Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner(economist.com) |
Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner(economist.com) |
Also, AC is for wimps.
Americans just like to shit on Europeans for trivial/nonsense things because it detracts from the heinous crimes the USA commits every day - which Americans don't really see, but the rest of the world does.
Its cute that Americans think Europeans don't want AC because Americans have AC. Europeans don't want war and genocide - Americans have plenty of that.
> Green electricity means never having to say sorry for lowering the thermostat
I literally just read some reports yesterday day about how AC can be a pathological solution.
It's not about the energy being green or not, it's that independently of the energy source AC is a heat pump, so it pumps heat out into the air, which makes the air inside cooler, but hotter outside; and for that, green or not, it needs to put in energy to do the work, which results in _even more heat_.
At scale a.k.a cities this creates measurable bubbles of heat (+1-2degC) around AC'd places.
As Desty Nova puts it in Gunnm (a.k.a Battle Angel Alita):
Now becomes the past in an instant — and everyone will eventually die! Destiny triumphs over human knowledge and goes mad! That is the way of things! I spit upon this frail, crazed, world! I spit upon the Second Law of Thermodynamics!That's what I have been wondering as well. When I was in Japan (which is notorious for using obscene amounts of AC), I once walked past the rear side of some buildings where all the AC vents were and you could clearly feel the heat these things are pumping into the city. How is this not creating a feedback loop?
What? If things would have worked as you say, we would have solved global warming in no time. Just open the windows and blow the cold air out and keep the inverter inside.
They work _exactly_ as I say:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump_and_refrigeration_cy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
> Just open the windows and blow the cold air out and keep the inverter inside
This "just" seems to hint that you don't seem to quite be grasping the concepts and scale at hand:
- Assuming perfect efficiency and unlimited free energy, where would you even put the heat from outside?
- Since energy is neither free nor unlimited, the energy needs would be enormous+
- Since it is not perfectly efficient and the energy needs are so high, the amount of wasted energy (which is heat) would be colossal, and only make the problem worse
+ The heat causing global warming comes not from human activity but from the sun, the anthropogenic effect at play is that this energy from the sun is captured by greenhouse effect.
China is at least adding more solar per year than America has in total.
However if we will start talking about a month or several months of hot weather, people will buy them kind of automatically.
Imho ac is only really needed for sleeping.
Totally doable
Looks like it will top out at that.
We have had plenty 30C+ weather.
Costal helps. The elite.
You couldn't be more wrong about it. A 12k BTU unit is about ~ 250-300EUR + maybe 100EUR setting it up. Building that are almost collapsing have AC. Its a thing to have AC.
In Spain it's not cheap.
Edit. And also local towns have rules, I can't just install one that have a device on the outer wall/window and I own the whole house, in the flats you depende on the community to decide.
No one hates AC, it just wasn't needed.
I suspect that's actually not the case, because most of the richest European countries have climates where it's rarely necessary.
Ventilation during night is almost useless, there is no breeze these days the air is perfectly still. Open windows through the building and air doesn't change, just insects come.
Now typical proper 2-part ACs are forbidden here for residential buildings, and monolithic ones are not that effective. We bought a mix of this from midea last year - 2 parts, permanently connected by hose, and we put it out when needed and cover door to balcony. easily 25 max under roof at low rpms, so far so good (outside easily 35 in shade, >42C on balcony in afternoon/evening). Proper permanently installed 2 part AC would save some energy since we lose some cold via smaller gaps in door, but its frequent these well-meaning moves end up doing more damage than intended.
While the adaption of solar + air-conditioners (better: reversible heat-pumps) will be a good thing, I hope the local/conventional methods to deal with heat are not forgotten.
The only regret I have is that this house only has mechanical ventilation (blowing waste air out and sucking in air through vents above the windows) instead of balanced air. That would have made it possible to have an even climate through the house. As it is, only the three rooms with a unit in it are fresh. We fill two large buckets with the water from the airconditioning and use it to water the plants in the evening.
They also love them on the mainland but nobody loves the hassle of getting one installed.
