We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building. I've heard stories of residents being scalded for putting flowers on their balcony railings that face outwards as it ruins the "look". Given almost all apartment buildings are built consistently between every floor they could ensure consistent placement of condensers across all floors and it wouldn't even look that bad.
What makes the situation much worse here is we have insanely good insulation on the buildings. They trap heat for the cold winters, but the walls just maintain all the heat during the summers. A new approach is needed to make it livable here.
In my own apartment I am not able to create a cross-breeze through strategic window opening to try and bring in cooler air from outside, so I've resorted to opening a window on one side of the apartment and using a Vornado fan to push air out the window on another side of the apartment - creating a pressurized system.
While I hear you, I think AC is better centralized for the building, along with heat and water.
Yes, there are numerous reasons why this is harder to do than just doing it ad-hoc per apartment, but if we’re to see it as infrastructure, it should receive the same level of consideration as other utilities.
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 my case it's just the two of us and the dog. Pretty insane, no logical solutions in sight. Moving isn't inexpensive.
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.
The problem with shared is the issue of shared cost. How do you determine how much a user consumes?
There is also the issue of upgrading the shared infrastructure. Because of the size it's a lot more expensive to replace, so that is postponed for much longer because now everybody needs to pitch in.
For most of the buildings from communism era - all the utilities run through the apartments anyway and there is absolutely no place or way to retrofit these utilities without extensively either re-doing it from scratch, or trying to somehow retrofit it on the outside.
All of these options are a non-starter considering basic AC starts from $500. Why should anyone invest more than that?
Permissions and structural concerns aside, you only need one 65mm/2.5" hole in the wall to run the high/low pressure gas lines, a drain hose, and a power cable, plus couple more non-penetrating drill holes on the wall to mount the inside and outside units. You'll need a hole saw attachment on a drill, a vacuum pump to thoroughly dry out the system, and bits of plastic putty to fill the hole against intrusion. It's a less than 5 man-hour job.
you don't really need drain hose for outside multisplit unit, my AC drain hoses from all indoor units are connected to my WC tank, I used previously pumps to push the water to the roof, but they were not reliable and once after thunderstorm they died when I finally went for passive solution, should have done it from the beginning)
Many communist-era buildings had a service shaft the width of the back wall of the toilet closet (yes, bathroom and toilet are separate rooms). This was hidden from everyday view with large cabinet doors.
A national-scale project can likely package cooling for these shafts, possibly emanating from rooftop units.
> We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building.
Same for Germany, at least in many places. And if your building gets reclassified as being under Denkmalschutz (cultural heritage management) you've won in the Lottery of Pain.
You can install one on the balcony below the railing level.
The housing company is responsible for the exterior surfaces and thus also responsible for whatever happens to fall on bystanders when it will inevitably happen.
AC installers are also notoriously bad at following placement guidelines.
I've had one placed like this in the balcony of a XVth century palazzo turned museum plus hotel, straight in the historical heart of Verona. If they can do it, everybody can do it as well.
Doesn't matter what it looks like, problem is it changes the facade. For that you need to submit some paperwork and get it approved.
You can actually install a heat pump in most apartment buildings, as long as it's on the balcony and not visible from the street (=below waist-level). Main reason you wouldn't, is condensate output which has to be piped indoors or into a heated drain during the winter. Or you just pipe it into your balcony's rainwater drain and accept that you can't use the heatpump below 0C.
Obviously, people thought about this, and there are lots of fence designs that admit plenty of airflow and lots of products ready-made for this already.
Service technicians hate fences unless they are easy to remove during a service call. Honestly, esthetics is not as much concerning as the noise from compressor and condenser fan. I stayed in an AirBnb, where the outdoor unit next to the bed room, and I couldn't sleep.
Sometimes it's not about the fence, it's about exerting power. Put people in charge of the decision that shouldn't be there, and you're in world of pain.
I think you misunderstand what isolation does. It will also keep the heat out. Having window awnings to block sunlight from directly warming up the room will go a long way.
The problem is if you can't get the home cooled off, then heat that does build up can't escape.
In western Canada until recently we got away with very good insulation coupled with opening windows at night as daytime-vs-nighttime temperatures could swing as much as 15C.
But as both daytime and nighttime temperatures increase, or in more humid climates where the temperature doesn't drop enough, that's no longer effective.
The net result is the home just gets hot and stays hot.
Now here is exactly one place where the regulation can hit hard: awnings are maybe not allowed because the house wasn't designed with them. Possible to get the new design approved? For sure. Simple? Ha.
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.
if you have balcony you could hide multisplit unit under railing
if you don't want permanent installation there are not basically mobile split units like Midea Portasplit, it's basically same thing you would install on the wall, but mobile on the wheels (personally I have regular AC (Toshiba) and my multisplit unit is on the flat roof invisible from the street, this year neighbor floor below me installed his unit on the roof as well, we are the only 2 apartments in two units with 40 apartments in total with AC, so much for Prague AC statistics, though honestly even under the roof in 35C+ temperatures it was not that bad prior turning on the AC)
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.
> 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 ago. Now that they've become the way they are, people are doing what? Correct, installing AC units. Imagine that.
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.
> 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 could be as well. It's a political choice to make electricity expensive.
Furthermore, given that many Europeans couldn't care less about the negative externalities of gas heating, it's very hard to argue that this is a major concern for AC, especially when AC is already mainstream in cars.
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.
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 engineering/structural/architect drawings and freehold-consent paperwork. The freeholder can also charge you their legal and administration costs, even if they ultimately reject the application. Essentially it's >5K of paperwork which might be wasted if it's rejected even just to install a single 5KW split.
So in the hottest parts of London and other major cities, where a large proportion of people live in flats, installing AC can be very difficult in practice. In the cooler commuter towns, where houses are much more common, it’s considerably easier.
Why can't they build it into new flat blocks/houses? Nothing outright prevents it but everyone does their best to discourage it. The London Plan, for example, uses a “cooling hierarchy” which 'seeks to reduce any potential overheating and also the need to cool a building through active cooling measures' so good luck getting planning for it.
Actually there is permitted development in Scotland but flats aren't excluded. There's no "Part P" either so an AC could be DIY with no notification or fees.
To be fair, the article doesn't say that AC is banned - it mostly focuses on the HOA-style local ordinances and permits that discourage people from using AC.
