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Like an engineer told me recently, the image of AC is biased in most of us towards the electricity-sucking devices of the previous century. Contemporary AC tech is to 1980s-90s AC what LED lightbulbs are to incandescent ones.
Moreover, the very same units are often also super efficient heating devices that embarrass their gas/oil burning counterparts.
Assuming the manufacturer has bothered to make the tiny modification necessary to turn AC into a heat pump and then not charge you 50% markup for the privilege.
Heat pumps are still stupid expensive.
https://youtu.be/_hAuKtoRxJI?si=3LO40Ih8XGKmbWmC
Tldr, gouging exists, but people regularly also get systems that are way bigger than they need, which drives costs up by many multiples.
It’s an even bigger problem in countries that don’t traditionally have air conditioning systems because basically no one knows how to size these things.
But even disregarding that, a similarly sized AC, (similar to whatever heat pump you are quoted for, which as you say will probably be too big) will still be more expensive than an AC on its own even though it’s basically the same thing.
Honestly it’s not that bad if the building is made right. Especially old stone houses that also happen to be surrounded by trees are absolutely godly in these scenarios (the down side is the heating bill in the winter :P or rather that used to be the downside…). I honestly wouldn’t have ever considered an AC a couple years ago, but now that summer means a constant 30°C I’m reconsidering. Like bro, 30°C used to be a HOT exceptional couple days, not the entire summer!
You are absolutely right about old stone houses. I live in an old stone cottage surrounded by trees and it’s amazing in the summer. We turn our ac on a few weeks to a month after everyone else does(in the US).
The winters aren’t too bad either. We have a tiny wood stove and even when using the oil furnace it holds heat in pretty well.
Side bonus! Home owners insurance gives us a break because the risk of fires goes way down when the outside is made of rocks.
Trees are OP. Please nerf.
I’m pretty sure that access to guns would instantly end my depression.
Got to shoot an assault rifle in the army. Would definitely buy one if I could.
Assault rifles are cool and all, but SMGs are just fun. The ugliest but most fun gun I’ve ever shot was a 9mm Colt SMG. A factory made kludge to fit 9mm into an AR-15 derivative. The weight and overall design being originally for 5.56mm in mind meant that full auto with 9mm had basically zero felt recoil.
Most fun assault rifle was the Vz. 58. Less controllable than an any kind of full auto 5.56mm AR-15 derivative, but so fun I didn’t care. And it reloaded with clips.
The M16 is definitely the best, most fun rifle I’ve ever shot. Hitting a pop-up target 300 feet out in less than 2 seconds is pretty rewarding.
You seem to live in Finland. Owning an AK or AR is highly achievable.
Seems minisplits are becoming more popular. Saw a truckload of them on the interstate a while back
they are great.
They are super efficient. They are relatively cheap. and they are super easy to install DIY.
Plus they are super easy to retrofit into older homes that dont have space for duct work.
Plus Plus, while the unit can only be in heating or cooling mode (so no heating one room while cooling another), you can control temperatures and even on/off on an individual room basis so you can have your bedroom at a frosty 61f while keeping the livingroom at a more reasonable 74.
Plus Plus, while the unit can only be in heating or cooling mode (so no heating one room while cooling another)
Some manufacturers are actually working to change that. It’s just a heat pump. Meaning it moves heat from one place to another. That’s how they can be over 100% efficient, because they’re not using power to generate heat; They’re just moving the existing heat around. And that can absolutely include moving heat from one interior room to another.
I’m looking into installing two of these here (southern Europe). There are some models that reach an SCOP of 5. That means that in heating mode for every Kw used they release 5Kw of heat in the room. They are legally considered renewable energy.
How is AC being a game changer surprising?? When it is hot I see my contacts in the UK sitting with icepacks in their laps or with fans all around them spraying themselves with water. Imagine if the whole room was just a tolerable temperature, it isn’t hard to picture. Seems odd.
(Yes I get it just isn’t a thing there and they have buildings older than time itself…but still…)
I just got hit by beryl, it is hell on earth here right now. Now power for two days so far with temps arouns 90-95 f andn%100 humidity. Sleeping is now considered a water sport and no ac in sight.
The worst part? You cant cool off even with a fan, there’s too much humidity forntour sweat to evaporate and cool you. I wish i at least had cold drinks
Leave
Easier said than done for most
Yeah, some parts of the US recently experienced something called a wet bulb event. Basically, that’s a phenomenon where the heat and humidity are both so high that your body’s natural cooling mechanism (sweating) stops working entirely and people will overheat simply by being outside. No amount of shade or cool drinks will help, because your body’s primary cooling mechanism has been defeated.