It's also insurance related. Houses are insured based on also their insulation. Try making a hole in that insulation for an a/c without 'gezeik' as we say.
When I lived there I had a portable mini split unit. I ran that baby constantly during heatwaves. Blew every single-hose portable AC unit away.
> Yanks holidaying in Europe expect cool comfort, and grow surly on finding that many old-world buildings require them to sweat and bear it.
And there's of course the ever present AI driver because where would we be if we don't get our priorities straight:
> It must ... expand its data centres, dwarfed by America’s, lest the artificial-intelligence revolution render it a vassal.
The rest of the article meanders through historical considerations, family wealth, home sizes, geopolitical issues, traditions, etc. None of which explain or justify the premise of the title, some even contradict it. Expanding AI DC goes head to head with "wasting" energy on cooling houses more. It's comfortable to lower the temp a bit in summer but all the arguments in the article are that the energy would be better used elsewhere. Industry, AI, etc.
The bottom like will always be that for any given production/storage capacity everything is a 0 sum game. I can use it to cool houses, or store it/use it for something more productive. The article does a bad job explaining why "cool the house" would trump other considerations when they compete for the same energy.
I still think though that people are severly underestimating the effectiveness of relative simple, low-tech options like awnings though.
My partner was downright insulted when I suggested getting some blackout curtains to reflect sunlight back outside when the sun is hitting our living room. I eventually won that battle after the first summer.
I mean, I'm currently in France, with 30°C (86°F) in my bedroom, do you really think that our shutters are opened ? At some point, sunlight is not even the issue. For the night to come, like the previous night, predictions are that we will have 35°C (95F) at midnight. I'm not even sure it was this hot when I was at Las Vegas eleven years ago. Las Vegas which is in the middle a of desert.
We are way past the awnings and we already have shutters and both of them are useless when the air itself is like a air dryer.
Vegas's dry heat is much more tolerable than lower temperatures in more humid places (which is pretty much the rest of the civilized world).
That said, yes, if possible, you should be installing an AC unit as well (and the awning will help make the AC unit more efficient.
Where I grew up and live in the US, I had no real need for A/C until 4 or 5 years ago, a bedroom window fan was fine for the few real hot days. Now, I need A/C, but I have aged too :)
Over the years, hot days are getting far more common and hotter on ave. In the "old days" (tm) we could go all summer without reaching above 90F (32C). Once in a great while it would get above 90.
And as a kid (5+ decades ago) I remember me and my friends getting real excited when one day was suppose to reach 100F (38C). We spent all day checking the thermometer at my grandmother's house and when it hit 100, we celebrated.
Now, 100 is just a ho-hum day :(
You're way too optimistic. At the rate the world is going they'll get it 30yr before they need it as the side effect of some highly engineered compliance solution to half baked environmental policy that pretends to be about heat pumps but was ghost written by a think tank owned by an HVAC billionare.
People seem to be catching on this and some brands now offer portable mini-splits ACs, I just bought this one (waiting for it to arrive though):
https://youtu.be/D5ApvRis9X8?t=45
However they are still quite expensive.
So AC is making the problem worse, or just worse for all those that are forced outside.
For urban heat zones, AC seems to be criticized in isolation. There's never a mention of a lack of tree canopy in vast parts of the city, or that reflective pavements and green roofs are nonexistent.
I think a real barrier is that we're not allowed to install compressors on building facades. I don't disagree with this; it just means that most folks living here are stuck buying portable AC units, which are inefficient unless you do some considerable DIY to make them dual-hose.
This one is particularly on the nose about Europeans not buying enough air conditioners, though. What with the normative headline phrasing that calls out Europeans specifically (who are infamous for their stubbornness against American consumerism!). I can usually appreciate the subtlety in these articles[0], but this one's about as subtle as a brick to the face.
The big picture in Germany is that it needs to rethink its energy system from the ground up and it's a bit behind on that (a few decades).
People burn gas to stay warm in the winter. That gas has to be imported at great cost. It's completely stupid at this point to perpetuate that system. Stop putting gas boilers in new buildings already. That's a decision that should have been taken years ago.