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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.
Notice how you switch from "more energy efficient than most..." when talking about heating, but then switch to "is not always the most efficient..." when talking about cooling.
Both are active temperature control, and both are much more efficient than previous forms of heating and cooling.
There's also the fact that cooling uses much less energy than heating because the temperature differential is usually much less extreme. It takes less energy to go from 100F/37C > 75F/23C than it does to go from 32F/0C > 65F/18C.
There are ways to passively cool a house without airco. People have been building cool houses in hot climates for centuries. It doesn't always work, true. Once it is hot 24/7 and you don't have a source of cold anywhere you need airco. But it does explain why people consider airco a luxury item when used for cooling and not when used for heating.
I'm not saying people are always right when considering cooling a luxury while considering heating a necessity, but there is a historical reason for that mindset.
No, heat pumps and ACs are exactly the same device. They add a button to the remote and series of valves in the machine to switch flow of refrigerant forward and reverse, and call it "heat pumps" for upsell. All air conditioners are technically heat pumps.
They just buy slogans from those who espouse efficiency.
In a traditional AC unit, heat is produced by either electric strips or by a gas burner, no refrigeration circuit is involved in the heating cycle. So, just a blower motor runs, compressor (and condenser fan) never runs in the heating cycle.
In heat pumps, refrigeration circuit does both heating and cooling. So, compressor works in both cycles.
How is that not just better since the power requirements are less? The whole point against conventional ACs and for what we call heat pumps is purely that they use less electricities (well, they can also heat and cool, so you don’t need two systems). People like heat pumps simply because they are more energy efficient. It isn’t guerrilla marketing making people like a new thing that is the same as the old thing.
Heat pump = conventional AC - (heat strip/gas burner) + reversing the refrigeration circuit for the heat cycle + efficient ECM motor (for air blower) + VFD compressor (single phase to DC to three phase AC with variable frequency) + modern controls to manage both inside and outside motors.
One can install an efficient AC unit with electric strips (gas burner) with "efficient ECM motor (for air blower) + VFD compressor (single phase to DC to three phase AC with variable frequency) + modern controls to manage both inside and outside motors." That's where modern AC units are driving at.
Heat pump uses electricity for compressor fan and fan in that outdoor unit. In an efficient conventional AC unit, one trades the extra electricity used in the outside unit for the electricity used for heat strips.
Geothermal heat pump is efficient and is a different ball game.
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 perceived cause of illnesses and malaise.
It'll go away. Because it's really vitally important, and because air/air HPs are perfect trojan horses to normalize AC cooling.
.. That being said, I had to call 3 companies in Germany before I even found one willing to sell me a air/air HP. And the cooling function has to be carefully ignored if you want it subsidized.
> 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.
The "get a heat pump" narrative is just saying that heat pumps are better than gas heating or electric resistive heating. It is not hypocritical to say "people who already have a furnace and an AC should get a heat pump" while also saying "people who don't have an AC should consider continuing to not have AC."
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 think both parties veto working together, but New Zealand loses out on green progress because of that. Instead the Greens only make a coalition with the left, which is already quite green focused so the Greens remain rather impotent.
Conservative greeny voters in New Zealand need better representation.
Fortunately our heat pumps usually also have AC. I can only guess we don't have any insane rules about that because having a heatpump with AC has been normal for decades (AC isn't just for the hated tall-poppy wealthy: and very few have a dedicated aircon unit).
> 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.
Sweden has a 'district cooling' as well as district heating. 2 completely different systems ofcourse. The district cooling is a centralized way of providing cold air/liquid to building and facilities across the city. The centralized producer of the cold stuff, they can also create the chilly stuff by utilizing waste heat from factories, large buildings etc.
Pretty neat idea IMO, and something that ideally would be in priority instead of letting each building have their own AC and create a lot of noise.
The problem with monopolies is that they can hike prices at will. This has certainly happened with district heating in Sweden. You can't do that with AC and solar.
> This ailment is mysteriously absent from the United States, where indoor temperatures are often kept at around 75 degrees even when it’s 100 degrees outside
If having a high temperature delta was a concern everyone in Texas would be dead by now.
I set my thermostat to 65F in August. My house is at 67F right now and it's 81F outside (at 7AM). We're still catching up from yesterday. I don't see the point in allowing the condensing unit to shut off when it's this hot and humid out. You are just giving the angry super Mario sun a head start when you let it turn off in the morning. The temperature in my house will still rise to 74-75F with this unit running non stop. The forecast for today is approximately 100F.
At some point, the cost of electricity becomes constant (100% duty cycle). You can't run the air conditioner more than all the time. It makes the equipment last a lot longer when it's not being cycled every 10-15 minutes. It can be cheaper to just keep things brutally cold given the relatively affordable electric rates. $300 capacitor replacement can buy a lot of kilowatt hours in the ercot and entergy markets. Short cycling a compressor with high pressure and you could be replacing one every other year.
If any of this sounds offensive, I would invite the offended party to join me for lunch in downtown Houston or Galveston sometime this week.
The point is that 65F is an unattainable temperature which results in the unit never shutting off. My pathetic 3-ton system cannot actually reach set point when the delta is 35+ degrees.
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 thing was this was a youth sports tournament. These kids are playing all-day tournaments in 33C+ heat (and sometimes 36C+) for a solid two months of the year. While they may cope with the heat better than I do, I worry it’s only a matter of time before tragedy strikes.
That being said, this year I am making an effort to rely less on AC and do some moderate exercise in the heat to increase my tolerance.
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.
A couple of years ago that would have been correct, but circumstances have changed.
We've had a series of heat waves this summer, and temperatures have gotten very high inside. Much depends on the location of course, and the type of building, and stuff like that, but the fact is that in Belgium alone thousands of people have died because of the heat. Thousands of people that would still be with us if they would have had adequate cooling.
When it's close to 40 °C in your home, a ceiling fan is not going to make a meaningful difference.
And we need to keep in mind that summers are in all likelihood going to get hotter and hotter.
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 very old so in winter that heat escapes immediately once the sun is gone. HOA has been planning window replacement for years already.
The lower floor has windows facing north so it's always much cooler there. I've never seen it reach more than 30C, which was in the middle of a heatwave, usually it keeps 25C during summer.
> 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.
