Improving air conditioner efficiency could reduce worldwide temps
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
CO2 is just one of many many forms of pollution. Think you're doing your part by purchasing a hybrid or electric vehicle? There are barrels of oil that go into those tiers, the plastics, not to mention all the pollution that goes into battery production. If your car is fuel efficient, the best thing you can do for the environment is drive it until the wheels fall off. When you do need to purchase a replacement, get a used hybrid or electric.
Climate change/CO2 is not the problem. It's the symptom of rampant consumerism. We can't buy and purchase our way out of destroying the planet. We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years. Companies need to be praised for smaller factories and lower sales for products that cost more and last longer.
That is a very very huge shift in the way we think. I'm not sure if it's even remotely feasible or what it would take to convince people, industry, the world to simply consume less.
What I would propose is we start now thinking about what sustainable architecture looks like, and start trying to imagine more permanent cultural edifices. I.e. permaculture. I don't think we need to worry too much about the ecological cost of replacing our current physical plant with a permaculture one--the ecological costs of transition are dwarfed by the ecological savings we will reap over 100 years.
That said, we should either go big (final stage permaculture) or not try at all. There's no sense in half measures at this point, we either build communities 100x more efficient, or we do as you say: make do with the stuff we have.
Add in a lot of NIMBY residents who don't want any new residents moving into their neighborhoods, good luck making the city appealing to anyone who doesn't REALLY want to live there, or else has some business opportunity that makes living in the city worth their while.
Here in the states IMO we'd do better by making suburban lifestyles more efficient. Between electric cars, renewables and more efficient tech of all stripes coming around there's no reason we shouldn't be able to get suburban houses down to carbon-neutral. The amount of transformation major cities would have to undergo to appeal to suburban populations is just unrealistic by comparison.
That makes me sad, because when I envision suburbia, it involves all the NIMBYism (especially in the form of HOAs) you mentioned above, combined with distances that make using a bicycle for transportation unrealistic. I actually enjoy riding my bicycle to and from work (and the grocery store). I would dread a commute in a vehicle of even 30 minutes.
A bike to work isn't necessarily out of the question either if you live just outside a major city. Some areas have bike trails that can take you quite a distance. But yeah in most cases you'll need a car for virtually everything, that is a downside. My personal commute is only 10 minutes, but I know people who commute up to 1 hour if they work downtown (morning rushour is a bitch).
Changing the buildings is changing the culture. You identify a complete resource cycle, like a weekly grocery habit, and design a replacement. Drop it in, look for another one.
Demand is a trailing indicator. Significant demand for integrated permaculture living won't happen until long after the concept is proven and started scaling.
The demographic shift of increasing the number of retirees per healthy adult will definitively cause suffering. There's a reason why Millennials are putting off having children - they can't afford to.
/s
If not voluntary, how could a place do this without instituting something like a 'one child' policy?
Sure it does, as each national industrializes it solves part of the problem; when they all do it, problem gone.
> It seems that the problem would just move around the globe until we hit critical mass.
You really haven't thought this through.
Even if "children per person" falls slow enough you could even indefinitely increase the rate that new people are added right?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_(UN...
(Interestingly, the above chart was created about 10 years ago; I do wonder how accurate it's been.)
All I meant to point out is that "birth rate falling" doesn't map to "population falling", if the average number of children per couple drops 2.5 to 2.1 then each generation is still larger (and the population still grows exponentially).
The population will continue to grow for a while because of developing countries' life expectancy catching up with developed countries, but unless there are drastic technological breakthroughs to improve life expectancy beyond where developed countries are now, the world population will stop growing fairly soon.
There's no possible way U.S. or global plutocracy is going to be kind and look the other way at attempts to shrink their economy. They'd sooner see the world burn.
I think what it would take, is a genome change. We'd need to be a different species. Perhaps inheritable memory so each generation isn't always forgetting the violence of their ancestors.
It's a creative re-framing of the problem, though. From "how do we force humans to behave better" to "what do humans need to be, in order to behave better".
If we agreed to increase those prices by, say, 5 to 10 times and used the money to fund research towards removing carbon from the atmosphere, the world would become a much better place. Problem is, everybody is afraid of the shock this would cause and everybody thinks only about his little square of the woods.
