It may be that you sweat the same at 30C (i.e., water coming out of your pores), it's just that with higher humidity the sweat cannot evaporate and collects on your skin in beads, which you notice.

But getting a portable AC unit is relatively simple, they definitely don't need "re-engineering the environment". Sadly most portable AC's here are single-hose units which are not great. They are cheap though with prices similar to yours, cheapest at around €200. Mini-split systems are very common though as a retrofit: On apartments you can almost always put the outside unit on the balcony.

The cynical side of me almost wonders if the current approach is designed to reduce health care and pension costs by disincentivizing installation of a technology that saves elderly people.

Of course air conditioning is reasonably well suited to be a solar load during peak hours, but in most parts of the world if everyone just installed AC units like are common in many parts of the US it would mean a huge amount of extra fossil fuels burnt.

For exactly the same reason an evaporative cooler isn't going to work: there's no "space" in the air for the water to evaporate into.

Existing properties are eligible for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme which also now covers air to air (ie. reversible) systems.

There's still a bit of "what? no radiators?!" cultural resistance to overcome, but I'd expect this to fall away quickly as the climate continues to warm.

Well, not really ignoring it, more like making it worse while setting giant piles of bills on fire.

By creating and artificial climate in all or our homes we are so disconnected from the world that we think technology will fix it.

Just wait fro the wildfires to blow up this week in the western US. AC will not help.

But climate change is bullshit, right?

Obviously the installation will be more expensive in Europe due to higher wages, but the units themselves should be dirt cheap.

When you start handling that range you've to take into account that these people are going to die because of something, save a guy from heat here and that's an extra death because of cancer 4 years later.

Now I'm not saying it's a thing to be ignored, but be wary of playing quick and dirty with statistics.

Maybe Europe should sell guns to the states - ideally sold in €

Same difference.

E.g. 2 degrees temperature raise did not sound bad to me, untill someone explained to me this is from ground to space, and the actual raise is double or triple that. Then we looked on a map and found current day Morocco seems close to what my Belgium is expected to become in that scenario. I still am not capable of deciding how realistic this is.

So you made me surf to amocscenarios.org, and even if this thing is reliable, it still is hard to interprete. My winter goes from -5 every decade to -18. I've never had either in my life. What does this even mean? Can my ww2 rebuilt house deal with -5, as it supposedly already did? What to do forcdealing with -18?

And that's the opinion of someone knowing a little bit. Now go to someone who has to managed 10 of life's disasters over his lifetime and explain how bad this really is.

this is also my experience as a north American, sweating is a no-go and they clutch AC at 18C.

what are you implying here

For steam based heat systems there is also cooling options, so that is a fix for those cities with central heat service.

You can no longer shift your activities when the weather reaches 35C (95f) every day for weeks without noticeably cooling down in the night.

And even if activity shifting was possible, which again, it is not anymore, the authoritative, fatalistic poverty mindset required to demand that one does not actively cool during hot hours is a European mentality not many other cultures, if any, understand.

In France, the same exact situation would be reported as a heat casualty leading to heart attack.

IMO even that's not a proper comparison though because you cannot compare Alaska to Texas, or Rome to Helsinki and thus throwing all of these in together for discussing heat deaths us just pure nonsense and rage bait.

Window units don't work in most of Europe because our windows aren't compatible with them. If they were, I would have one.

And again, it doesn't solve the core cause. If you want to cool down your home, your first step should be to stop heat from entering. If you can get the same result from €900 of shades and €100 of AC as from €1000 of AC, you'd have to be stupid to go for an energy-guzzling AC-only approach.

This isn’t true. I’ve lived in 3 places in London with single glazing. They’re surprisingly common. All new properties come with it but the majority of our housing stock is old.

There’s also little comparison between air con and double glazing. One will be helpful for 4-6 months of the year and reduce my energy bills. The other will be necessary at most 1-2 weeks a year and will cost me thousands of pounds up front. Most people simply can’t afford that.

Of course thinking a cold is caused by being cold doesn't help either...

Global warming intensifies differences in weather patterns. Hotter hots, colder colds, more intense storms, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Europe

Living in Germany, rental apartments simply don't have AC. Even luxury apartments that are 4k+ per month typically dont. Thats changing very slowly but still a long way to go.

A lot of landlords simply don't give a shit as they're not required to install one and since there is a housing shortage, good luck convincing them of anything.

Even if you own your apartment, installing a split AC requires unanimous approval from the other apartment owners before you can install one because making any permanent modifications to the outside of the building (like drilling a hole) needs their permission.

The older generation (generalising here) often has the opinion that the cold air from ACs is unhealthy and causes cold.

Once you get past all of that, is when price can become the issue. The AC units, even top-of-the-line, cost around 1k-1.8k. Good luck finding someone to install it for you. You need an electrician and a licenced installer.

I own my house so I dont need anyone's permission. The cheapest total cost (including the 1.2k for the unit I want) is 6k. Because apparently drilling 2 holes and, running the wire and coolant pipes is 4.8k.