Chances are that ambient are doesn't provide enough cooling. Maybe you can open only window, or all windows on the same side of your home, meaning there's no draft. Maybe you're in an urban environment, with a micro climate even hotter than outside the city. Maybe both. Heat will enter from sunlight and from people inside, and will exit only very slowly.
There's a world of difference between a house in the countryside, with maybe even some trees providing shade, and an apartment in a densely populated area with very low opportunities for thermal control.
I live in Sweden. You are incorrect. Having your home basically unlivable a few weeks every year is not ok, and ground heat exchange pumps that provide cooling are energetically basically free, so just do it.
I think you underestimate how powerful ceiling fans can be. The highest temperature in Sweden this year was only 36, you would be absolutely fine with a ceiling fan unless you wanted to exercise.
That said, if you are able to get a ground source heat pump, that's awesome, but it's something like 10x to 20x the price of even a really good ceiling fan.
Ceiling (or for that matter any) fans work on your own evaporation. So unless you accept unacceptable levels of humidity or acclimatized to much hotter climate than Sweden and are there for a short time they are not a solution.
Ground source is overhyped and overpriced. District heating and air-exchange AC is still the winning solution.
Well if there's no convection you must be in a vacuum!
But if you mean no forced convection, that's just not the case. You can survive at wetbulb temperatures in excess of 30 C, which means 30 C + 100% RH. Hell, my house right now is at about 25 C drybulb and 18 C wetbulb, which from the perspective of evaporative heat transfer is identical to 18 C with 100% RH, so I should be dying any minute. See you on the other side!
you still have convection even in a sealed room. its walls also do not have zero thermal conductivity so if you don't move, you only have to reject about 100W and that is survivable
They have very good thermal coeffiency: ground source heat pumps will typically generate 3-6kWh of thermal energy from 1kWh of electricity. By reversing the flow you can also use ground source heat pumps for cooling as well.
Doesn't sound like "basically free" to me... It still uses electricity, which doesn't help with climate change (even if it mostly comes from renewables).
More or less the only people who can do that in Europe are rich people with detached homes in the suburbs, which is a vanishingly small minority. European governments could do a lot more to invest in photovoltaics, but it's a bit complicated with how cramped the continent is.
You can replace farmland, but that seems like a really bad idea with Globalism's decline. Who knows what's going to happen to the food supply chain over the next 30 years. The only other option is attaching them to the exterior of historic buildings, and heaven forbid! Think about the character of the neighborhood!
Plenty of semis and terraces have solar. Including the semis I can see out the window right now.
In the UK Semi, Terrace and Detached is about 75% of households and 80% of people.
If you look only at owners it's about 90% of households (and even higher for population)
And anyone who owns a home is rich. If you can afford 300k for a house you can afford 15k on reducing your electric bill.
Now rental of course is a separate matter, and the real problem.
As housing is so constrained landlords can extract all the money from tenants regardless of the quality, but even if it isn't, renters tend not to value things like solar or aircon. You can spend £10k adding solar to a house, but you probably aren't going to get enough from extra rent to offset the cost of installing it.
In the US a property owner has to provide AC because renters will expect it, same as you have to provide a washing machine connection in a rented place. This is a mindset thing which can't be changed.
In other European countries, but its not changing. Among owner-occupiers its France 80% houses, Germany and Austria 70%.
However the rental issue is far more in those countries, where nearly half the country live in rental. Things like balcony solar work well there, and they can power a portable AC.
Hard to see how you can read what GP said as anything other than "basically free", and failing to quantify, like you are doing here, and just categorically calling all electricity use bad is not coherent or helpful either.
Normally with ground heat exchange you cool down the hole so the system becomes less efficient over time. With cooling of your house that extra heat goes down the hole again. That ends up being almost free over the lifetime of the entire system.
Run on solar (sun usually shines when it's hot) and use geothermic energy. The ground below your house is significantly cooler than the surrounding air.
I'd still favour the fan, I've lived in India for longer periods with consistently around 32-36 C and a fan is perfectly enough after a little while of adapting.
This was an half usefull joke. I can still make it with the exterior unit off for an extra 1 or 2 degrees with just the interior unit blowing during the day and the use the AC to cool during the night when it is more efficient.
In any case where I live fans are not a meaningfull stopgap measure.
Forced air cooling require air to be colder than the heatsink surface and evaporative cooling require relative humidity to be less than 100%.
I don't know how bad the situation in Europe is, but we're already at point where there are times and places on Earth where one can construct a primal instinctive understanding of that by simply walking out of an air conditioned room(to which you SHOULD return within half an hour and MUST within an hour). "Just get fans bro" is tone deaf.
I mean, those places didn't have air conditioning 50-100 years ago and did fine, now air conditioning is life saving devices there. Global warming/climate change is real.
The WHO guide others are posting says fans only work under 40C, but that's the absolute maximum. There's no other option than resorting to devices based on refrigeration cycle when people are already dying("estimated through excess mortality" or however you dress it up), beyond being useless(human cognitive performance significantly degrade at above 28C).
The upper bound of 40C quoted in other comments is also just absolute maximum temperature - it's just saying that there's no way fans do anything if temperature of air and body are actually equal. The practical upper bound is lower than that(humidity and metabolism dependent, I guess).
yeah, I honestly dont understand why every apartment doesnt have ceiling fan, it's almost zero investment like 40-60EUR and it can be combined with light, so you don't even need any new power line
personally I tried one summer back here in Europe without AC just with ceiling fans in each room and gave up and installed AC next year, that was like 10 years ago, can't imagine just ceiling fans in these 35-40C heatwaves, you will be just moving hot air since building can't cool down even in night
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.
> Several countries require AC installation to be approved by the equivalent of a homeowners association or impose noise ordinances that increase compliance costs and paperwork.
This is not unique to ACs. Anything on the outside of a building requires your co-owners to agree.
That's where the image of AC in general matters. It needs to be seen as a life saving tech just like heating, not a luxury item for rich people.
If it was just a matter of red tape it would be fine, but in France people would fight you on AC because it's ugly/noisy/warms up the street.
So you can get it rejected by people who live in a flat where heat is not as much of a problem as your (ground floor vs higher floor, window orientation) or by landlords who don't even live in the building.
https://www.headingtonshark.com/Home/About ("Hello. I'm Magnus Hanson-Heine, the home-owner of the Headington Shark House. The Shark House, formally titled Untitled 1986, consists of a 25ft-long fibreglass and steel shark crashing through the roof of an otherwise ordinary house on a quiet residential street in suburban Oxford...")
