Mattsplained - Keeping It Frosty

This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Fun Friday, my name is Jaffs Andu, and on today's show, Couchbox Matte Amatage is clearly pining for the beast from the East. Nope, that's not his latest pay-per-view subscription, but a wave of cold weather that's freezing Northern Europe like a tone deaf superhero. In honor of his frigid four-beast, this week Matt's plane keeps it frosty.

Matt, in case you haven't realized this yet, this isn't Northern Europe. The only reason it's cold in here is because you demand for the air conditioning unit to be at 16 degrees Celsius. And that's exactly what I want to talk about, because as you said, in this part of the world, it's always literally the hottest day of summer. I think my car was saying something stupid like 37 degrees on the way to the studio today.

So apart from that weird couple of days we had a couple of months ago where everyone was complaining about how cold it was, and I was still sweating, winter is something that when you live in the tropics, you have to actually travel to experience. So air conditioning has become a way of life for us. And I know that not everyone is as extreme in the use of AC as I am, but I pretty much only exist in this part of the world with air conditioning. I have it on all the time at home and at work, it blasts in my car, and I try not to spend too much time outside during daylight hours, but that's mainly because I frighten people less in the dark.

That said, our solutions to personal cooling are still kind of blunt, and they haven't really progressed a very great deal. So it's a bit like shoelaces. Everyone accepts that it's not great, but it mostly does what it wants. So we can't start with it.

So which means you have a solution to this cooling crisis? Not really, but I do have an interest. It's kind of like my quest for the Holy Grail. And there are some interesting technologies coming up which are seeking to address some of the issues, and we'll get to some of those technologies later.

But I thought, first of all, we could actually look at some of the history of air conditioning. Not the most interesting topic of all time. It might actually be more interesting than you think, like the fact that air conditioning was actually created as a byproduct and not by intention. Just after the turn of the 20th century, a printing company called Sacket and Wilhelms in New York was having problems with its printing process.

Humidity was warping the paper, and it was preventing the ink from bonding to the paper as a result, so their magazines and whatever else they were trying to be printed wasn't getting done. Enter a guy called Willis Carrier, an engineer who came up with a solution that pumped air over cool to metal coils. It saved the print run, but the larger discovery was that the print room was now the coolest room in the building. So staff started to take their breaks next to the machine, which is quite a feat, because a printing press is really noisy.

So that's the best place in the building. You can tell what people felt about heat. And Carrier then went on to found the world's first commercial air conditioning company. But when did it start being widely adopted?

Well, the systems were extremely large, so it wasn't really until the technological progress, rather, a miniaturization that came after the Second World War, that we started to see the first domestic units. So movie theaters are actually credited with being the first spaces to popularize air conditioning in the 1920s and 30s. Movies were an enormously popular form of entertainment, of course, but during the hot amounts of summer, the picture palaces were often sweltering and suffocatingly hot, so audience numbers tended to decline during those warmer months. By persuading movie theaters to adopt the cooling systems, Carrier helped to make cinemas into a summertime destination.

So in most cities, they were literally the coolest place you could be, and attendance is actually skyrocketed as a result. And that has actually influenced the way that movies have been made and released. It's eventually basically led to what we now know as the summer blockbuster season, because of that movement of people towards movie theaters during the summer months. But surely the air conditioning has a greater cultural impact than movie-ready schedules?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to go into enormous detail here. There's a really good episode of the 99% Invisible Podcast, which is called Thermal Delight. Love it. Yes, exactly.

You can check that out if you want to know more. It's where I found the tale of Willis Carrier as well. But it is safe to say that the impact of air conditioning and air cooling has been absolutely enormous. In the United States, domestic air conditioning from the 1950s onwards helped to fuel a population migration from the northern states to southern states like Florida and Arizona, which had traditionally been considered to have inhospitable climates.

