Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

humanprogress.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 294 posts

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

#281

Post by michelsedgh »

kalleboo wrote: post #277
michelsedgh wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/2035921843757216158?s=20 This is just one example. EVgo and many other very large charging networks use generators also. Even if you charge at home or anywhere else which you don't see the generator, that electricity has to be made from using coal gas or other stuff, renewables are not a big share in most of them. Those cables transferring electricity loses a lot of energy and give…

Rare exceptions exist (the other is chargers out in the middle of nowhere, or during construction that impacts the grid connection), if they all used gas generators that cost for a fast charge would be 4x what it is, it's obvious it's not normal. > that electricity has to be made from using coal gas or other stuff, renewables are not a big share in most of them If we're talking about Europe as this thread was, fossil…

Totally understand thanks for the explanation. still it doesnt make sense and answer why are they so strict about using cooling devices. If theyre using renewables and stuff it only makes sense cooling would be more okay that using that same energy to heat houses, yet cooling is just political and restricted. Im in US and i could care less it just reading comments even on here how hard can be installing AC and stuff really doesn't make sense.

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

#282

Post by snapplebobapple »

stasomatic wrote: post #274
deanc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, new builds should be mandatory, but this is not easy to retrofit to existing apartment buildings in a country where labour and parts are notoriously expensive and have to be split with the residents.

I can run a broken toilet tank all day long without extra fees, hundreds of gallons. Can turn all faucets on without penalties, nobody is counting and the utility doesn't care. The maintenance fees for water cover it, spread across all residents (although they are not low, like $1,800 on top of mortgage, subsidizing things I don't use, like card rooms, ping pong hall, etc.). Some families live 4-5 in a 2 bedroom, in…

Thats easy then. put the condenser in the running toilet

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

#283

Post by kleiba2 »

throwaway473825 wrote: post #195
kleiba2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I have to say, AC is not "banned" anywhere in Europe Exactly, the whole premise of the article is a bit of a strawman. In fact, where I live, the demand for AC installation is so high that you have to wait months for a company to install a unit for you. These extreme heat waves are a fairly new phenomenon, summers in central Europe just didn't use to get so hot for such a long stretch of time even a few decades…

> But let's not forget that energy is also on average a lot more expensive in Europe than in the US. The cost plus environmental concerns, which seem to fair less high in the public conscience on the other side of the Atlantic, have also been reasons why people were not keen on AC units in the past. The price of energy in Europe is largely determined by taxes and policy costs. Gas is mostly unencumbered. Electricity…

Traditionally, for heating your house, you had the choice between coal, oil, and gas. Electric heating wasn't a widespread alternative, esp. because of the price of electricity. Even today, heat pumps consume a fair amount of electricity. Solar panels can offset the cost but in many parts of Europe, the panels are not producing enough power in the winter, which is when you naturally want to run a heater.

And regarding ACs in cars: you will certainly agree that cooling the inside of a car for the duration of a drive vs. the inside of a whole house (or even just selected rooms) for the whole day differ from each other by orders of magnitude regarding the energy required.

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

#284

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

mopsi wrote: post #221
Moldoteck wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not propaganda what a nonsense. The fact that more ppl die from cold is not an argument against using ACs. It's an argument to have hvacs to get proper electrified cooling and heating

But it is such a strange, superficial flood of propaganda; preaching is perhaps a better word. The main concern remains heat retention and that's what buildings will remain optimized for. My house has 65 cm / 2 ft stone walls, which makes the normal temperature changes throughout the year very gradual because of the enormous thermal mass of the walls. But once the walls heat up during a prolonged heatwave (which are…

I agree with this, there does seem to be a volume and tone about AC that seems inauthentic (in general, not specifically on this site)

Yes, AC is harder in old building with solid walls as is common in UK & Europe. We have a portable AC unit since March this year, and are very glad of it. It doesn't solve everything but it helped us through the worst of the heat.

All of that is nuance, and nuance is notoriously ineffective when replying to propaganda that relies on black and white thinking, volume and on changing the subject to something related, emotive but not as consequential.

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

#285

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

Moldoteck wrote: post #140
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #72

You might be surprised how far you can get with a simple fan. What your body needs is to evaporate heat. You sweat, it evaporates, skin cools down. Airflow helps that process a whole bunch. It's physics. It may not make hot weather feel perfect but it will cover the necessity pretty much anywhere. Same goes for tree shade and sensible city planning, also architecture (see all those textured dark grey or black condos…

During heatwaves the fan is no longer sufficient. It can improve ac cold air spreading though. A fan alone will not help you when your walls are warm and when even at night outside temp is above 20dg and humidity is high

It will. In SE Asia it was so hot even the water from the pipes is warm. Airflow does wonders regardless, as long as ambient temperature is lower than your body.

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

#286

Post by iso1631 »

kalleboo wrote: post #262
iso1631 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they put more demand on the electrical grid. Domestic connections in the UK are built with an average peak consumption of about 1.5 to 2kW, you can draw ten times that, but its unlikely every house will do that at the same time, so it's just like a contention ratio on a network. Now imagine everyone charges their car, even if it's only for an hour, but when they get home at 7pm, same time as putting on the kettle…

Easily solved with various time-of-use pricing schemes. Have people put their cars on a timer to charge in the middle of the night, or during the day in countries with solar. I already have this for my hot water heating - the water heater only runs during solar hours when there is a cheaper rate. > Drawing 20kW for one hour Why would you fast charge if your car is going to be parked at home overnight anyway

Charging one car at 7kW, put the oven on, jump in the electric shower, and you're there before the heat pump even kicks in.

