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Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

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Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#141

Post by t_mahmood »

Right now in my city it's 30c, with 79% humidity, and real feel is 41c, and it's late evening. And, next year it's probably going to be worse. I can see things going really bad for health compromised people pretty soon.

And, we have a flaky electricity, without enough focus or renewables, so, because of war(money)games in the middle east we have a huge gas crisis, and having one/two hours of load-shading every day.

So, tell me, what are we going to do when we can't run the freaking AC, because our power grid failed?

This is encouraging curing the symptoms, not the true problem.

And, the more AC we use, it will increase the ambient temp. And more people uses AC, the more the temp grows. How long we are going to keep doing this? it sounds like another corporate drama to put it on us, the general people instead of solving the issue they create. Heat increased, use AC, it's not a luxury, but we are not going to stop destroying environment.

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#142

Post by twoodfin »

danek_szy wrote: post #49
probably_wrong wrote: post #22

I'm not convinced by the author's point that ACs do not impose a burden on the electrical grid. They write that ACs have gotten more efficient, which may be true, but that's the same Windows developers have been saying over years and yet boot times and hardware requirements have gone way up. One million efficient units still require more energy than no units. And while I definitely believe that European hospitals and…

> I also have reservations about why an American libertarian think tank writes about what Europeans should do, but that's probably on me. My thoughts exactly, except in my mind it's pretty clear that it's about influencing the climate change discourse... The less people are bothered by the rising temperatures, the more they will acquiesce to environmentally unfriendly policy.

European citizens should have obstacles put into their path to access one of the great life-enhancing technologies of the last century … so they will vote for the “right” policies as implemented by the politicians setting up those obstacles?

Good luck with that.

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#143

Post by bewareofscams »

Arodex wrote: post #65
bewareofscams wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many homes could get by on ceiling fans Tell me you're German without telling me you're German

Ceiling fans are extremely efficient, and they also improve enormously the efficiency of AC - by reducing by several degrees the amount of cooling to reach a comfortable level. Ceiling fans should be installed before any AC. If you are not convinced, there is a one-hour video by Technology Connections on YouTube that will argue the point more in-depth that anything I could write here.

I'll check it out

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#144

Post by Moldoteck »

elil17 wrote: post #9

Cooling technologies are a necessity and air conditioning is one of many possible options. Europe north of France is substantially cooler than much of the US, even on the hottest days. Many homes could get by on ceiling fans, but they are very uncommon here.

During recent heatwaves ceiling fans will still not help you. They'll help with ac efficiency but you'll still feel miserable

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#145

Post by iso1631 »

Ekaros wrote: post #69
imp0cat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have drain pipes installed, but you can also just collect the water in a bucket and empty it periodically. That requires no extra investment of money, just a tiny bit of your willpower and manpower, depending on the size of the bucket. There are also systems that spray the water back at the AC unit to cool it down, this is supposed to both improve efficiency and evaporate the water so you don't have to deal w…

Both are options. Still both also carry risks or don't solve entire issue. With buckets you don't want to them overflow on floors for example. And with spraying it on ac you want complete evaporation or you are back to same problem. As said it is not too hard problem but still something that most likely requires consideration.

If you're worried about that amount of water, what do you do when it rains?

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#146

Post by margor »

wim wrote: post #117

And AC can heat too! For example, in some EU countries gas boilers are still a huge thing, even though increasingly archaic. At the same time many of its users denounce AC because of reasons, apparently missing the fact that an AC is an (air-to-air) heat pump. Incredible how Big Boiler somehow convinced people to keep heating their houses by burning gas in these contraptions while ACs could do the job with much highe…

It's not that simple. If you have a gas boiler, you're most likely exchanging heat using radiators which are _designed_ for certain amount of heat exchange. With high water temperature, you can get away with smaller radiator and deliver the same amount of heat.

The story gets worse when you put heat pump to the same system - now you have to run it to its limits to have just enough heat in the water to make the radiators release enough heat to barely heat up the room.

Of course, it's only that simple to replace one heat source with another, why wouldn't anyone do it already?

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#147

Post by Ekaros »

iso1631 wrote: post #145
Ekaros wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are options. Still both also carry risks or don't solve entire issue. With buckets you don't want to them overflow on floors for example. And with spraying it on ac you want complete evaporation or you are back to same problem. As said it is not too hard problem but still something that most likely requires consideration.

If you're worried about that amount of water, what do you do when it rains?

Some idiot figuring out that nice hole in cladding is right place to direct it... Or people under balconies when it is not raining not wanting to have water drop on them... In many cases balconies have less than ideal designs.

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#148

Post by t_mahmood »

freetime2 wrote: post #81

While at an outdoor event this year on a very hot day early in the season - before my body had time to adapt to the summer heat - I got a warning from my Apple Watch that my heart was elevated even though I didn’t appear to be moving. My heart was up over 120 BPM just standing around. I went to my car, turned on the AC, and drank some water. My heart rate went back to normal, but it was pretty unnerving. The scarier…

Multiple kids died in my country forced by the teacher to play soccer during a heatwave. This really should not be allowed.

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#149

Post by sfn42 »

thisisauserid wrote: post #38

For some reason, room-level air conditioning is basic public health, but weather engineering is a sci-fi villain origin story.

Because weather engineering is experimentation with potentially huge unintended consequences both for the people in the relevant region as well as people in neighbouring regions and potentially even further.

How would you feel if your neighbour started doing something that was good for them but disastrous for you? Or something with good intentions that turned out to just be a huge mistake causing billions in damages, maybe even lives lost?

Weather engineering is extremely risky, we can barely predict the weather a few hours in advance. We have no idea what kind of havoc we might cause trying to do it on a large scale.

Re: Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

#150

Post by kwarcode »

matt-p wrote: post #136
ricardobayes wrote: post #34

I tend to stay away from topics like this which generalize and basically tell a whole continent they are living their lives "wrongly". But I have to say, AC is not "banned" anywhere in Europe, apart from certain cantons of Switzerland. In Germany you have a right to AC actually, if your community votes to "veto" the installation a court can overturn that.

It’s not banned, but getting permission to install the outside unit is essentially “hard” in some parts of Europe. In England, if you own a house, you generally have permitted development rights to install one, subject to some fairly common-sense rules. If you live in a flat, though, it’s a very different story: you will need planning permission *as well as* freeholder consent, and the process generally involves engi…

> In the UK

You mean "In England".

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