And as a result, had pretty low population densities. And it's hard to state the enormity of the influence that it's had on architecture. In what we mean? Well, before we could mechanically cool buildings, it was an architect's job to ensure the correct balance of ventilation and lighting.

So that meant that architecture was more vernacular. There was often a huge local variation in terms of styles and building materials. Crucially, it tended to limit the height and width of buildings, buildings tended to be narrower and were often constructed in unusual shapes or patterns. I mean, that's one thing that you can see in Malaysia in the older architecture.

They don't have that kind of block form that the skyscrapers have. And that was to maximize airflow or in a colder climate heat retention. And of course, it varied depending on the requirements of the local climate. So as I mentioned, the materials used would also reflect that local climate.

Some materials might absorb or retain heat. Materials, other materials would dissipate and reflect heat in terms of hotter climates. In desert areas where the days might be punishingly hot and the nights could come close to zero. Materials like Adobe were used because they absorbed heat gradually during the day, but didn't bring it into the building, but would release it into the interior at night to keep the place warm.

But of course, air conditioning has turned all of that on its head. Cooling has now become a feat of engineering and not a factor of design. So that has enabled buildings to be taller and fatter? Basically, yeah, it enabled architects to develop entirely new design languages.

Buildings could be made more cheaply and at a much higher density, which of course increases the return to developers. It's also enabled the building of the glass and steel structures that now decorate the skyline of the world's major cities. And we've got so many of them here in Kuala Lumpur. Because when you have a lot of glass, you have a lot of light and that creates a lot of heat.

As most gardeners will know, that's great for tomatoes. It's slightly less awesome for human beings. Tomatoes. Well, it turns humans into tomatoes.

Yeah, your head's just like blossom out in the burst. But once you have that central air, the sky physically becomes your limit. Yes, it's true. It has resulted in some awful buildings and it has resulted in this kind of increase in global homogenization.

You look at the skyline pretty much any major city. And it's hard to decide which city or country is which. We see the same cookie cutter off his block because suburban housing developments repeated time and time again across the world. But it has also resulted in a colossal amount of design innovation.

And it allowed architects to really let their imaginations run wild, which has frequently made our urban landscapes a more interesting place. So, Madapart from letting you summarize a Wikipedia in four in five minutes. Why are we talking about this today? That's rude and offensive.

But then I wouldn't expect anything else. I was trying to point out the importance of air conditioning to our modern way of life. You could probably make a case that the internet wouldn't exist in its current form without air conditioning. Because when we talk about the cloud, what we're really talking about is enormous server farms.

Some of those are located deep underground in countries that have an abundance of permafrost. But the rest are in places like California in artificially cooled hangers. You know, it always makes me laugh when people tell me how much they hate air conditioning. But they have little or no understanding of the fact that their Facebook profile relies on air conditioning.

And we always seem very quick to talk about the things we hate, like pumpkin, and less time talking about the things we love like salt and vinegar crisps for chips to our Americanized listeners. And of course, that's your personal interest in just saying cool. Yes, my personal interest in salt and vinegar chips and staying cool. When I first moved to Malaysia, I really loved the heat.

And as my vintage has increased, to which I always say, I seem to find myself most comfortable wearing shorts and t-shirts in temperatures below 20 degrees centigrade, which is not a situation I often find myself in unless I go for an 11 AM cinema screening. I guess most of our listeners get these. You know those notes you get from the electricity company telling you how your consumption compares to your neighbors. Well, apparently mine is about 30% higher than most of the people on my local grid.

So I can only assume that my neighbors are spending their air conditioning savings on extra deodorant. But for a long time now, I've been thinking about the technology behind air conditioning and how it's a bit like those belts that my belly has made redundant for my pants. You know, we make the odd cosmetic change that the form and the underlying technology hasn't really changed much. You know, sure, the machines have become more compact, powerful, energy efficient, but they're still a very blunt, one-size-fits-all solution to what is in actuality a set of multiple problems.