Unfortunately I personally live in a highrise, and in a rental unit, so that "small hole and a bracket" definitely isn't an option for everyone.

Yes, exactly: install AC where it truly helps and where it is truly needed. That's the point I was trying to make. Most of the rest is solved far more efficient by things like installing shades. In other words: don't go all-out on giant whole-home AC without first stopping the huge inflow of new heat.

> if Europe stopped being so averse to new construction

We're not, there's plenty of new construction over in Europe.

The difference is that European buildings are built to last, so structurally there's no need to tear them down after a couple of decades. They are perfectly usable for another half-century after a minor renovation (including retrofitting AC!), so why destroy a charming historic district for absolutely no reason?

That doesn't mean buildings are never torn down, of course. Right now a lot of post-WWII rental units are being replaced by new construction, as they are architecturally nothing special and renovating them to modern standards is simply way more expensive than replacing them entirely.

I speculate the restriction on AC in that conference room is because it is a unique historic location they want to preserve, not some ideological anti-AC dogma.

"This number is small but it means BAD THINGS" isn't a very good message

If you factor in the need to replace radiators etc, then the ability to act as an air con probably makes air to air the better choice. Now that the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grants cover air to air as well as air to water, I'd expect them to become much more common in the UK than they have been until now.

Most UK houses have radiators and not underfloor heating and so cannot operate in that way without a hugely expensive retrofit of underfloor heating. It's typical to heat the water to over 50C if you want to reuse installed radiators. In this configuration the A2W pump is less efficient than A2A.

Worth noting these numbers are low. Latest A2A pumps can have COP of up to 4, but an A2W can achieve 4.5 if you keep water temps very low.

Europe is a continent with a lot of different countries, all with different laws and regulations. Even the ones who are in the European Union have different rules and regulations.

So please realize that any blanket statements about Europe work as well as making one about the Americas (ie North/South).

Agreed. I live in an apartment complex finished in 2020 and they have no provisions for AC, really not optimal. At least add provisions for holes so renters can easily install a mini split.

Freezing to death in winter should be a harder problem at this point right?

Now that I had to explain my personal living arrangement, am I please excused from the constant nagging about europoors and their stupid hangups about AC?

Funny enough Germans appreciate good ventilation, but here we have following: wind outside - ok, same wind inside (draft) - you killing me. Always wear slippers inside, protect your feet and neck from coldness. Avoid AC at all costs, especially bad if it blows right into your face. Also no fans right into your face or body. Wet hair - do not under any circumstances go outside. Even the most respected people I know fall into this trap.

Possibly some confusion comes from rhinorrhea - people mix up these symptoms with actual disease. And most ironically lack of appropriate ventilation increases spread of respiratory infections.

Last decade+ we had a bit of a HRV fad, wonder if that is reflected in some stats. Anecdotally I heard people shut these off to save power and open window instead...

Extrapolate salaries, cost of living and that's more like 3k in your money.

That said magic happens when government subsidizes things. Friend spent 8k euro for 10kW solar + 15kWH battery system, of which government reimbursed 7.8k. 1.35k USD for entire system, when you'd pay this much for someone to plug some cables for half a day.

Best of the best is about 15-16 SEER

That's entry level central HVAC efficiency

Minisplits are far higher, 20+

Obviously you need a model they is made for which winters but people use them all over Finland including Lapland without any issues. If you want to save some money on the coldest days you burn some wood in the oven/fireplace if you have one.

edit: heat pumps (both air and ground) have been very popular in the nordics for quite some time now. One big reason is that we have cheap electricity and very expensive oil/gas. Lately also municipal level central heating networks have been slowly moving to heat pumps as their source of heat.

Ironically when I had a 200 year old thatched cottage it had 'eaves' by virtue of the thatch extending almost a meter from the wall. It had built up slowly over centuries of rethatching.

My experience is mostly with Californian houses that definitely had eaves.

Is that increase small compared to other things, like surfaces that absorb more solar radiation? Maybe. It depends on a lot of factors, but the amount it increases the heat of the outside is certainly non-zero.

> A significant degradation of external thermal comfort can also be seen in the simulations, as heat released by AC systems warms the outside air (see figure 3). The temperature increases due to AC depend on the time of day and on the characteristics of the heat wave, mainly its intensity. On average, the duration spent under high heat stress conditions in the streets is increased by about 20 min per day because of AC.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab6a24#...

Yes, it does. It may be small temperature increase but AC use increases outside temperatures. It is just physics.

Here is a simple diagram: https://www.lozierheatingcooling.com/filesimages/heatPump.jp...

That’s way high: You can buy 2 for that much if you want a big name brand that provides support for self-installs. 3-4 of them for $5k if you don’t care about that…

Source: I’ve done it

Besides that, just know you’re participating in a system of belief that needlessly kills thousands each year (and many more to come, if you believe as I hope that climate change is real). Just dwell on it a little. Thousands dead because of ideological comfort and resistance to change, which in and of itself is a weird form of climate skepticism.