There are noise conditions and a few scenarios that will need planning permission (facing a public highway is one) but generally pretty liberal.
The shark scenario is more interesting, and was I'd say was largely allowed to stay because it was an art installation. They couldn't have built an extension of the same proportions without planning permission.
> HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?
Home-owner associations in Europe are frequently set up for apartment buildings, in which case, yes, the roof, foundation, hallways, stairwells, main piping, electricity, etc are all legally co-owned.
Primary purpose of HOAs is to save for & plan long-term maintenance on the entire building.
HOAs for neighbourhoods, or blocks with single-family homes or terraced houses are pretty rare in Europe.
What will hit you before that here in Switzerland is the local authorities which have in front of their eyes a certain plan for your building, and anything not on the plan (in this case the AC unit) will need a permit. It's not an easy task, I would say impossible actually, to get such a permit, unless you find a way to redesign the whole facade in a acceptable way (units poking out doesn't count as acceptable).
Multi-logement buildings are not really the issue here. In the US (and outside, but less commonly, but e.g. France has them in the Alps, for the same reason) there are communities with only freestanding houses that privately own the infrastructure serving a number of houses, if I may be blunt: to make things cheaper for local councils and get housing approved, everything from roads to sewer lines.
They force homeowners to decide together (and pay for) everything from road maintenance to what noise levels are allowed.
Another issue they cause is that, of course, the homeowners living there do not just use HOAs to override the wishes of individuals, but also feel disinclined to let the local authorities ... and the locals ... operate as normal there, given that they pay for everything, sometimes literally including the roads in the area around them. These communities may have banks, parks, even beaches, and there are conflicts about who gets to go there, given the local homeowners pay for maintenance. For example, given they clean up left-behind garbage, do people from the nearby town get to play there ... and leave behind more garbage?
The root of the problem is that more housing is no longer a net positive for many communities in a great many places. The increase in taxation income does not justify the extra infrastructure in many places. This means local authorities refuse building projects unless they pay for their own infrastructure. Hence, HOAs are being forced to take over the functions that public authorities used to have ... because local authorities are forcing the responsibilities that local authorities used to have on them. Of course, then the public nature of public space goes into question.
> The root of the problem is that more housing is no longer a net positive for many communities in a great many places. The increase in taxation income does not justify the extra infrastructure in many places. This means local authorities refuse building projects unless they pay for their own infrastructure.
So a municipality can just refuse to build infrastructure?
That's just the "fuck you, got mine" mentality that permeates the living experience of US citizens. That's how they got their healthcare system as well.
> So a municipality can just refuse to build infrastructure?
Technically they're refusing to let people build unless they pay for (and arrange for) infrastructure. They will certainly claim that this is in fact building infrastructure.
> That's just the "fuck you, got mine" mentality ...
HOAs are companies, with the owners as shareholders, who own the shared infrastructure of the owners. Things like hallways, maybe elevators, gardens, this can even include the roads in a community.
The point of HOAs is to force homeowners to CO-decide (in houses: to make things cheaper for local councils) on what happens to the shared infrastructure. What and how to spend of maintenance and what to change.
Don't get me started on how it works in my country.
People who don't have a balcony are screwed and are entirely dependent on homeowners association which arbitrarily can agree or not, or they can stay indecisive about it and not let you do anything.
Well, if you have a balcony? you just put it there and make the necessary holes for it, problem solved.
The effect is exactly the same - you just have AC installed. In one case you have to go through totally unnecessary hoops, and in other case, you just do whatever you want.
It is not entirely that simple. Condensate water is potential problem if wrongly discharged. But adding sufficient drainage is not that expensive per balcony basis. So it is something that should be fixed.
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 with it. I am sure those have some downsides, too.
I am all for solving these problems and making sure they don't cause problems for others. My problem is with the ability for arbitrary people to say "no" to your case, without even considering the options or facts.
Sure thing, you could go to court if they have any problem, but who is going to fight for AC worth $500 for a few years just to get it installed?
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.
Exactly. While I personaly don't have a problem with AC condensate dripping down on the street, I can see how some people might not be used to that.
Best would probably be to use the existing rainwater pipes that lead down to the sewers - all building have those. But good luck getting that past your HOA-equivalent, as that will most probably involve some modifications to the building and we can't have that, no!
In a typical mini-split, the water flows to the outside unit and exits the system there, so you either have a pump or a sufficiently sloped pipe from the inside unit to the outside unit.
edit: I guess you could route the drain pipe anywhere if you wanted, so I retract my previous statement.
Into drains in the parking garage in the case of my building. Though thinking more about it now, it's totally reasonable that other buildings might find it easiest to drain to the outside unit.
In our London apartment leasehold, we have a water-sourced air conditioning unit. No external condenser required, it instead dumps the heat into the waste water. It has been incredibly helpful during this heat wave as someone who really struggles in the heat and works from home.
It's not ideal during a drought though to be using water like that, it would be nice if we had a grey water tank system so we didn't have to waste drinking water. It doesn't seem possible to install a grey water tank like that in our apartment though. Given our apartment already has district heating, there's not a super strong reason why it couldn't have district cooling as well, but the regulations are not in our favour here.
We installed it all without planning permission, although it still might require permission from the freeholder depending on the rules regarding Service Media alterations (as it requires new plumbing for our mains water).
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.
Most building professionals, urban/city/master planners/engineers are explicitly incorporating resilience into their designs at all levels. This includes both new designs and retrofitting old buildings.
Places of emergency cooling refuge, parks, backup power to ensure energy/water continue, passive features like solar heating, natural ventilation, bioswales, air quality filtering, cool roofs/roads, water features, overhangs/louvers/awnings, insulation, thermal mass, etc, etc.
These are things grass roots can do now to mitigate impacts while governments dither and punt hard decisions into the future.
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 currently in fashion and shudder). The other day I was biking along a road after dark and residual heat around it is so noticeable, biking 5 meters closer to the trees it felt so much colder.
I've spent some time in SE Asia. Many homes out there don't have an A/C. Apparently the real number is like 85%.
