Google is not working right for me or something and I can not find this. Anyone have a good link?

Oh, and yes the cost of cooling a home in different years is related to shade trees.

i suppose it depends how old you are .. lol ... if you are 40 ... you were born in 71 ... and if your father was 30 at your birth .. he was born in 41 ... [who had air conditioning in the 40's?????] .. meaning grandpa was born 30 years earlier or 1911 ... unless you are a rockefeller ... i am missing something ...

wouldnt we need to know what decade you are talking about????

my gut tells me we will be searching air conditioning websites .. but w/o further info from you .. i can see where you are having a problem defining a search term .... at this point.. i dont see how to search forestry websites either ...

will ponder such.. and await further info from you

ken

Good point you bring up btw. In 1941 a good shade tree probably helped make your non-air conditioned brick home much cooler!

again.. you are wrong..

the post WW2 housing boom created the suburbs.. and was most likely created out of farm fields ... i doubt your hypothesis that said houses were built under mature canopies ...

i was a very late baby boomer ... and we did not get air conditioning until the early 70's ... and we were one of the first in our middle income neighborhood ... and the sub-division was built in the late 50's .. and by the 70's .. the darn maples and sycamores were no more than 20 to 30 feet tall ... and they were not shading anything much at all ...

inspiration hit .. check out the link ... and i would take anything at arbor day with a grain of self-serving salt/intent ... but that site might get you a better search term ... or a reference ...

were you raised in the city .. where much older homes .. might have actually had mature trees ???? .. i would suggest that a vast majority of peeps were not ...

ken

ps: i like that list of collector cars.. in the other post i think .... google images brought back some lost memories ...

===>>> but scot.. did you have any trees in it??? ... lol ..

all these car references today ... get out.. we had a 68 impala ... ah the days when cars were not glorified lawn tractors ... and we hung out the window at 60 mph.. and slept in the back window on the highway .... and gas was 17 cents a gallon ... those were the days my friends ... etc ...

ken

Not in dollar amount spent but interesting.

My working theory has been modified Ken.

Now it is with the post 1960s central air in all our houses revolution it is time to reconsider where to plant them shade trees.

Example, there is less incentive for that white ash to overhang my house in 2011 like there was in 1960 when A/C was either newer (and presumably more expensive to operate) or absent altogether.

My 68 Mustang was a factory A/C Car. As much as it dislikes the heat it does have working A/C again.

The 77 Firebird I started off with two decades ago was also an A/C car from the factory. By 1990 when I got it as a teenager the A/C was toast and being broke and more interested in how it ran than how comfortable it was out with the compressor and a good portion of the A/C box.

Our first home, built in 1951, with no insulation, benefitted mightily from the sugar and red maples planted all around it, by the time we purchased it in 1986 - great summer cooling for the largest part of the day, just due to the shade they provided - but they sure wreaked havoc on the septic system.

In fact, in the mid seventies, my husband was a heating and airconditioning engineer and our home didn't have central air, nor was it standard in new subdivisions. You wanted it, you put it in yourself.

I was a night shift worker in that general timeframe and because of that we sprung for a small window unit to cool one bedroom and considered that pretty high on the hog. LOL.

One TV, one car, one bathroom, one phone, no central air..........our generation grew up like that. And going green hadn't even been invented yet.

I have run across stats suggesting how much a power bill might be decreased by the planting of trees, of contemplated cooling of urban heat island effects by increasing canopy cover, and by how much power bills have increased after storms have stripped areas of trees.

Of course, my Cray is not available right now, so to do the true number crunching is gonna take a while...

Anyone have a pencil sharpener?

It is odd how things make you feel old. A Commodore 64 was our first computer. I remember that rolling in when I was about ten. Commodore Basic! Now I have apps on my phone my 14 month old can touch to make animal noises or trace lines.