20kW is the about the maximum input to a typical UK home (80A or 100A breaker single phase 216-253V). You can draw that fairly easily.

But a street of 100 houses is not drawing 20kW to each house at the same time, or 2MW to the street. Standard models put it around 200kW. The substation can be overspecced to 300kW and there's no problem.

Convert everyone to electric and that substation needs to be upped far higher.

I live on a new build site still under construction. Until a month ago the site was fed from a long cable from a separate substation. The houses have solar and electric car points.

The voltage varied dramatically and electric chargers would frequently trip (they do that when voltage goes over I think 247V for safety purposes).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f6TD2OSup4 helped me understand what I was seeing.

Last month we were moved onto a new substation and haven't have issues since.

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

#287

Post by Yizahi »

robocat wrote: post #279
Yizahi wrote: 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 :) .

The biggest issue with greenies is that their goals tend to be overly idealistic. They don't compromise - even when a compromise would strictly improve the world. Well, most voters hate to make compromises but the greenies seem to do it harder. In NZ we have a very left wing Green Party who in theory could have power in a minority coalition with our "conservative" party. However politically it would never work. I thi…

> They don't compromise - even when a compromise would strictly improve the world.

This 100%. This what I recently articulated for myself about my dissatisfaction with certain groups of people who claim to be very progressive and so on. Some of those people are so radical that they are unwilling to compromise even on a tiny things. If they get to get 100% of something and other people get to get 50% of they want, or if they would compromise and both sets would get 90% or 95% or even sometimes 99% (both), they are absolutely unwilling to cease demanding strict 100%.

Basically they claim to be pro-social, but if we think about the issue in general, they are the ones failing the prisoner's dilemma, just on the opposite side. Not willing to compromise on anything even if they do then humanity on average would win more.

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

#288

Post by Yizahi »

sig-11 wrote: post #224
Yizahi wrote: 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 :) .

They are. They're also heating indoors up to 4x more efficiently than the best alternative. Nobody is opposing AC cooling for efficiency. The resistence to cooling with AC comes from way before HP became popular and remains, somehow. Part of it is because it's perceived as a luxury (while heating is not), partly because being relatively uncommon until recently its surprising for some people and therefore the perceive…

> It'll go away. Because it's really vitally important, and because air/air HPs are perfect trojan horses to normalize AC cooling.

I sincerely hope so. But the trouble is that politicians and activists are very fond of picking smaller targets for their negativity. Because it is easier to wage war on a regular mid to poor salary-man neighbor instead of some faceless corporation with the billions of cash, a staff of lawyers and incorporated half the world away in a jurisdiction with thoroughly corrupted judges. This is why we are seeing this avalanche of anti-social initiatives under the slogans of "progress". Like the insane fines for not following insane garbage sorting rules in some select countries, or the taxation levied on the individuals and small businesses instead of megacorps, or the whole legalized surveillance while rich people and corpos are excluded, or this AC insanity now (had any activist in EU protested under any business center that it should be without AC? Nope. But firing at individuals is easier and grants more satisfying results.

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

#289

Post by stasomatic »

ryandrake wrote: post #278
stasomatic wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can run a broken toilet tank all day long without extra fees, hundreds of gallons. Can turn all faucets on without penalties, nobody is counting and the utility doesn't care. The maintenance fees for water cover it, spread across all residents (although they are not low, like $1,800 on top of mortgage, subsidizing things I don't use, like card rooms, ping pong hall, etc.). Some families live 4-5 in a 2 bedroom, in…

That seems unusual to me. I've never lived in a place where water was not metered and charged by the volume consumed. A necessity like water (and A/C) should be as you describe, but I've never seen it, at least not in the USA.

I live in a condo in Florida in a 3 building high-rise compound. There are no water meters per unit. Water is covered by maintenance fees. They are atrocious and rising, but water is "free". Retrofitting will increase maintenance fees, likely by a lot more than I would save paying for my own water usage.

I had a similar situation involving electricity when living in Los Angeles, in the Valley. Electricity costs were averaged across all units, there were no individual meters per unit. My family of 3 humans in a 2 bedroom apartment consumed a lot less than a 10 human family in a 3 bedroom, and that was a thing. I subsidized their electricity usage. This involved things like pool heating, grass maintenance which I never cared about or used. This was at Bella Vista near Warner Ridge. https://www.equityapartments.com/los-angeles/woodland-hills/...

In the US, utility companies don't bill you for actual usage, they have "predictions" on what you may use. IME. You can burn candles and eat canned food for a month and still get billed $300.

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

#290

Post by AlexeyBelov »

esseph wrote: post #254
vlyan wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> but the only remotely European people not going extinct are some subgroups of Israeli Jews What?

70 day old account. You're replying to a 70 day old account. Just don't.
Post reply on HN