If you answer this, please address each of my points from both comments. You have adressed none so far.

An ordinary heatpump for an ordinary house should cost something like 3000 NZD including labor for installation. What are we doing differently?

Opening sideways also shouldn't matter for a casement AC unit.

Most of Europe has a "registered building" system, where buildings above a certain age are considered historic. Renovating those buildings is an extremely difficult, expensive, and bureaucratic process. You generally need to preserve the period-appropriate look and materials. An AC unit sticking out of a wall won't pass muster.

Even newer buildings are problematic. an acquaintance of mine lives in an upper-middle-class apartment complex that was finished two or three years ago, and their architect has some claim in the contract that prevents residents from installing AC units to "preserve the building's unique look."

The US is build around privately-owned housing (and hence creature comforts) a lot more than we are, so AC is a lot easier to implement there.

Since these one tube systems just push hot air out, you are creating low pressure in your room and you will suck the air in from somewhere. Often times simply from outside from the leaky windows.

I don't understand why it's hard to buy systems with two hoses that would keep the pressure in the room.

The sun = 175 quadrillion watts of heat.

So I would say, the heat from running ACs is not significant. It's also additive with all the other existing forms of energy use we have. Unlike greenhouse gases, which are multiplicative.

The increase in the heat outside the houses, caused by the air conditioners running MOSTLY ON RENEWABLES[1] is a drop in the ocean. Especially if we speed up installing heat pumps powered by renewables and acting as AC in the summer.

There's plenty of good arguments and then there was yours. No, ACs running worldwide are not a net contributor to the climate emergency.

If you at least said that solar reflective paints and foils should be much more popular, along with reforestation of cities, which would then bring the cooling needs down but no, you had to do the strawman.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/for-the-first-time-w...

Air Conditioners do not produce a net heating effect unless you power them by burning fossil fuels.

"If we all do this little thing" thinking is utter nonsense. If all of human consumption or contribution to warming or what-have-you is 1000, applying a change that lowers that to 999 is not doing anything more than that.

This here is not even a 0.1% thing. You could probably get a better result by telling people to read ebooks rather than hardback. It's just absurd.

And yes, there are options for tubes/ducts for the more common window types. Like tilt-and-turn windows, horizontally sliding or all the other kinds of inward or outward opening windows - but most of them are the ducted portable units the original comment was speaking of, which aren't great. There are also some better portable split units, but those are pricier and the install is not as easy. (They're great though.)

I also sometimes miss being able to stick my head out the window but that's a tradeoff about screens and in the end of the day I prefer not to have to worry about bugs.

This doesn't mean that there's zero heat added locally (as many seem fond of suggesting): The compressors and circulation blowers and fans don't run for free, and every Joule of electricity they consume is ultimately converted to a Joule of heat in a process that wouldn't occur in the absence of aircon. That's not zero.

But in very broad strokes, it's not very significant. It's somewhat akin to running a refrigerator inside of a kitchen.

With aircon, the refrigerator is the size a whole house. That certainly sounds huge, and it is huge. But that refrigerated building is inside of a room that is the size of the Earth's atmosphere, which is very obviously vast in ways that kitchens simply are not.

It doesn't really matter. Millions of homes with aircon don't mean much when the atmosphere is millions of times bigger than they are.

Would love to see you convince the landlords to refurbish the building to use expensive heatpumps when gas is already in place. Also heatpumps just like any other heating solution sucks without insulation.

It would be better to look at new buildings and you will find out that yes even europeans when building new get AC/heatpumps and solar and all the good stuff.

The thing is - I as european don't know a single person who has or is building a new house. I know few that live in a house but most prefer appartments.

No heat is created either, that would explicitly violate the first law of thermodynamics. An air conditioner powered by solar energy (or anything solar powered) ends up releasing the exact same amount of "excess" heat as the sunlight would have if it hadn't been absorbed by the panels.

It would actually be a much better global warming mitigation strategy to install bidirectional heat pumps (A/C in the summer, heat in the winter) that runs on electricity (which is increasingly produced using renewables) and then get rid of fossil-fuel burning furnaces.

It’s ~25kg for a 2.5kw/9000 btu condenser I just looked at, but yeah, if there’s no balcony/fire escape, and you’re well off the ground, you might need some rappelling gear, and you might want a pro. No idea about whatever heavy bureaucracy you live under, that’s a human imposed rather than fundamental challenge. Pipe routing isn’t a big deal, the copper lines are very flexible, just need to be careful not to kink them - give the bends a good radius. And to answer your unstated objections, you will need some tools you almost certainly don’t have lying around. Mostly, though, you need an attitude of being able to do stuff, and getting it done.

Or you can get a portable or window unit. Midea makes some really nice window units now. Might need hung windows, though, not sure whether it’s possible to make them work with casement windows. It takes a little space, but that doesn’t seem like a huge deal?

Or do nothing and just deal with it.

But if you actually did read what I wrote, there was no complaint from me about the cooling part of the AC.