Should air conditioning maybe be less regulated in Europe? Sure. Do I enjoy A/C on occasion? Sure, guilty. Is climate change real? Sure. But A/C is a necessity like water/sewage/electricity? In Europe?? Idk.
Edit: I agree in advance with everyone saying it sucks without AC but just saying, a strategic fan (and opening windows if possible, closing curtains, etc) can be OP. It might sound stupid but for years I literally forgot fans existed because I was where everywhere is AC and often no fan. Just try it...
Edit 2: I think if you're in a hot AND especially humid place (probably not EU) I'm not sure if I'd take AC or dehumidifier
I think you're under-estimating how hot it gets inside well-insulated European homes. Your mileage may vary across European countries, but in the north where it gets cold in the winter our homes are built to trap heat. Opening windows won't get you very far as the temperature radiates through the windows and traps in the walls. Closing blinds will help, but not by much. It got over 40c in my office this summer. This is not livable conditions with a fan.
When it's around 20C, it's impossible for me to make my rooms colder than say 23C, because there is no way I can make so much of air exchange.
Even if I somehow manage to pull the air in, the moment I close it - the walls that have all that heat will start giving it back again, bringing the temperature back to where it was.
It's so funny, that when the winter starts, it's long into the winter before I have to turn on heating in my apartment.
You should come to Texas and tell me how well you get along with just a fan. We have had like over 40 days of 40-45 C in a row. The wind feels like a blast furnace and at night it can still be 38 C outside. Even the birds have fled to cooler locals. It is so intense that you can not walk barefoot outside around your home. If your car broke down on the side of a road, you would be dead in less than an hour, even in the shade. I like to tell people that Texas is the next stop after Hell and too be honest it is like living in the Arctic compared to Arizona where the temps are even worse.
I was in Vienna this summer and the inside of the apartment was over 40 for the entire week. Thank god, we were able to buy a portable AC unit from Mediamrkt before they ran out.
The problem is when humidity rises it makes it harder forbthe body to expel hear via evaporation. This is what is happening in places like UK this time around. An AC helps get rid of the humidity as it cools the air. I don't know about necessity now but 20 years down the line, who knows
Cooling the air by definition raises the humidity :-)
Dehumidifier mode in AC works by cooling the air below the dew point, removing the condensation, then warming the air up (either by itself or literally heating it up)
But for dehumidifier in AC, the heat is dispensed through the outdoor unit, so end result actually cools the house. I use our AC in dehumidifier mode, also, as I understand it has less power consumption (please correct me if I am wrong). In my experience, it cools down the room pretty well
Due point for that air is 19.8C. Meaning it reaches 100% relative humidity at this point. If cooled even more, water condensates from air into droplets.
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What this means: if you cool that air to 22 degrees (instead of 19.8) it will reach 87% humidity without loosing any water to the outside.
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That’s why we need humidifiers in winter as the opposite thing happens: if we heat cold air that has 80% relative humidity to room temperature it will drop its humidity to 20%
I won't say "less power consumption". Definitely, not more consumption if efficient controls and motors are used (ECM motors for air handlers, VFD compressors).
The real problem is the repair costs of these advanced units in the developed countries. Carrier wanted $8k for a new control board for a residential unit in the US. Same thing for ECM/VFD.
It really depends on the type of ac unit and conditions. If for example it has to cool it first to condense the moisture out and then also reheat it back to avoid blowing back air that’s too cold, it may consume more power even.
> Cooling the air by definition raises the humidity :-)
That’s a bit too nitpick-y. It raises the relative humidity by the condenser coil unit so it condenses and drips out, but air flowing back into the rooms will have less humidity.
Now my room is 26.5C and 40% relative humidity, it is really pleasant. There are days where it is 24C and relative humidity is showing 55%, that's when I turn on AC.
I am from an SE-Asian country, AC usage has increased a lot, and, also we are hell bent on devastating every green that is available, as much as possible.
Portable one's heat dispenser is inside your room, AC unit's outside. But the issue being, as it disperses the heat outside, it's probably still increasing the ambient heat?
People in Asia are in those conditions from the birth.
Like they literally put on the sweatshot/hoodie in the early mornings with effing 27 degrees Celsius
That’s not a normal temperature for Europeans.
Also I could not imagine doing some serious thought work in temps like this.
There are a lot of studies of how mental performance is correlated with temperatures with men needing couple degrees even lower than women (eg 22 vs 24)
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Airflow helps a lot, of course. But it must be in swinging motions / constantly changing direction — nervous system doesn’t like same constant stimulus to the point of neuralgia if prolonged.
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.
If humidity is high, you'll not cool down even if ambient temp is below body's. Needless to say, living with 30dg ambient temp inside the house is a misery
> If humidity is high, you'll not cool down even if ambient temp is below body's
No, it's about combination of humidity and temperature called wet bulb.
Highest wet bulb we can manage is 35 degrees. Below 35 wet bulb, a fan helps. And that's my point. For comparison the most extreme wet bulb temp that hit London in summer 2026 was 26 degrees according to met office. (I can't find other peak 2026 wet bulb temps in Europe)
Fans stop cooling at 35 degrees wet bulb. For comparison the most extreme wet bulb temp that hit London in summer 2026 was 26 degrees according to met office. (I can't find other peak 2026 wet bulb temps in europe, feel free to contribute)
> But A/C it a necessity like water/sewage/electricity? In Europe, nah.
s/Europe/all parts of Europe/
I.e., Europe has a lot of different climate (sub)zones, and it heavily depends on where you actually live.
I'm fine with a fan in the Alps, where I sleep at 1,000 metres above sea level, and nights with the minimum temperature above 20°C are still very rare. I even don't bother turning the fan on most of the time, or just for an hour or so to clear the trapped heat in the bedroom at like 22:00 o'clock once outside cooled down enough.
OTOH I'm NOT fine in my Vienna flat with just a fan. There, this summer we got quite a few nights where the minimum temperature did not go below 25°C, even some with a minimum of 28°C and a maximum of 41°C. The flat is an old building and has only windows on one side facing a small curtilage without any trees or grass, so it traps heat, and I cannot even cool it well at night, even if the outside temperature goes a few degrees below the inside one, as the yard also traps heat.
Without an AC I could not sleep at all-even with a fan, it's very hard to sleep well above 25°, and frankly even above 23° for me. And I had to buy a much less efficient portable one (before the Midea Portasplit was a thing) because of braindead local regulations.