Basically, sweat works by evaporating. When water evaporates, it takes heat with it. This allows sweat to cool you down as it dries. To be able to accurately determine what the temperature feels like, you can’t just use a regular dry thermometer. You need to use something called a wet bulb thermometer. This is basically a thermometer with some wet cotton wrapped around it, to simulate sweat. As the wet cotton dries, it creates a more accurate gauge of what the ambient temperature feels like, the same way sweat cools you.
But a wet bulb event is when the wet bulb thermometer reads above 95°F. At that point, it means the cotton isn’t drying fast enough to cool a person down. At this point, the temperatures are dangerous even to fit and healthy individuals in the shade with fans and cool drinks. Because a breeze won’t even cool you down when it’s that hot outside; A fan will actually heat you up even faster, because the air is adding heat faster than evaporative cooling can remove it.
That is basically life down here from may to september lol
Nah, true wet bulb events are pretty rare. With a wet bulb event, you overheat even while sitting still in the shade with a breeze. Because again, you’ve reached the point where a breeze is actually warming you up instead of cooling you down. They’re becoming more common nowadays due to global warming, but they still only happen occasionally. Again, a wet bulb thermometer will typically read significantly lower than the ambient temperature, because it’s being cooled by evaporation.
At wet bulb temps in the 90’s, construction crews start delaying, school athletics aren’t allowed to practice outdoors, cities start setting up pop-up cooling centers for the homeless, etc… Even the army limits outdoor work to 10 minutes per hour, because the risk of heat stroke is too high. Wet bulb temps above ~87 are rare, so when it reaches the 90’s emergency management crews go into full blown crisis mode as people start getting heat exhaustion just from walking around the block.
The other thing in the UK is that screen doors and windows are non-existent so if you want to open them for fresh air you’re inviting all the bugs in as well
There are nets with velcro tape.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/tesa-insect-net/s?k=tesa+insect+net
They don’t even have screening? Guys wtf get a hardware store that’s worth a shit.
I wish we did in Sweden as well. Parts of the country has a fuck ton of mosquitos during summer.
Inward opening windows are unfortunately not uncommon which makes screens a pain.
Newer windows can usually do that fancy flip trick and a bunch of other fancy stuff though.
Inward opening windows are the standard in Germany and nearly everyone just buys a cheap bug-screen set that you can simply wedge into the window frame. They cost like 20€ a pop. There are all kinds of solutions for this.
My house always is cool anyway - it’s well-insulated so heat doesn’t come in unless I open a window, and I open the windows every evening when it’s cool outside.
Air conditioning would just waste energy and increase humidity
Air condition decreases humidity.
Yeah and that is my problem with them. I often get a sore throat when in airconditioned rooms, especially in smaller rooms. But it is not as bad as it used to be. Don’t know if my body changed or the ACs became better.
Then you can add humidity
Oh? My workplace has one of these that you fill with water that then cools the water and very slowly sprays it into the air, mixed with air of course. Works well to make the room cooler, but even in the manual it says that it shouldn’t be running all the time because the increased humidity can cause mold.
So which kind of air conditioning are you using?
(and even when it decreases humidity the other reasons still stand)
That’s not air con, that’s a swamp cooler. Air-conditioning works by the same mechanism your fridge does. And the cool coils condense water vapour in the air, thus reducing humidity.
Air-conditioning works by the same mechanism your fridge does.
Boiling-cold)
Haha holy shit…they thought THAT WAS AC?
This right here is the bare minimum as to why education is so important.
Just so you know, there are places where people live differently from you.
Would you expect the same level of knowledge about keeping a house warm at the equator? Because I’d argue you need to better your education if you do.
I’m living in an area where AC is completely unnecessary. About +15°C in warm summer nights (that’s when I open my windows to let fresh air in), +30°C peak but all houses here are well-insulated (they have to be because of winter).
Of course it’s different in the USA, you have higher temperatures and don’t insulate your houses (a well-insulated house keeps its temperature: it stays warm in winter and cool in summer).
Interesting, thanks.
Also if room is too humid it stops working
Lots of places in the US don’t even get to a comfortable temperature at night. Right now I’m in Pennsylvania which is pretty far north and the lowest it’s going to get tonight is 80F with 80% humidity. It was 100F today with the same humidity. I actually got sick at work from it.
Damn, I didn’t expect it to be that bad outside of the southern states.
I’m currently getting ~30°C peak but about 15°C at night. We only have a few nights every year that reach 20°C. Austria.
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Honestly, for me a reason why humans shouldn’t live in such places. For the Europeans here (that have not much clue of weird American units):
80 F = 26.667 C
100 F = 38 C
26? It’s pretty warm, but not too hot.
