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Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

One of the culprits:

> air-conditioning units (which are basically unrestricted openings to the street)

Window air conditioning units are virtually unknown in a large part of the warm weather world. We use "split systems," where only a couple thin pipes and some wires connect the outdoors with the indoors. NYC's fascination with inefficient window units is really quite strange. I suppose landlords enjoy not having to pay for installation and maintenance of permanent units.

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> NYC's fascination with inefficient window units is really quite strange. I suppose landlords enjoy not having to pay for installation and maintenance of permanent units.

Fascination is not the right word. As you correctly assert, landlords have no interest in installing permanent AC, so my window unit is my only option, and it isn't particularly fascinating.

Given that a window unit is on the order of hundreds to a thousand dollars (for a REALLY nice unit) and the permanent external/internal systems are on the order of $5-10k, I think the fascination is pretty obvious.

What the hell? An indoor/outdoor system costs less than $1k on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Ductless-INVERTER-Conditioner-...

In an apartment building, installation is going to cost you more than the actual unit. You need to run fairly heavy hoses to the condenser. You also aren't going to put a fleet of little one-ton units on the roof, so you're looking at much larger central condensers or possibly cooling towers for chilled water (which often ends up cheaper for large installations but requires more space).

Huh...have you traveled to other parts of the world? Look at an apartment building in Japan or China, those are all over the wall and is the de-facto AC solution.

Really, installation takes less than an hour and the rest of the world think Americans are bizarre with the window units.

You also aren't going to put a fleet of little one-ton units on the roof

Sure you are! Or, well, you could. I lived in Chicago condo that had 20 or so one-per external units on the roof.

Some arguments in favor of this approach here:

http://buildingscience.com/documents/digests/bsd-110-hvac-in...

These things always have the worst remotes.

Not to mention that when renting a unit, you don't have the option to put in central air. So you do what you can - stick a unit in a window.

It's not central air, most Americans don't know what indoor/outdoor system mean. It's something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Ductless-INVERTER-Conditioner-...

I looked into split system A/C when I moved to NYC. The gist is that attaching anything to outside of a "historical" building requires planning approval, complete with engineering drawings and a public hearing.

But hanging a window A/C out into the street? Somehow this does not affect historicity and so no approval is required.

I'm vague on whether the rules apply to non-street facing installations (I live at the back of my building), but I don't know if I can be bothered to spend the money to find out. So window A/C it is.

In NYC is it a thing to have the owner pay for heat for the whole complex via one giant efficient boiler in the basement, and the individual apartments cool by electricity they're separately billed for? This is not unusual in the midwest.

On one hand in my bachelor pad apartment a really bad August was like $40 of electricity for cooling, on the other hand times 40 apartments, I'm sure the owner would prefer "we" pay instead of him.

Very common, to the point of being nearly universal except in relatively recent construction. Many (perhaps most) NYC apartments don't have thermostats. Don't like the heat the landlord has chosen? Open the window or buy a space heater. Want to be cool in the summer? Buy a window air conditioner.

Any idea how that system got common? NYC used to have mainly heat based on steam radiators, which are perfectly easy to control per unit by just adjusting the radiator valve. Since the 1930s, there are even "automatic valves" that raise/lower the radiator inflow automatically to maintain a set temperature, like a thermostat (this is the invention that Danfoss was built on). That's exactly the system I had when I lived in Copenhagen, and it worked pretty well. But it seems to have been largely replaced in NYC with forced-air heating that has no individual controls? So yes, to "adjust the thermostat" downwards, people literally open their windows in January, blowing heat into the outdoors.

NYC landlords are a unique species of scum. If it's doesn't cost them anything, it's good.

There's a lot of history that got us here. One of the outcomes/legacies of this stuff is rent regulation, and the standards of operation there extend into unregulated apartments as well.

Fixing the steam heating valves will decrease their energy costs as tenants reduce the heat they demand, since they all seemed to be overheated. I wonder why they don't do it.

Because the tenant pays the bill, not the landlord so the landlord has no incentive to fix.

With a proper working housing market the landlord might have an incentive to fix (because people just won't rent from your wrecked place if they can get a better place for the same money) - but given the housing shortage in cities like NYC, even a run down shack is better than sleeping in the park.