Ironically, in the winter the local gov suddenly starts calling those "bad ACs" again by their alternative "heat pumps" name, and they become the best thing ever for heating. I really cannot figure out how one can do that mental gymnastics without getting a headache.
Anyway, don't assume that your local conditions hold for all of Europe.
At least in France, almost all excess deaths were in hospitals and retirement homes. The rest were workers. And we had more heat than Germany. Yes, it is a necessity in some places (schools, nursing homes, hospitals). an AC at home is a luxury. Which, great if you can afford it.
Hearing that ac at home is a luxury in France when piss poor romania/moldova do install them left and right sounds borderline satirical. Ffs an ac is not that expensive. And running it is not that expensive, especially with french nuclear
Here in Norway AC is not the standard in hotel rooms. For 80% of the year, that's OK - but it can become pretty uncomfortable if you're booking anytime between mid-June and mid-August.
The standard here are heat pumps, at least for residential housing. It is really only a problem if you live in blocks or apartment buildings that are housing associations, with strict rules regarding how such heat pumps should be installed.
With that said, for my travel to Europe - especially down south, AC in the hotel room is an absolute necessity. A couple of years ago we ended up in a completely booked hotel in Italy (mid July), where the AC in our room was busted - it was beyond miserable. Ended up changing hotels after one night.
Since global warming I guess. When there's a heat wave, Norway is probably one of the worst places on hearth to be. You've got near constant sunlight, there's not much time at night to cool your house.
As I wrote, most of the time it isn't a problem. There's some central heating which gives you a range of temperature, but getting your room cold is much harder than heating it up.
But during summer months, where some cities can hit 30+ degrees (C), that could become uncomfortable. Even worse if you're somewhere humid...20 degrees in high humidity can make you toss and turn all night.
Well, summers are summers. Besides typical eu ac is a thermal pump, you can heat up with it, although even in mediterannean winter it's not quite adequate.
For me the hardest part is sleeping. I can cope with heat during the day, but even with good bedding, mattress, windows open, fans, etc. the body traps heat underneath and if it's hot outside it's just impossible to sleep. I was like a zombie for 2 months this year. And sleep deprivation in general has a ton of adverse health effects.
Unfortunately, I do live in a "heritage" building so split unit is a no-no. Midea pre-filled mini-splits went from €700 to 2000-3000+ and months of lead time. It's crazy.
I mean it's mostly about energy efficiency, a well insulated house is as easy to cool in summer as it is to heat in winter. Most heat pumps can also cool and new construction in most European countries like Germany is equipped with floor heating and central ventilation which in summer allows you to run around 18 degree Celsius hot water through the system to cool it, that yields around 20-40 Watt of cooling power per square meter, and that's often sufficient to keep things chilly. Mind you not American style 18 degree Celsius kind of chilly, but 20-25 degrees easily, which I think is quite nice. The bonus of this system is that it's mostly "radiative" cooling as the cold surface acts as an absorber of infrared radiation, I find it much more pleasant than having cold air blown into your face.
We equipped our founding era building with wall heating and will test out the heatpump based cooling next summer, if it's not enough I would consider installing a small AC unit, that's super easy as well.
Don't know what the article wants to say, there's no ban on AC anywhere in Europe and small units are quite affordable, you can get a single split unit from Mitsubishi for 500 € from Italy. The only nuisance is that installation is heavily regulated in Germany so they rip you off with insane cost. That's definitely a thing that needs to change in my opinion.
Imagine a world where a larger share of companies focus on actual, verifiable improvement of outcomes for people. Not a world dominated by selling more consumption. A world where we go to work to make things better. Outcomes driven by improvements in human health, longevity, and happiness, not by bottom lines and profit margins. To get to that world we will have to be more open about being imposters.
They think global warming is a minor threat that requires minimal to no changes in regulations, but heat waves (that, according to her, have always been the same every year) are a massive threat to the public and requires immediate changes in regulation.
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.
Any discussion about AC and heatwaves needs to involve the use of web-bulb temperature(which is what the "heat index" comes from), not regular temperature.
A total ban is nonsensical. If you’re concerned about noise regulate the sound level. If you’re concerned about energy use, tax it and put the money raised into a solar subsidy. But the idea you can have a heat pump and can’t have an AC is absurd because a heat pump literally is an AC flipped around.
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 and the oven, that's way higher than the substation can provide.
One study put a fully electric car/heatpump/cooking about 4 times the peak demand of an ice/gas heating house, even if total usage is only twice as much, and total energy use is far less than with ICE/gas. Throw in solar and it reduces the total power drawn from the grid, but not the peak amount. Drawing 20kW for one hour is far more expensive to service than drawing 1kW for 24 hours, but uses less energy.
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).
And no fast charger i've ever used had a gas generator next to it. Even if it were true (and in the EU it is definitely not) DC fast charging is only small percentage of EV charging.
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 gives off lots of heat but you won't see that.
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 fuels are 35% of the grid and dwindling (it was over 50% 20 years ago). Coal is only 11%.
> Those cables transferring electricity loses a lot of energy and gives off lots of heat but you won't see that
Transmission losses are 5%. Transporting oil (be it by ship, truck or pipeline) isn't free either.
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.
I've been thinking for a while about whether it would be feasible to produce an affordable 'personal cooling chamber' for lower income people in places getting scorched in the summer that don't have A/C.
Basically an automotive air conditioning unit hooked up to a battery and solar panel, with a tanning bed type form factor (up to maybe capsule hotel size), painted or coated to reflect light & heat. Highly portable.
I'm not sure if it's remotely practical, but it would be interesting to run the numbers, and I'm certain there is at least someone out there who would buy it even if the cost turned out to be higher than I envision.
You can already get small portable air conditioners but until recently, most people with low incomes wouldn't spend £300 on something they might only need for 4 weeks per year and needs storing the rest of the time. That might change of course as time goes by.
What some people in the UK do is go to local air conditioned public buildings like libraries (which they are welcome to do) and occasionally a large air conditioned store or shopping centre.
Wow, that is really close to what I had in mind, and helpful info. Cool! Literally! Appreciate you sharing it.
As I feared, though, with a price tag of $10k USD, you're halfway to buying a solid used car (preferably hybrid) with air conditioning... which could sleep at least two people fully reclined, plus kids or pets. So you might as well do that. I'd love to see a viable path to bringing this price down.