Over night, with 80% humidity? Are you sure? I’d be close to hospital with that temperature without some kind of AC, or at the very least ventilation… (I’m sensitive to heat). And sleeping with that temperature even with ventilation is going to be very uncomfortable and not relaxing…
Also we’re talking about lows, so this is likely not the temperature inside when there’s no AC, more like 30+C
https://meteoinfo.ru/pogoda/russia/moscow-area/moscow
80%, 20°C at 10.07 01:00
I’d be close to hospital with that temperature without some kind of AC, or at the very least ventilation… (I’m sensitive to heat).
Then you certanly need ventilation or AC. I just have window open.
The temperature is not a big problem imo. The humidity though.
Temperature is absolutely a problem. Without getting too deeply technical, a heat index above 99F/37C is dangerous even for healthy adults. Las Vegas this week has seen temperatures up to 120F. The forecast today is for a temperature high of 118F/48C (low of 90F/32C overnight), with a relative humidity of 8%. That works out to be a heat index of 111F/44C.
Where I am, today’s high will be 82F, but humidity is sitting at 90%, which is a heat index of 92F.
You can also look at wet bulb temperatures; at a certain point, your body can’t cool fast enough through evaporative cooling, and you’ll die from heat.
I lived through dry summers around 40°C without ACs without a problem my whole 40+ years of life. But 30°C with a high humidity is a different thing. Much comes down to being accustomed to things though naturally. I have friends who grew up in southern China who get problems when the heat is dry.
But people live in areas that get 35+°C every year for several month since the beginning of humanity itself.
So you’re trying to say most of North America is uninhabitable? I’m in North Carolina, the temperature and relative humidity were in the 90’s yesterday. It’s July.
I mean it’s thanks to modern technology not uninhabitable, but we’re “wasting” a lot of energy to make it habitable, and this is getting worse in the future, because of climate change. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere where, I can’t get out (of AC cooled buildings) because it’s too hot.
25º during summer nights either already was or is going to become normal around gigantic areas of the world. Getting all Indians to just live anywhere else is never going to be plausible.
I didn’t say it’s realistic to move that much people around the globe, it did grow like that historically, but I do think, that migration because of this is becoming a sociodemographic and political problem in somewhere near the future. And is already somewhat in areas that are less wealthy and instable politically (e.g. northern Africa).
People live there for many thousand years now and most of the time without ACs. It is defintly inhabitable. We “waste” the energy to make it comfortable.
Considering the energy we “waste” to make most of Europe inhabitable on the other hand… And here it really is about “inhabitable”, because without heating we couldn’t live in e.g. Germany.
If we only lived in areas where it would be comfortable without heating and ACs we’d have to kill of 90% of humanity.
True, there’s a lot of heating necessary to make life comfortable in Europe (but also in USA btw. probably even more, because I’d say the standards for insulation are better in Europe, and temperatures are more extreme more in the center of the continent).
But it’s absolutely possible to live without (most of) the heating, by:
- Using passive solar energy (even in the winter) + good insulation
- Clothing! There are ways to help with heat too via evaporation chill though (I’m just sitting here with a cooling west, because I easily overheat, and that makes my life quite bit more comfortable in summer without AC, even or especially outside)
Though as you correctly notice, the combination of high temperature and humidity is what potentially creates a dangerous climate for life, even with things such as cooling wests in “low” high temperatures (within 30-40C), because evaporation chill stops working, so there are times and places, and these times and places will get more frequent where humans can’t survive outside (without some serious technological counter-measures) while with cold temperatures you can always wear (somewhat specialized) clothing.
Evaporation chill does work even with quite high temperatures, but at some point (and I do think there are places that reach that point), the quite effective human cooling system is not able to catch up anymore (I think somewhere around 50+C IIRC).
The irony being that my favorite designs are foreign.
Mikhail Kalashnikov is one of my engineering heroes. He designed for real world use cases and changed the world.
AKs are cool and all, but I simp for Czechnology. The short stroke piston like a Vz.58 is just my jam when it comes to rifle systems.
AKs are cool to me for the AKM overcoming the engineering hurdle of making stamped rifles that held up to mass production.
I did, they’re pretty fun.
The American pro-gun community calls anything stricter than “fill out a one page form without lying too much” a “gun ban”.
The only exception to this is when they claim “It can’t be our permissive gun laws because Switzerland has permissive gun laws and they don’t have all the homicides, armed robbery and mass shootings”.
Which is just a lie in the other direction since Switzerland has regulations the pro-gun community staunchly opposes for America, calling them a “gun ban”.
We could use AC over here by now, it gets unbearably hot…but man those fuckers use a solid amount of energy and everything is already expensive as hell…so suffering through the heat it is.