Heatpumps work great and they can cool and heat. That should be the default at this point. It's not something that requires further studies or chin stroking (a national sport here in Germany, they are world champions being indecisive). This has been studied to death already.
Even if heat pumps use gas powered electricity plants, they would take a lot less gas. Because heatpumps are that effective.
From a system level point of view, mass deploying heat pumps would be an investment that should start paying off big time within 10-15 years. People think of this as cost rather than as an investment with a positive and very substantial ROI. There's a bit of an economic crisis here and a cost of living crisis. And the government is moving deck chairs around on the titanic instead of investing their way out of this as they should have started doing ages ago.
Many private home owners make this choice already of course. But on a normal sized apartment building with 20-40 apartments, the tenants have to pay through their nose for warm water and heating. There are a few million such buildings in Germany. Many buildings don't even have thermostats in their apartments (mine doesn't, built this century!!!). No smart meters either (seriously, wtf?!).
Germany needs a giant kick in the ass when it comes to their high energy bills. They are high because they are structurally doing all the wrong things and refusing to do smart, common sense things. Lots of hand wringing, not a lot of action over this.
- News coverage about how extremely hot it has become in north/central Europe - News coverage/comments about heat-related deaths in Europe - People suddenly discovering wet bulb temperatures - "Extreme Heat" warnings, and events getting cancelled
What I see is people complaining about something when I can walk into my local Walmart, Canadian Tire, or hardware store and buy a $150-250CAD air conditioner which will cool a bedroom to 20C.
Is $200CAD ($150 Euro?) worth sleeping well for 2-8 weeks a year (counting warm-but-not-extreme weeks)?
Window designs in Europe may be different, but we have also invented... sheets of plywood and saws to cut baffles. It may not be pretty, but a vast number of low-income apartments in Toronto have plywood baffles + aircon in their bedroom windows.
The complaining, outrage and sudden realizations that it's hot outside are what annoy me. Some years it is >30C for 4 weeks and >25C for 8-12 weeks. Well worth $150 for a cheap aircon unit.
It's true that historically Europe is cooler than similar latitudes in North America. But there's also an anti-AC movement in Europe based partly on environmentalism, partly on reflexive anti-Americanism, and partly due to a general preference for "naturalness"/suspicion of anything new.
Most of Europe only sees occasional heatwaves (for now) so it's a compromise to suffer some heat briefly but save money and effort on the AC installation. Those who can, time their vacation to overlap with much of the peak heat.
I think this slowly changes but it's driven by need (longer and hotter heatwaves), affordability, local regulation, not by thinking of "Americans". Not even US Americans.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/3sac4u/interactive...
This is complete speculation from your part.
It's so amusing to see what people really think about us Europeans, so suspicious of anything new and those Americans, I guess we still burn witches too!
I for one love my AirConditioning unit, but it gets use maybe 1 month of the year ? I can completely understand why people don't see the need when awnings are still a thing. There are just already ways to keep the house cool during the day.
The big disconnect comes from the fact that places like Miami and Houston don't really have analogous European peers in terms of climate. There are places that come close but it's not the same.
It's one thing for it to be unbearably hot at 2-6pm. Its a different thing altogether for it to still be 80F+ at 3am every single night for months on end. You cannot escape the heat in Houston without phase change cooling technology. Latent heat removal is what most of us are paying for around here (water out of the air). Not sensible heat removal.
I can walk down my street and find 2-3k sqft sqft homes that have 5+ tons of HVAC capacity. There is a home with three condensing units and it's not much bigger than mine (I only have a single 3 ton system). I've been thinking about getting a multizone ductless installed on top of my central unit to deal with July and August.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/weather-news/articles/worst-ive-e...
You cannot survive without an AC in Florida. Nor in Las Vegas, Dallas, NYC and the boroughs, the list goes on. Doable in Santa Monica or in the Bay perhaps.
Humidity is a larger burden on me than temperature. I can do dry Las Vegas at 100F, but can't stand Miami at 80F and 70% humidity.
