter curtains just in front of cooler. This will break the flow of air, but if you have sealed rest of the are, so air can't leak elsewhere, then you would get air breaking its flow and flow around the obstacles and reach you, but not as loud. We do something similar, we have not covered fully, we have left partially open (60 % i guess from the middle) but to cover noise, we partially close it by window (which is kept in place by curtain over it) so we get a tighter channel of air (as it bends around the edge of window). If you stay in the channel, you get large air flow, but more noise, but if you move away from it (from my casse, even by a foot) then the noise is cut in half. The rest of the room is now cooled by this air current mixing with rest of room air. If room is large, t=you may also have to turn your ceiling fan on for this, but we do not have to.

In really peak summers (and peak hours of the day), we use ac for few hours (1-1.5 or 2) and when it gets cooler outside, fall back to cooler.