Regardless, there do seem to at least be niche applications even at this price point.
The compressor unit is just too big and heavy for that. COP is too low for Peltier cooling elements(aka Thermo-Electric Coolers). First generation of those will be/are based on regular ice of H2O or a frozen coolant pack with some engineered high temperature ice; H2O is going to be more convenient since they can be drank and replaced.
It did occur to me that a small, efficient portable icemaker would be an okay runner-up solution. I think being able to cool the air in a small space would be more comfortable overall, though, and wouldn't involve getting wet.
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 higher energy efficiency while also cooling the house in summer (and yes many places with these gas boilers have _hot_ summers these days)!
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?
>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.
Very strange take, you can buy an airco unit in the EU today get it delivered tomorrow morning and, assuming it's the portable kind that just need to be plugged and exhaust outside, have it running right away. For more permanent ones you might need a professional to install it if you don't know yourself. There is absolutely 0 barrier if you need or even just want one.
Proof in Belgium : https://www.coolblue.be/en/air-conditioners/filter which ironically enough aren't even available anymore because they are out of stock, so clearly purchased showing people had no problem getting them. Alternative example 12000BTU A+++ energy rating delivery next week https://www.bol.com/be/fr/p/climatiseur-mobile-puissant-clim... To be clear I'm not advocating to buy these, or not, only that they are freely and conveniently available.
I live in France. That kind of aircon is garbage both in how much it can cool a room and how efficient it is due to under pressure.
You can get a portable split-system if you have a balcony.
But installing a real full-size AC with a large external unit is prohibited in most cases. If you’re renting you’re of course out of luck. An apartment, even one you own-forget it.
Well that is a different setup that what I mention but thanks for indeed highlighting how they are not the same.
FWIW houses in Tuscany with very strict rules, e.g. you don't even get to pick the color of your own house, manage to get the entire place setup with full-size AC it's feasible. What's not feasible is trying to ignore laws on what a building must look like but that has nothing to do with air conditioning. For example if Belgium if you has is classified as notable (most old houses are) then you need a permit even for the window frame.
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.
I've been to a little town in Pakistan where they sell meat out in the open and you can get a hair cut on the street. Houses are run down as you would expect but you better believe they all seemed to have AC units.
The real huge problem has been abandoning all ancient techniques used to passively cool buildings (provenzal well, wind towers, crossed ventilation, pressure differential,...) when AC was invented. The industry loves maintenance. The price will be paid now: low and expensive energy and unnecessary deaths.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I am wondering what luxury will next become a necessity if we keep increasing our energy usage in order to get both more luxuries and necessities?
On the bright side, I suppose one mitigating factor is that renewable energy makes it less harmful to use energy to power A/C usage.
In France it's a cross between a sin, American influence, and something that will destroy your health. Hospitals and retirement homes lack AC and excess deaths occur among the elderly population.
I guess there's the unintended consequence of making the healthcare costs cheaper, if you let the older people cook under unusual weather patterns (even if they are unusual every summer now).
What's particularly weird, but also very French, is it's now a Right v Left issue, with the Left saying we should explore building design ideas for passive cooling instead of hurting the environment further (after all suffering is our own fault for hurting the environment and we should be exposed to that consequence), while the Right is pushing for AC.
Whatever it is, if you go to Paris make sure you stay in a hotel or an Airbnb with A/C.
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 retirement homes sadly need ACs now (thanks global warming), I'm not sure everyone and their dog needs one.
I also have reservations about why an American libertarian think tank writes about what Europeans should do, but that's probably on me.
The reason why they aren't much of a problem for the grid is solar. Right now we already have the issue, that in some areas we're throwing away the majority of the produced electricity. Very common in e.g. southern germany.
Conveniently, cooling is especially needed when the energy production from solar is at its maximum.
I've been part of projects building 20-40 MW solar installations in southern germany and on average we throw away >50% of what we generate.
There is SO MUCH SOLAR now, we don't know what to do with all the energy.
>while I definitely believe that European hospitals and retirement homes sadly need ACs now (thanks global warming), I'm not sure everyone and their dog needs one.
If a 10-day heat wave cuts work productivity by 10% (which is optimistic IMO, it's probably worse in countries where people aren't used to it), that's equivalent to a 1-day general strike. If the workers actually managed to pull off a general strike in modern times, you can be sure the state wouldn't be happy with business as usual.
Most of the grid is built for winter. Summer has huge overcapacity. That's also why France exported every single day and hour this summer despite all the stories of shut down nuclear plants
Europe had tens of thousands of excess deaths from heatwaves this year. It's not about american think tank but basic will to avoid suffering
> 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.
I'm still brothered by climate change every time i get out of my apartment. I still don't want to feel miserable during heatwave. This argument is utter nonsense considering most of Europe has summer clean electric overcapacity. It's even more nonsensical in case of hvacs because it leads to pollution reduction by replacing gas heating
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?
The truth is that until recently AC was not needed in the mild climates of much of the continent and it is already present everywhere in the South and East. Regulation and affordability is part of the story, but its far from the primary factor for most people.
Its funny how its mostly US-based libertarian types concerned about AC in Europe. There are plenty of things Europe over-regulates, but this is not it.
> the French government [1] have said that cooling a room .. more than 15 degrees ... can trigger “thermal shock.” ... This ailment is mysteriously absent from the United States...
Leaving aside that this kind of insinuation makes the article look like cheap rage-bate, cold shock is a cardiovascular risk to the same populations that are most vulnerable to heat waves, and the French government article was recommendations to implement AC in a reasonable way to keep them safe. The underlying weirdness here is that neither of them is a problem for most of the population: the vast majority of heat-wave deaths aren't otherwise healthy people. If you're going to write an article advocating AC, predicated on the deaths heat causes, you should at least mention that you're worried about a very specific population.
For sure heat is uncomfortable for everyone. But so is cold shock: don't drop the temperature by 15°C so that I have to wear a coat to work in the middle of summer. That's just silly.
Has anyone ever argued that AC is luxury? This century? Really? I believe, the division goes between harm/comfort and not luxury/necessity.
I don't have AC at home. Some think I don't install it because I somehow don't get hot in summer or cold at winter. It's the other way around. We, people, have one of the best thermoregulation systems among animals, our whole skin is essentially a huge cooling system. The only way to render it incapable is... stop using it for a prolonged amount of time. It's use it or lose it all over again.