It gives them an excuse to raise the rent. I'm sure that rents aren't falling this year with gas prices!

There are two things. One, many of the steam units have a knob which doesn't actually work (landlords seal/paint it to the point that you cannot move it.) One of the apartments I grew up in in Brooklyn had one of these "units", and according to my grandmother, the knob hadn't worked in many decades (she started living in that apartment in ~1930.) How this came to be is definitely a mystery.

Two, some steam apartments don't have a unit at all, just a pipe from floor to ceiling. Older tenements feature these (the one I'm living in now has one, for example.) If you want to adjust the temperature with this, your only choices are A/C or the window. These apartments were just built this way, and this was likely the cheapest/only tech available at the time.

No, steam heat is still quite common in NYC. It's just those valves work approximately 0% of the time.

To agree with chmullig, NYC apartments I've seen are almost all steam heated, but I don't think I've ever heard of a working valve. Most people I know adjust temperature in the winter by opening windows (apartments are largely overheated, for some reason).

The reason we heat with full-apartment systems and cool individually is that landlords are required to pay for heating (and hot water) but don't want to pay for cooling.

I'm from a warm climate part of the developing world and we got split units for a long time and the window ones are not really common due to inconvenience during the install process and despite their relative economic pricing to their competitors.

It's not necessarily only window units. Many apartments have in-wall units also. It would be cost prohibitive for most to close up a hole in a brick wall to install a split unit.

I guess this might be an example where leapfrogging technology by being a bit late ends up with better results? One reason split units are popular in southern Europe is precisely because they're cheaper to install than wall units, since you only have to drill a small hole through the wall, not open up a big gap. But I can see that if you already opened up a big gap, because you installed A/C back when the ductless split units weren't widely available, then it'd be more expensive to close it back up again. A/C has only really gotten common in Italy, Greece, and Spain since the '90s or so, so they went straight to the modern split units when retrofitting.

This doesn't explain NYC, where a huge number of apartments use window units. Landlords don't feel compelled to provide A/C, so tenants need to provide their own, but tenants aren't allowed to drill any holes at all, so they're left with window units. Plus, window units are cheap as chips in NYC--under $200.

In any case, almost nobody in NYC uses the sort of split system so common everywhere else. Older buildings are left with window units, while new buildings have built-in units, often with the most horrible control panels you can imagine from some dudes in New Jersey.

My building, from the 80s, has no central air, but through wall cutouts the size of a window unit. However, when I went to buy an air conditioner I found that only one company made a unit the exact right size and the cost 3x more than the BTU equivalent window unit.

How about using the radiators and district cooling? Distributed hardware is usually not very efficient, especially here with space and noise constraints.

Radiators do not work for cooling. Cooling creates condensation, which will drip on and rot the floor unless you move it out of the building somehow. Cool air also needs to be forced to circulate, whereas hot air will do that on its own.

I just left a 3 story walk up with central air and I can say the during the summer the large roof mounted AC units (technically split systems as you describe them) drove me absolutely insane. The humming caused by multiple machines running made it almost impossible for me to stay at home and fall asleep.

I'm sure there are smart mechanical engineers working on vibration free AC units, but until then I'm looking for a house.

The propeller was invented 200 years ago. I think the aerodynamics for silent ones have been known for 70 years (laminar flow).

The rest is just politics - those who pay for the conditioning system are not the ones who suffer from the noise - and even if they were, they have no competence to differentiate.

Maybe if apartments had noise ratings, and they could charge neighboring buildings for the measurable loss of worth from noise. Maybe there are precedents from airfield politics.

Seconding mandatory noise ratings for buildings and all thermal conditioning machines. In Europe they've invented all sort of energy efficiency ratings to sell wares already, i don't see why it can't be be done for noise.

I believe what you describe is partly caused by a beat frequency: the humming of different units is at slightly different frequencies, giving a noise with time-varying perceived amplitude. This is much more disturbing than a constant noise.

building laws, zoning, and history, all conspire here. Now new energy efficiency regulations may finally push the move to centralized or similar systems. Still the zoning restrictions tend to run into issues when more than two percent of a buildings space is classified as mechanical.

Also NYC does a lot of older structures that would be too costly to retrofit

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