Regardless of the issues of stated vs. real reasons, the reaction of people in the country was totally predictable: people are enraged. How dares the government raise the fuel price? You get a similar reaction if you try to suggest an emission tax to any driver.
With this mindset, sadly, we won't get anywhere.
Why? Because they allow governments to set policy empirically. You can raise the tax a little, bit-by-bit, until you start seeing negative effects. Carbon taxes allow a legislature of non-economists to procedurally find the maximum reduction that the economy can bear, which is good, because obviously you don't want more than that, and given the nature of the situation you probably don't want less.
The difference between this and a cap-and-trade model is that with cap-and-trade, there's a lot of money tied up in the carbon shares allocated, so lowering the cap is politically impossible. Big corporations like it because they have an easier time acquiring carbon credits than small companies, because they have political influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Incent...
Cap-and-trade worked with other kinds of emissions because those emissions are less common and come only from certain industries, whereas carbon comes from everywhere. As such, it wasn't possible for the acid rain producers to lobby Congress to raise the cap on NOx. Or to not lower it. Furthermore, the market is small enough that it was possible for charitable organizations to make a dent by buying emissions allowances and "retiring" them -- which is extremely unlikely to matter for carbon given the size of the carbon market.
Carbon taxes are fairer and simpler, and it's harder for a company to weasel out. Some observers have suggested that an industry could lobby to be exempt, but this seems unlikely: how many industries have successfully exempted themselves from income tax? From VAT? By contrast, this happened:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-credits-sy...
> a diplomatic cable published last month by the WikiLeaks website reveals that most of the CDM projects in India should not have been certified because they did not reduce emissions beyond those that would have been achieved without foreign investment. Indian officials have apparently known about the problem for at least two years.
>[...] Today, more than 720 Indian projects have been approved and have gained some 120 million tonnes' worth of carbon credits, a large fraction of the 750 million tonnes issued since 2005 (see 'Cleaning up').
> Yet on the evidence of discussions at the meeting, most of the carbon-offset projects in India fail to meet the CDM requirements set by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Our disposable-good society is a small fraction of our overall impact on the climate. It is 100% possible to power our world with solar, wind, and batteries while keeping the rest of our lives largely unchanged. The only climate-hostile things we can't easily solve for right now are a) beef and b) air travel. Every single HN reader can go all-electric today, and most can sign up for a renewable-energy program through their utility.
If you think our society should build fewer, higher-quality goods then I agree. But doing that won't come close to stopping climate change.
So no, plant-based foods alone is not the holy grail, and also not realistic to force this upon people in the first place. In my opinion, what should happen is that the relatively new plant-based hamburgers which are very very similar to meat would gradually replace the 'mass market' meat for things like fastfood restaurants. But that on it's own isn't enough, we need better production methods for these plants too, so we don't have huge transportation pollution.
And airtravel is not the only big issue, large container-ships are a much bigger problem. Once in international waters, many switch to burning very dirty oil, instead of 'clean' diesel which they only use in local waters to comply with emission norms. Not only that, ships are built to last for decades, and companies won't convert them to full electric without economic incentives.
Now all we need is someone to manufacture used cars, since nobody buys new in this utopia.
Edit: to the downvoters: I guess I have to spell it out for you, but my point was that building efficient A/C units makes sense because eventually someone somewhere has to buy new.
Nobody is proposing we magically manufacture billions of new units of everything tomorrow and kick out all the stuff we purchased yesterday.
Turnover takes years or decades anyway. Just like the EU did not make possession of incandescent light bulbs illegal, they just mandated that all new ones sold beyond a certain date must meet energy efficiency standards that can't be met by incandescent ones.
> We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years.
Cars already last more than a decade. As long as moore's law is not entirely dead cell phones will be obsolete simply by advances in the underlying hardware and software exploiting those hardware advances, you don't even need planned obsolescence for that.