I'm going to get you to explain that a little bit of the cost. It does sound rather confusing. We'll go for a short break with a man. I'm going to take you right after this.

Give me a 9.9.9.9. Vodacious Fabulous Mines, BFM, 89.9, the Business Station. And we're back. My name is Jasan Dood together with Couchbox Matte Amity.

And we're talking about air conditionings on matte spain today. If you're still listening, then you've got more patience than I have. Matt, before the break, you said something along the lines of air conditioning being a blunt solution to a lot of problems. Do you want to explain that to the people at the other end of your microphone?

Me? Sure. It's not like I've got anything better to do right now. No, remember we did an episode a few weeks ago where I asked people about tech problems that science has forgotten to solve?

Well, one of the questions I got was from a lovely fellow called Wern Shen. And he very reasonably asked why air conditioners can't create different temperature zones in different parts of a room. For example, on different sides of the bed or a sofa. Why?

Well, this is the block solution part. We treat cooling, whether at home or in a building, as though it were a one-stop shop. Now, before we start to record him today, you came in the studio and said, it's freezing. I'm going to put my jumper on and I'm sitting here perfectly comfortable.

It's like you're on a holiday in by the beach. Precisely. So it ignores the fact that different people have different temperature requirements. My wife is always too cold in our house and I'm always too hot.

Literally. I usually get my way because I tell her it's easier for her to put on a jumper. Whereas even if I walk around naked, I'm still going to be warm and sweaty. And if she's sitting on the sofa, quite literally in her face.

And that's probably not the fairest way to win an argument. So I've been wondering why we haven't been as successful at creating microclimates as we have at creating micropetes. Is that really necessary though, man? Sometimes we don't improve on something because it's already as good as it gets, right?

I think it's more that this is quite a difficult topic to solve. But it doesn't mean it's not one that we should be avoiding. Like I said, this one size fits all ethos is really energy intensive. One of the figures quoted in 99% invisible, I think, was that the United States currently uses much electricity for air conditioning as the entire continent of Africa consumes in total.

Wow. Yeah, that's quite an astonishing figure. And of course, as a result of that, there are environmental aspects. Air conditioning generates a lot of CO2 emissions.

And weirdly, it actually leads to increases in temperature. If you go to the area surrounding large buildings and shopping malls, you'll often find that there's a temperature spike because the ambient temperature is higher because of the heat generated by the exhaust fans of the cooling systems in those buildings. And a lot of that energy is simply wasted anyway. Think about all the dead zones in office buildings, places like walkways and unoccupied conference rooms.

A lot of those spaces are cooled to the same temperatures as the places where humans are concentrated. There must be a lot of innovation in this sector, right? What about the smart clothing market? Yeah, we've talked about smart clothing quite a few times before.

And there is a growing body of innovation in temperature control, clothing powered by batteries using nanotech and heating elements. But it does seem that heating clothing is a lot easier than using it to cool people down. Most of the smart clothing we talked about still follows the basic principles of evaporative cooling. And that kind of technology doesn't work so well in the tropics.

It works better in dry climates as it relies on a lot of moisture. So if you have moisture outside the body, as well as the stuff you're trying to take from the body, the cooling doesn't actually happen anymore. So a lot of these smart cooling developments, and even those portable air coolers that you add ice to, aren't as well suited to climates like those we find in Southeast Asia. What else is on the horizon?

Some solutions are old school practical. Quite a few of the refurbished or new buildings I've been in recently combined central air for the main kind of people areas combined with regular switch on switch off units and meeting rooms and other spaces that are not constantly occupied. Other overlooked innovations include, hey, windows that open. Something that's an ephemer to most modern high rises, because they allow workers to have some control over their own environment.

Obviously, you're probably not going to want to open a window on the 85th floor. It's going to be one very windy and two probably kind of dangerous. The computer aided design and innovation company Autodesk has a really interesting project called Dasha. One of its uses is as a command and control structure for large buildings.

