auntblabby wrote:
if you live in your own place [tin can or stick-built house] you can paint the roof with "snow roof" which reflects the bulk of sunlight away from the attic. radiant reflecting metal barrier in the attic will also help. whole house fans in the attic on each side will pump out the hot stagnant air, and can be set in the mornings/evenings to vent hot air from inside the living space as well. a fan-assisted outdoor cooling tower with aerosolized water spray cools the air and causes it to blow in downwards from the top, and via underground tunnels leading to the baseboards of the house, will add semi-passive cooling there as well. old fashioned houses from back in the day used thick walls with alternating layers of rock wool insulation or air gap and solid staggered stud framing to block out both outdoor heat/cold, and noise. "heat chimneys" were also situated in the center of the house to allow convection to vent hot air up through the roof, sometimes these are augmented with chimney vent fans [like a big version of your bathroom vent fan]. paint the southern exposure of the house white. what I've seen some tin can dwellers do, is to make a false roof or put a big tent over their tin can, at least on the southern exposure side, to block the direct sunlight. plant trees around the house as they both offer shade as well as augment natural convective air currents upwards.
did you know that in downtown phoenix AZ is a several hundred foot tall cooling tower that uses aerosolized water to lower the temperature at the base by up to 30 degrees F?
At my previous place that lacked insulation and did not have have insulated doors, the sun would beat on the front door for half of the day and the back door for the other half in the summer. I had an incredible stroke of good luck when I found a box someone had discarded with two half inch thick styrofoam panels the same size as the doors.
I've lived in many places, some insulated and some not and good insulation really makes a difference. One place had top of the line insulation (I know this because one of my neighbors was the original owner of his house and was around when the development was being built) and that place never got too hot or too cold.