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I can only imagine being able to afford an ac unit.
I don’t even care about the cost, it’s so hot and humid. We can deal with that once we live through this
I’m just over here looking at that lineset cover wondering how in the hell whoever installed that is expecting the condensate drain to go up.
That’s the output of a split system, the part doing the actual condensing and fuckery with the air is outside, that’s just a box that can output the cool air. Some are extra fancy and do fan control to move it across the room better.
The only thing in that box is some wires, some fans, and a control board for everything to run off of
That’s only partially true. The evaporator is located on the indoor unit, and that’s the part that gets cold and generates all the condensation. There is a drain hose on the indoor unit that has to be directed outside, and the condensate water will only flow downhill. Up is not an option. This is what makes installing a mini split on an interior wall such a hassle.
So that’s why I’m wondering why the lineset cover goes up in that picture. I guess it’s possible there is another hole punched in the wall behind the unit for the condensate line, which is the normal way to do it. But I have absolutely no idea why, if there is exterior access like that, anyone would not also run the rest of the lineset through the same hole…
Idk how common it is but where I used to work had a split system where for some reason the evaporator unit was also outside like a standard AC unit and then cold air was ducted in and pumped out of one of those boxes
The squareness of the duct made me think of that
Up is not an option
Well, it is, but then you need a pump.
Not to mention I don’t see a way to check the drain pan from the inside. That set up makes me nervous. I’ve got three registers in my house and I check the pan every time I clean the filters. No way I want to deal with an indoor leak.
Maybe this is a through wall system and that’s covering the power cable?
You might be right, but it sure looks like a mini split to me.
Oh it’s possible they totally screwed it up too. I don’t want to say it’s not.
literally me now that summer’s getting real annoying here
AC always gives me a sore throat after couple of days, is that just me?
Found someone not living in 100 degree heat 90% of the year…
Fyi it could be filters need changing. Right now if we turn on the aircon at work, I get terribly sore throat that would last for days. Turns out they change/clean the filters only once a year, and it’s even worse in some other rooms where it also smells bad.
They have A/Cs that recycle the condensation that they remove back into the air, but not every unit does this (usually the moisture is just dumped somewhere outside). But yours probably doesn’t do this so like everyone else said, you need a humidifier.
Don’t get one if those crappy little 1 gallon ones that create big clouds of steam; you have to use distilled water or all the junk that’s in your water will get atomized and into your lungs. Buy a basic evaporative humidifier instead (the kind that use a wick), one of those giant 6 gallon ones and set it to 40-50% RH. It’ll keep your entire home nice and comfortable and you can just use water straight from the sink. And you only have to refill them about once a week instead of every single day. Just make sure you don’t skimp out on the bacteriostat cause they will get nasty quick if you cheap out.
Alternatively the budget option is just to take showers with the bathroom door open and the vent off. Just make sure that you’re monitoring the humidity levels in your home should you go this route; keep RH below 65% or you’re going to have mold. If your A/Cs thermostat doesn’t report humidity levels, then you can just buy a cheap meter. They’re under $10 in most parts of the world.
You’re running it too cold. I have the same if I set it to 21/22 celcius. Set it to 24/25. That’s still amazing in summer and yet no sore throat or getting sick.
Air’s dry. Try a humidifier
Not just you. I hate AC. Awful being in hotel rooms where it’s AC all the way and you can’t even really open a window in the room. I get sore throat and usually they’re really noisy too, so I can’t sleep without earplugs. I very much prefer opening a window and airing thoroughly in the evening and then during the night leaving window on kip. Travelling many days or weeks in AC vehicles really makes me sick.
Slap a humidifier in your room. Air conditioning is by its nature also a dehumidifier, so some people end up with overly dry and therfore eventually soar throats.
Came to say the same thing. I sleep like a baby next to my humidifier, dreaming of a way out of this hot hellhole
Like someone else mentioned, the cool side heat exhangers condense water out of the air.
Doubly amazing due to these crazy heat waves.
Lived in Europe and US and building and landscape design play a big part on how much you really need AC, well at least they used to. Now I would say for the most part living in either place AC is an important quality of life option as it’s just getting gross everywhere with crazy high temps.
Europeans be like “I live in a 500 years old house! That’s freaking sweet!”
They also be like “Help, I’m dying in my house that has no insulation!”
If you really live in a 500 yo house, the walls are probably like 1 meter thick full stone/brick and the windows are tiny. They stay cold in summer, it’s like living in a cave.
The much more common 60-100 yo houses on the other hand…
AC is great, but have you ever had DC?
Put them together and you’ve been, thunderstruck.
Ah
You understood! Hahahaha!!
