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July 20, 2006
Ice, Ice, Baby!
Honda goes back to the future for a way to cool its Ohio factory: Ice, ice, baby!
Cooling with ice used to be big business- chop it in the winter, store it under sawdust and use it for cooling and refrigeration all summer. Movie theatres used to run fans over ice to bring people in all summer, making summer the biggest movie season because it was the coolest place to go. Honda's new Ohio plant is cooled by ice- not cut out of the river but made by two big 450 ton chillers that work all night using cheap base-load power, which then chills the air all day as the ice melts. While the system cost more at the beginning, it should pay for itself in three years and last at least thirty.
"What's cool about it is that it's using ice as the coolant as opposed to any sort of Freon," said Elaine Barnes, executive director of the Cleveland Green Building Coalition, referring to the ozone-depleting gas often used in conventional air-conditioning systems. "It is a very clean and environmentally friendly source of air. It's a very efficient system."
Those Dead White Men must've known what they were doing, eh? Cutting ice and storing it for use in the Summer months has been used for hundreds of years, and it's interesting to see a willingness to rely on time-tested techniques in the hyper-modern era.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 20, 2006 08:11 AM
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