If you don't believe me, read what ultra-marathon runners have to say. If a trained athlete can survive Badwater, almost everyone can train themselves to survive a European heatwave.
Sure, some people can't. Some need AC because of cardiovascular conditions. It's fine, let them have it. But some people can't walk because of musculoskeletal conditions, but no one would argue that a wheelchair is a necessity.
The other side is: my grandmother could survive heatwave just because her house wasn't heating up that much. It's old, it's stone, stone is just good at keeping temperature even. And the air coming through the windows passes through trees that are good at lowering temperature.
Even if it got a bit hot – like it does in mine, that has less volumetric heat capacity — simple floor scrub lowers temperature. Evaporating water is just a very good at that, and floor is a big area.
If we take a house made of paper and place it in a place with no trees and a lot of asphalt, I believe that AC could become a necessity. No amount of evaporating water could help you to fight heat rising from the road.
The AC propaganda coming from the US this year is really strange and out of proportion. About ten times as many people die from the cold in Europe as die from the heat.
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 becoming more frequent because of climate change), AC becomes remarkably ineffective at cooling because the walls will continue radiating heat into the rooms. The walls used to cool down during the night and provide a very nice thermal buffer during the day, but with elevated temperatures even at night, that doesn't work anymore.
"Just install AC, brooo" seems like something coming from the crowd that doesn't want to address the root problem.
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.
Kind of interesting to think about why an American libertarian think tank would be writing articles about Europe. Is it just to give Americans talking points against whatever europhile they might encounter, or does Cato actually care about European policy now?
> HumanProgress.org is a project of the Cato Institute with major support from the John Templeton Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust [1]
> The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. [2]
It's nothing more than US libertarian think tank trying to influence EU policy... Perhaps in an effort to push more anti climate change agenda/discourse in US (but that might be just my projection).
I think even when it's 45C and your boomers cook alive in their concrete ovens, I will still see these sneering opinions from the enlightened master race, civilized to the point of welcoming their own extinction to preserve the klimat for someone else's children.
aboriginal Europeans' TFR is about 1.2 and falling. even if did remain that high (it won't!), 750M will become <100M in 100 years and <10M in 200 years. Europeans have already adopted the most effective strategy imaginable to fight klimat change -- extinction.
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.
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.)
it's a throwaway. it's 70 day old because two or three controversial comments in a row get accounts without 100000000 karma ratelimited to one comment per infinity. when it happens I make another. my squeaky clean main account is older than yours.
It's a throwaway troll account. I know of three other accounts of the same user. The issue is not a couple of slightly downvoted comments, it's persistent trolling.
The ability to create new accounts so easily and be a nuisance is my least favourite "feature" of HN.
not a single European country has the TFR anywhere near 2. with the median age now reaching >=40, the TFR of 1.0-1.5 means rapid and irreversible decline. is this news to you?
yes, yes, very virtuous of you, now back to my point: why should Hans give a flying fuck about climate change if he will have no descendants to suffer from it?
okay, sure. I only removed it because I know that questioning the mass hysteria of that brief era gets you flagged.
>the RKI estimated roughly 2,600–4,900 heat-related deaths annually in 2022–2025
>Germany reported about 2,800 COVID-19-associated deaths in the 2024/25 season, which covers most of the 2025 winter and spring.
so yes, taking Germany as the example, the world-ending plague now kills fewer boomers per year than summer does, despite it being over 4 years since anyone wore face condoms or gave a shit about bi-weekly boosters.
> During a heat wave in 2022, one Frenchwoman said AC “makes you sick, and it gives you a headache.” Left-wing French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon has claimed air conditioning “destroys your sinuses.”
AC giving people headaches and destroying their sinuses sounds a bit bonkers. Ok let people install it then, slap a “government believes this may give you headaches and destroy your sinuses” sticker on it and let people decide.
I guess before the heat wave this could have a been a litmus test for stupidity but now it should be a litmus test for maliciousness.
For sure.
I'm from Germany (but with an AC) as well and am always amazed when people tell me that AC makes you sick. Even young people sometimes replicate this "Oh you gotta be careful not to get sick" and would rather be in 30+°C indoors.
How come Germans get sick while the rest of the world seems to be doing fine and is even productive during summer (it feels like Germany grinds to a halt during heatwaves).
Exactly. It is like never turning the heater on once the temperature drops to -10°C (then catching a cold and getting sick).
So once it is too hot, just turn the AC on and you won't get sick or risk a heat stroke either.
We'll come back to this in several months for a winter freeze to see if Europe has basic heating to keep themselves warm (or will they not turn the heaters on for some reason) and in a year, to see if the rest of Europe have learned their lesson to just have basic AC installed for the next heatwave.
In Japan people often claim to be "allergic" to AC too for some reason, and there have been many stories I've heard from foreigners whose Japanese wives refuse to let them run the AC during the night either.
Personally I think their "allergy" is just because most AC units in Japan are disgustingly moldy and never cleaned regularly.
>Yet as heat waves kill tens of thousands of Europeans each year
...Each year? Was it the case every year twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago? What has changed, miss Follett?
Last words from the article:
>But forgoing air conditioning is a refusal to move on from a lethally hot past.
Gee, I wonder if this global warming thing wasn't a mistake to let happen...
If that author is right, then we can and should punish the people responsible for global warming? Because that includes a lot of her colleagues at Cato and WaPo. The same who were against the same carbon taxes that would be useful to reduce and mitigate the global warming that kills...
We can start with people who got paid to make sure no action was taken against global warming - such as everyone working at CATO, like the author of this article...
It is called a rhetorical question. You already know the answer.
And if you don't already know it, just wonder why AC isn't widespread in Europe, why nuclear plants built decades ago have to stop due to the lack of water and why every single article talks about an "exceptional" heat wave. Do you really need me to hold you hand there?
What makes the situation much worse here is we have insanely good insulation on the buildings. They trap heat for the cold winters, but the walls just maintain all the heat during the summers. A new approach is needed to make it livable here.
In my own apartment I am not able to create a cross-breeze through strategic window opening to try and bring in cooler air from outside, so I've resorted to opening a window on one side of the apartment and using a Vornado fan to push air out the window on another side of the apartment - creating a pressurized system.