Now you can drill down to sensor information on temperatures, CO2 emissions, lighting and power use at really granular level down to the individual worker drone cubicle. Yeah, exactly. So while technology like that is not specifically targeted at creating micro climates in the workplace, it will be capable of doing so. So whether it's manipulated by the cubicle op, whether it's manipulated by the cubicle op, or by a central administrator, or even by an artificial intelligence, you know, we'll have to wait and see about that.

There are also various prototypes and commercial versions of climate control of these jets, which combine things like heating pads and fans that blow across your back. And because often we're not talking about massive fluctuations in temperature, making a difference, you can shift an average temperature by one degree in either direction and make an enormous difference to the comfort of many of the people within that space. As Malaysia's cool as do, I should point out that Matt wrote that sentence himself. Are there any products out there that we can get hold of it now?

Thanks for pointing that out. There's a lot of innovation going on and a lot of people coming up with really interesting ideas. I come across quite a lot of them when I'm researching for King of the Crowd, the items that we feature on Geek Squad. And it does seem that a lot of them don't make it beyond the prototyping stage.

So it is a bit of an investor at your peril area. Ember Wave is one that we've talked about on gigs before. It's a wearable bracelet that helps to make you feel cooler by applying a cool or warm element to the pulse point on your wrist. It essentially tricks your body into thinking the air around you is warmer or cooler than it is.

That should be commercially available by the middle of the year. And that's had really good tests on the reviews I've seen so far. Then there's My Climate, a personal air conditioner that's a great concept, which has become bogged down in development help. Yes, that's one I actually invested in.

It's a wearable air conditioning concept that circulates cool air around your body. It sits around you like a bit like a belt on blows cool air around you. It's kind of nice. It will get there, you know, as with a lot of these crowd things, it just takes longer to get to market than a lot of first time entrepreneurs actually imagine to begin with.

One of the products that has just reached the market is called Zero Breeze, which is a portable battery powered air conditioning unit. It's about the size of a portable ice cooler. I think it weighs about five or six kilos. That's had some pretty good reviews.

But as with anything, unless I'm really excited, I prefer to wait for the later manufacturing runs to give time to sort out any gremlins or quality control issues if it turns out there are. What about something you can buy now? Well, there is a device that I've been using for a couple of years. It's made by a company called Evapilar and it's called the EVA Lite.

They now have a larger capacity machine called the EVA Smart, which adds Wi-Fi connectivity and smartphone control via a rather nice app. And it was an early King of the Crowd winner. It was one of the first items I think we featured on King of the Crowd. I bought two units pretty much as soon as I saw the indigo page.

And I haven't been disappointed. Yeah, the company completed development and delivered all according to the schedule. So what makes this different from a standard air conditioning unit or the evaporative cooler? OK, admittedly, one of the reasons I was attracted to this is because it uses a nano material called EVA Breeze to cool the air.

And it's a very clever piece of minimalist tech because I'm that kind of geek who will buy anything that has nano written on it. Too-based, T-shirts, TVs, anything T-ver, techy. The Evapilar units, they don't use ice. They don't have a pump.

And that means it reduces the number of moving parts. So the device is the device is a really small and light, which makes them super portable, which is also a must for me. It's about the size and height of two boxes of tissues stacked on top of each other. Yeah, it's size of a desktop fan.

And it weighs less than a kilo and a half. So like I said, it's really light and portable. And I like using it because it's so simple. You fill the water reservoir, the material in the cartridge soaks up the water and a fan blows cold air at you.

You know, it's really simple. So I said, it's a really nice piece of minimalist tech. And it also makes the devices really energy efficient. They run using a standard USB cable.

So you power one off your computer or plug it into your phone's charger. Evapilar says the cartridges last around six months, but I found they tend to last eight to nine. And the replacement cost around $30 US dollars is less than servicing a traditional AC unit. The company also claims that the machine has air purification properties because it filters out dust.

