District Air

Part of the technology series of articles.

District air (commonly air conditioning or district air conditioning, and also district cooling) is a municipal cooling system in the Commonwealth, in which cold air is produced at central plants and distributed to homes and buildings through underground ducts. Unlike conventional air conditioning (which puts a compressor and refrigerant in every building), it keeps all of the machinery at the plant, and there is no machine in each home. It is closely related to the pneumatic waste conveyance and water systems, and is widespread in the tropical and subtropical republics of the Antilles, Kalina, Verde and Lucaya regions.

It was first introduced in Kairi in 1990, derived from the Osaka Expo ‘70 demonstrators and assisted by Mitsubishi. District air is run by municipalities. Today, major cities in Kairi, Karu and Barbados operate large plants serving tens of thousands of homes, and smaller island republics tend to have neighbourhood-scale systems.

The system runs continuously. Municipal plants chill the air and condition it to avoid condensation at the centralised end, so it needs no treatment once it reaches a home. It travels through heavily insulated underground ducts, first to neighbourhoods and then to individual buildings. Large apartment buildings and commercial structures often operate their own plants on the same principle.

Homes contain only grates, which residents close and open by hand, and flats typically have two to four of them and houses four to six. A grate has to be accessible by a person, since it is worked by hand, and a fully open grate releases most of the cold air. District air also informs Commonwealth low furniture, low beds and low tables, precisely because the cheap infrastructure that later developed into a standard releases air at the low level, where it mixes less with the warm, humid air above and causes less condensation.