The far-reaching effects of air conditioning

My desk reaches about 80 degrees once the weather is over 65, and it won't drop below that until the fall. In order to make our AC more efficient they "weather sealed" the windows, which mostly involved gluing them shut. So now I can't open the window when it's cooler outside.

I'm sitting at my desk with my sleeves and pant legs rolled up like a five year old pretending to be a pirate. Most of the women don't mind because they can wear light dresses and slip on shoes.

The did give me a fan after I asked HR if I could wear women's clothing to work.

But seriously, it's kind of ridiculous to be paying to cool a place to a certain temperature when literally nobody in the office has any reason to be dressed up.

One problem is that Seoul is further north than Tokyo, so the temperature tends to stay around 28C anyway, especially during the monsoon between mid-June and mid-July. Thermostats only detect temperature, not humidity. So the A/C sits idle and everything gets damp :(

For athletic centers, of course it makes sense. But in big open libraries, lecture halls, places with little activity in general, it's awful. It's especially bad for your health if you live in a hot region like southern California since your body has to keep adjusting between the scorching heat outside to the freezing cold inside.

Humor aside, there's a point for me at which even with more clothes the AC is too cold or aggressive and I end up with headaches. Fortunately I am aware of it and I try to be preventive about it (by moving away from the thing).

I suspect (for offices) it has to do with productivity - warmer people can get sleepy after lunch, etc. Colder people are more alert (to a certain point).

HK is one of those places that's absolutely amazing as a city, and has some of the worst weather on earth (crazy humidity all the time, insane heat in summer, crazy rains and typhoons all the time… and a cloud of pollution emanating down from Shenzhen).

The first was a stepwell, called Baoli in Hindi. This was basically a giant swimming pool dug out and filled with water. Around the stepwell, terrace-like steps were created where the general public could hang out and stay cool. For example[1].

Another method was to have dual walls with some lattice patterns on the first wall. The first wall absorbed all of the heat and would get warm in the evening, but the second wall, recessed from the first wall by a certain distance, would be spared the hot sunshine, and would stay cooler. These second walls made up the walls of your room.

Moving to basements was also a popular solution, since beneath the earth stayed cooler. The British especially loved this solution.

Older homes in India have high ceilings with ventilation at the top to allow for natural convection. The hot air would escape from the top and be replaced with cool air. In places like New Orleans, the Creole architecture also involves inlet vents in the basement-region, where cooler air would be sucked in.

Finally, after the arrival of electricity, we had evaporative coolers, where pads made out of hay would have water dripped onto them. The evaporation of the water would cool things down inside the cooler via latent heat, and this cooler air would be blown into a room with the exhaust fan. This is a fantastic solution for dry heat places because it doesn't get rid of humidity (making the skin feel terrible), and has the power consumption only of a puny exhaust fan (unlike a full blown positive displacement compressor).

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/ChandBao...

During the summer, it was hot and humid. Unfortunately, centra AC wasn't a thing, and the wall units would only do so much. Now I live in LA and the weather is mostly perfect.

Most building are side by side with no windows on the side. And unites tend to only have windows on a single side which means it's impossible to get airflow.

As for radiators some can be adjusted but many are binary, either on or off. You could always turn one off for awhile too. They stay warm for quite awhile when off.

Swamp coolers don't work in the tropics, obviously. They are great in the desert though (except during monsoon season). In the tropics, you cool by extracting humidity, not injecting it. And extracting humidity might not work very well in a very dry desert...so...

The ice block thing worked perfectly fine in Iran, at least.

Historically most refrigerants have had "issues" when leaked either environmental or being toxic or otherwise it minimizes danger to keep as little as possible. Even if we could afford to use 1000x as much refrigerant with a central compressor station, it would be bad for the environment to use it that way.

You can move a huge amount of heat with water pressurized to merely 14 psi or so, but I have a puron aka R-410A conditioner at home and that dude runs near 400 psi on a hot day and its difficult to run miles of high pressure pipe.

I'm not sure bigger compressors are that much more efficient than smaller compressors, taking into account the environmental and economic expense of the pipes.

From an engineering standpoint its cheaper safer and less environmentally destructive to push kilowatts thru copper wire than push high pressure expensive refrigerant thru long high pressure pipes if all other things were equal which they mostly are.

Step 1: It is too hot/cold here

Step 2: Lets put in heating/AC

Step 3: Damn, the electric costs are getting too high. Lets put in insulation and double-pane windows (well, actually three-pane is standard here in Sweden) to keep down the costs.

The further you live to extreme heat or cold the faster a society progress down the ladder. Which is also a reason the death rates during winter is a lot higher (per capita) in central Europe than it is in northern Europe - people in the northern parts have long since been forced to learn to build better houses whereas people in mild climates can afford to fail as it isn't that many days a year that it is a problem.

Have any part of Texas considered central cooling? It should be even more effective than having units in every house as long as it isn't too damp and the water needs to be removed as well. But perhaps that kind of solution would be too socialistic for you :P

Older houses (in my area, that's early 1900s, laugh away you European readers) were built with huge beams of old-growth timber by careful craftsmen (sometimes in the Craftsman style, sometimes colonial or victorian). Houses this old typically had antique plumbing and electrical service, which needed (or now really need) upgrades, and they also will likely need window and/or siding replacement. During these repairs and remodels, smart homeowners and contractors also upgrade the energy efficiency, and there's a very strong skeleton on which to do so.

Shortly after WWII, there was a lumber shortage. You can drive around and identify the neighborhoods which were constructed in the late 40s and early 50s because the eaves only project a few inches out from the walls. These were built as fast and cheaply as possible. But for a while, energy - especially for heat - was cheap, so they kept building them.

Since then, energy has become variously more and less expensive, and manufacturing/construction techniques have produced cycles of lower quality cookie-cutter cost-optimized goods and higher-quality standardized, well engineered construction. We're riding high on an efficiency swing right now, to the point of absurdities like homes so well air-sealed between Tyvek, caulk, and air-tight electrical fixtures that you're required to install an air vent to the outdoors in the furnace room to prevent negative pressure problems.

I do agree that having the house designed for good airflow in the first place would be ideal.

The dew point in January during a cold snap spends weeks around -20F. This is fairly self evident, we have some crisp dry snow free mornings around -10 to -20 every winter and obviously if the dew point were above -20 it would be snowing at that time, or at least cloudy. If I try to humidify the house it'll just get moldy so I let it dry out instead.

I have noticed my hands get dry skin problems, skin cracks and gets infected, when the dew point is below freezing for a couple weeks. Winter is a bad time for static sensitive electronic experimentation. I participate in many winter sports activities and when the dew point is -20F you don't have to sweat much to get hypothermia or dehydrated. Dehydration is a big problem for long distance hikers in the winter, you have to carry the water in a thermos or it'll freeze and tradition is to drink caffeinated hot beverages which makes you pee which dehydrates you faster than not drinking at all.

You'd have to live in an interesting climate where the dew point in the winter is higher than the dew point in an air conditioned house in the summer.

Air conditioning directly lets people live where they otherwise couldn't; it doesn't seem obvious that refrigeration is larger-impact.

I cant give a name though; I just bought a box of 'samples' from a guy that's doing some research with it. But it's years away from market, judging from his story. Could send you a 20ml spray if you'd like. :)