And because the Eva Breeze material is biologically inert, it won't breed bacteria, something that's fairly critical for a product that spends its life sitting in tap water. The bigger question is, would you use it to replace a normal split-air conditioning unit? Well, as I said, I mean, this is really about creating micro-climates. So I use my units in conjunction with traditional air conditioning.

So I use that to cool kind of the ambient surroundings. And then I have one machine by my bed and another at my work desk. That allows me to have a little bubble of super cold air around my work area and my pillow without my colleague or my wife getting annoyed. Because it tends to, I think the range is around three meters squared, four meters squared on the bigger unit.

And in that bubble, it will reduce the temperature by about five degrees centigrade. So it has quite a major impact. So my wife can be happy in 26, 27 degrees. And I'm down at 21, which is much closer to where I know.

But that's freezing. It's freezing cold air. No, you need a vest and pants. You know, you usually don't go into this level of detail about products on Metzby in here.

That's partly because today we are being pretty specific. There are a lot of great technologies on the horizon that will allow us to create micro-climates and move away from the kind of shackles of central air. I think these developments will also likely spur more rapid innovation in the traditional air conditioning sector, because the manufacturers won't want to get left behind. Invertor air conditioners are already a right step in that direction.

But in terms of micro-climates, we don't have a lot of relevant products on the market right now. I have tried out a lot of them after the years, and most of them have a combination of being both expensive and basically rubbish. Comme dee-tinnable. One company, which is now gone bust, sent me three completely non-functioning machines before I insisted on a refund.

They had operating pumps, but the pumps didn't actually pull any water or moisture out. So they were just a machine that made a lot of noise, went, until the battery ran out. So yes, I am kind of pushing these evaporar units, because I think they are a genuine and immediate solution to a pressing problem. They reduce energy use and they increase personal comfort, and I find them to be very good value.

In case anyone is wondering, this isn't a paid endorsement. I don't get anything if anyone decides to buy one of these. I contacted the company for product information, and when I explained today's topic, they're supporting generously offered a 25% order discount to this. So I'll post the details of that on the Matt's Play interface.

Okay, so people have got to go and like the Facebook page and then... They don't even have to like it. There is no stress. No, no, no, no.

No, no, no. Just come and get the code. The code is valid until the end of March. And off you go.

Give them a like as well. Anyways, if the real developments are on the horizon, man, how can we keep it frosty in the meantime? In a few years' time, I think we'll be amazed that it took us so long to create these personal microclimates. It will seem as simple to us as it feels complicated and beyond the reach.

Now, we won't be having these conversations about, oh, I'm going to go and get my jumper or whatever. You will simply have the temperature you want on your side of the desk, and I will be sitting inside an ice cube on my side of the desk. Everyone will be happy. You know, we can't do much about the way our offices or our homes are built, not in the short term anyway, so our choices are often quite stark.

If the architecture isn't adapted to the climate, then air conditioning may be the only way that is reasonable for us to stay cool, at least for part of the year. And these homes and buildings are going to be a feature of life for decades to come. You don't just knock houses down because it's a bit too warm. What we can do though is look at the tools that are available to us now and make practical decisions that might reduce energy use or reduce our carbon footprint.

As I said about the architecture, for those of us living in the tropics, in an era of climate change, it's probably not practical to think we can do away with our conditioning completely. But that doesn't mean that we can't make smart use of the tools that we do have. Keeping it frosty with Matt Amatage, also if you think Matt is cool, or what's the term that you wrote down as a Malaysia's coolest dude? If you think he's Malaysia's coolest dude, check out Matt's Play's Facebook page, that's also where you could get the 25% discount code for Evapolaire.

Also, if you're keen on checking out how Matt could help you or your business, or if you just want Matt to be a cool guy to mentor you to coach you and stuff, then you've got to check out his culture with a k because it's cool with a k, right? That's right, you got it. This has been Matt's Play, we'll be back with G-Spokes after this.