I guess it depends on the country, customs and other things. In my part of Europe, older people are convinced the AC will kill them if they use it. So YMMV.
balcony is more practical place where to hide it if it's historical building, worth that <0.5m2 if you don't hang it on wall and must hide it from neighbors/bureaucrats
Yes, historically, the AC didn't make sense in Prague, but there's no going back, the world is just going to get hotter.
Went back to Rome in the summer this year (haven't been there in summer in about 8 years)...
And holy moly it's so hot. Unbearably hot and humid. You don't want to step out, it's outright unpleasant.
I don't get this extremism, neither no AC or AC full blast freezing the room. We have ours set to mild spin aiming for 20C, it drops temperature in the room cca 4-5 degrees down compared to no AC. Still 25, very pleasant while outside 35 in shade, especially for small kids.
Using 28C as a threshold since temperatures at or above start to affect sleep.
it certainly more than 4 weeks hot enough between June-September to justify AC, even one month per year is comfy + it helps also during heating season if they start too late or end too early, you can use AC for heating as well
Modern air-to-air heat pumps (i.e. aircon) are a pretty good solution for that. I think we're just going to have to work our way around this as a society. While many Europeans live in historic buildings that will require a lot more care, most do not, and installing aircon at least for homes with elederly people and young children provably will reduce unnecessary deaths during our now yearly heatwaves.
In an interconnected grid (most of europe) clean power capacity that is not used locally can be sold off to places that have less clean power capacity. This argument only works if all of europe was mostly renewable energy.
But I mean, heat-pump AC is quite efficient as long as you are not making your home frigid year-around I don't see that as a big argument. Govs would be better served by providing good heat-pump regulations and pre-approved installations for residential builds and banning those incredible ineficient portable ACs.
Can you expand on this? Because it feels like greening is always a pressing topic for any architect working here[0][1].
[0]: https://gruenstattgrau.at/news/
[1]: https://www.wien.gv.at/spezial/klimafahrplan/klimaanpassung-...
And my criticism is mainly of the city in its current form. I'm appreciative of the efforts from the city, but walking around Neubau, it's hard to describe it as anything other than a concrete jungle.
I totally agree on the importance of trees, reflective pavements, green roofs, etc.
However, pretty much everybody who is critical of AC would also support the things you've listed. Is your complaint that people do not talk enough about it? That's not really my experience.
I have the feeling that widespread use of AC would make it even harder to make these changes. At the very least, these things must go hand in hand.
I thought I was going to melt, and everyone from the North suffered. Few passed out due to the heat. I asked people from Tulsa "is this heat normal for June". They said "No, it does not get hot until August". I had no idea what to say.
I will never when go south again and will only go in Jan of Feb if I have to go.
So in the South, I would have to live in a freezer in the summer. A/C is required down there.
There are plenty of Americans who side with the Europeans and also define themselves in opposition to "the kind of American" who has AC/eats fast food/is obese/has no culture. I'm from New England and maybe even a majority of people have that perspective.
In France, shutters aren't like most American ones, here we mostly use either plain wood with no gap for light (old houses) or for most of the recent houses, we use rolling shutters that let 0% of light (and therefore, 0% of radiative energy from the sun) get to the window and will make the room entirely black. Also, most modern rolling shutters are white by default so they are pretty reflective.
In the current situation, it's the air temperature that fuck us by not getting down at night and so our (concrete) buildings accumulate the heat even at night.
Even if the shutters are wood and white when sun hits them they will radiate some heat into the indoors. But of course shutters are still better than letting the sun hit your floor directly.
Vancouver is a mess with ac too, but Vancouver is also way cooler
Right now it's unbearable but even 10 years ago you had a fraction of the nights with these temperatures (over 23degrees). People are just slow with change and some older Italians are superstitious about the cold air. With costs being difficult for some on top.
In case you haven't noticed, they are waning fast.
The ACs for us Europoors is however another matter.
Tbh even in old buildings it might be possible to reabilitate old chimneys for AC (or rather heat pumps).