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Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

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211–220 of 294 posts

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

#212
post #192
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unacceptable levels of humidity? You can just open your window when the sun goes down to vent off the heat and humidity that built up during the day.

haha. no. try opening your window in +15C high humidity and then sleep. I assure you, sleeping in a 0-5C sleeping bag on the nearby sea shore would be a more acceptable experience. You just never lived there, yes?

Perhaps 15C is a typo? That is perfectly comfortable even at 100% RH + no air movement.

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

#213
post #146
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 radiat…

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

In most European countries, electricity is taxed much higher than gas. Those taxes eat a large chuck of the efficiency gains from a heat pump, and then it's not worth the effort.

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

#214
post #127

This is all, sadly, very true. Anti-AC sentiment is prevalent throughout Europe, and like all superstions, it's based on false assumptions, and extremely resistant to actual evidence.

If that's the case, then why do all European cars have AC? There's an anti-electricity sentiment, but that's a very different thing. It's why most of those anti-AC places use gas heating.

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

#215
post #186
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say stupid, but I actually would find it sad to see beautiful buildings that are in many cases hundreds of years old defaced with loads of small condensers bolted on to the face. That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.

I'm not talking about historic buildings that are hundreds of years old. I live in Finland - we don't have many of these. Almost all apartments are built after the 60s outside the downtown and look like concrete boxes.

You'd be surprised (I certainly am) how fond can some people be of concrete box architecture - hint Le Corbusier.

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

#216
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aboriginal Europeans' TFR is about 1.2 and falling. even if did remain that high (it won't!), 750M will become so I don't think it's fair to scold Hans from Hamburg over his carbon footprint. Abdul from Mogadishu may emit less CO2 over his own lifetime, but each of his 5 children will have 5 children, and no one will scold him for it.

So Hans can do whatever he likes because you want to blame Abdul for the cumulative sum of all his descendants?

yes. does that not make sense to you? unless Hans is a young global leader who flies his private jet to Davos every year to urge proles to eat ze bugs, his carbon footprint will be less than that of someone with children.

(I would use something other than "Abdul from Mogadishu" as the counterpart, but the only remotely European people not going extinct are some subgroups of Israeli Jews.)

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

#217
post #202

I also find deeply and even extremely ironic, that the same greenwashing radicals who bash ACs in Europe are then supporting "heat pumps" as a modern and efficient heating device. There are even programs labelled as Eco or green or whatever the jargon of the day is, to subsidize or finance heat pumps. People are seemingly unaware that heat pumps are just an AC with a tiny additional valve in the pipes :) .

Heat pumps are just ACs with a lot more energy efficiency. How does that make people hypocrites?

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

#218
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the inside of your home getting to 40 in Belgium? Our hottest recorded air temperature was 36 this year. There were many excess deaths, but there was also a shortage of fans here. Good fans could have also saved their lives.

I live in the Netherlands. My apartment has two floors. The upper floor is basically a greenhouse, so 40C is absolutely normal if I close the windows. During the summer I always keep at least one window open, which cools down the house to around 30-35C. This sucks during summer but during winter it's a blessing because I can have 30C on a sunny day even if it's 0C outside. The only drawback is that the windows are ve…

> During the summer I always keep at least one window open, which cools down the house to around 30-35C.

Yeah this is exactly my point. If your house is so poorly insulated that your internal temperatures go above the ambient temperature, you can open a window.

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

#219
post #202

I also find deeply and even extremely ironic, that the same greenwashing radicals who bash ACs in Europe are then supporting "heat pumps" as a modern and efficient heating device. There are even programs labelled as Eco or green or whatever the jargon of the day is, to subsidize or finance heat pumps. People are seemingly unaware that heat pumps are just an AC with a tiny additional valve in the pipes :) .

Nothing ironic about that. Using an airco to cool a house is often (not always) a luxury that humans did without for centuries. So people are used to seeing cooling as luxury. Without heating you die.

A heatpump is more energy efficient than most other forms of heating. A heatpump is not always the most efficient way to cool a house.

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