3 ms·

> Insane amounts of inner-city schools without Air conditioning depend on open windows, kids sitting inside all-day next to busy streetscapes with diesel trucks

by WWLink 4y ago

> Insane amounts of inner-city schools without Air conditioning depend on open windows, kids sitting inside all-day next to busy streetscapes with diesel trucks roaring by. We know what this does to people. The surburbian schools I went to as a kid didn't have air conditioning, just a line of windows in the back of the room that were always open during the spring & summer, and a line of windows in the front near the ceiling, that were also open on hot days. AFAIK most of those schools were remodeled in the 2000s. They added air conditioning and nobody opens the windows anymore. That's great on a hot day, but man I really liked the fresh air on days with nice weather.

ggm 4y ago
My son's school was built in the inner city Brisbane streetscape in the 1920s in a time of low car density. Once we vehicled up, it was sitting between two day long constant flows of cars, buses and trucks. I believe it was also the first public school in Brisbane south of the tropics to get air-conditioning (Qld used to manage the economics of the problem by defining a climate boundary to limit the cost) I get that "fresh air is best" and we kind-of also got that in covid times, its important to replace the air in a closed space. I like fresh air too. The problem is, what "fresh" is. If you sit at a window above the garbage bins, for the first 10-20 minutes you know what people had for dinner. After your nose shuts down you tune it out, but those particles didn't stop winging it from the prawn heads into your breathing tract. We can't easily tell we're breathing in diesel particulate matter and like, unless you happen to walk by an airport at the right time to get a whiff from a passing jet, but the fine matter is there, smelt or not. I sometimes think that wheezy asthmatic non-sports kid down the back of the class is the canary in the coal-mine: if they're having a bad day, actually everyone in that room might be. For the first year of my new Apt, every time we came back in from shopping we got a whiff of a lovely "new house smell" -the complex VOCs include the formaldehyde in the construction materials out-gassing. That stuff isn't good for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_car_smell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_car_smell

by WWLink 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

My son's school was built in the inner city Brisbane streetscape in the 1920s in a time of low car density. Once we vehicled up, it was sitting between two day long constant flows of cars, buses and trucks. I believe it was also the first public school in Brisbane south of the tropics to get air-conditioning (Qld used to manage the economics of the problem by defining a climate boundary to limit the cost) I get that "fresh air is best" and we kind-of also got that in covid times, its important to replace the air in a closed space. I like fresh air too. The problem is, what "fresh" is. If you sit at a window above the garbage bins, for the first 10-20 minutes you know what people had for dinner. After your nose shuts down you tune it out, but those particles didn't stop winging it from the prawn heads into your breathing tract. We can't easily tell we're breathing in diesel particulate matter and like, unless you happen to walk by an airport at the right time to get a whiff from a passing jet, but the fine matter is there, smelt or not. I sometimes think that wheezy asthmatic non-sports kid down the back of the class is the canary in the coal-mine: if they're having a bad day, actually everyone in that room might be. For the first year of my new Apt, every time we came back in from shopping we got a whiff of a lovely "new house smell" -the complex VOCs include the formaldehyde in the construction materials out-gassing. That stuff isn't good for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_car_smell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_car_smell