And ultimately it depends on the individual product whether it requires more energy to build or during its lifetime. Without checking I bet a space heater will burn significantly more energy during its operation than manufacture, and replacing it with a heat pump would be a net gain at almost any point in its lifecycle.
https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm
It is a big shift in thinking, but consider this: most work schedules see people driving between the same two places twice a day, five times a week. Reducing that distance can give you back considerable time, not to mention reducing costs (even if you drive) and reducing stress. And before someone counters with the inevitable "I don't get paid enough", you should be getting paid enough to live as close to work as possible, or they should let you telecommute. It's also arguable you can afford to live closer to work:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
This is a cultural problem that goes beyond just consumerism (although that's the elephant in the room) to things like corporate culture. I'm also still using a Nokia N900, but every year I more and more feel the pull to jump to an Android phone. Having a hardware keyboard for Emacs+org-mode is quite handy, though.
http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climat...
What other ways can consumers compare the efficiency of A/C units? I would think some standardized testing and labels would be required.
Currently the minimum is a SEER of 13, but I've seen units as high as 22 advertised.
EDIT: I should mention that SEER uses different units for each part of the ratio -- BTUs of heat moved vs watt-hours expended. COP is dimensionless, and EER is just SEER but for a specific operating point. SEER extends the measurement through an entire "season", and so it theoretically gives a more realistic picture of overall efficiency.
You can get ground source heat pumps that are 50 SEER, 5.3 COP (and they'll provide all your hot water, too)
There used to be a federal tax incentive of 30% of the cost, no max, but it expired at the end of 2016.
Everyone knows GS heat pumps are more efficient.
A SEER 13-16 system might last 15-20 years (if you're lucky), while a SEER 22 system could break down much earlier at about the 10 year mark. You can sometimes replace specific parts, but depending on what breaks, it may not be cost effective.
In short, the only way we're moving to more efficient AC systems is if costs come down significantly, we see some major innovation in the field, or the government provides significant financial incentives.
As an aside, I also think we could achieve energy efficiencies by increasing the insulation in houses. It's unbelievable how much hot/cool air is lost through windows, doors, crawl spaces, and attics.
Brushless / electronically commutated DC motors are pretty interesting, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushless_DC_electric_motor
These motors are microcontroller-based. Apparently there was a rash of bad GE X13 motors in the early 2000's traced to bad thermistors. Unfortunately the board is potted in an insulating compound that makes board-level repair rather impractical.
My first motor's controller failed after about 8 years. It was cheaper to just buy a new motor vs. replacing only the controller. The second motor's rotor started grinding against the stator after about 13 months. I pulled the controller from that motor and installed it on the first motor (since it was near-perfect duplicate of the original motor). That ran for 14 months before the second controller failed.
I've been running the third (Nidec) motor for about 2 months. I'll be interested to see how to holds up long-term.
We went from SEER 10 to SEER 15. With the rebalancing that the contractor did, our house is much more comfortable with the thermostat at 80 than it was under the old system at 73.
With 2008 not being so long ago, neither job security nor resale value are that promising. We're still rebuilding consumer confidence after nine years. The economic recovery in the US is largely in a handful of major metropolitan areas pulling up the averages, with large swathes of the country still struggling. This needs to improve or some government incentive program like you mention must take it into account if we're going to sell capital-intensive home upgrades.
Anytime there are multiple standards for manufacturers to choose from, customer confusion is guaranteed.
This seems to be primarily an issue with copper coils. I was bitten by this with a brand new system that I had installed about 9 or 10 years ago. It was pretty tough to eat the labor costs of having a new coil installed (that was covered under warranty) as well as a complete refrigerant fill (at the time ~$900 for the full R410A fill) on a system that was less than one year old. Its been good since then though!
Nobody cares enough about EnergyStar to cut it, so I doubt it will be cut. It made it through the last time Congress was under Republican control totally unmolested, so I really doubt anybody is going to bother with it now.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
I'm not saying there's no reason to worry, but there's also no reason to pretend that having the Democrats move pollution overseas solves global problems.
Democrats don't want to abolish every regulation possible in order to maximize corporate profits.
Democrats don't want to cut healthcare and entitlement programs in order to give massive tax cuts to rich people.
Democrats don't want to defund Planned Parenthood and are not rabidly anti-abortion.
Democrats don't want to ban gay marriage.
Democrats don't work their asses off trying to suppress minority votes.
Democrats don't want to prevent refugees from war zones from seeking shelter in the United States.
I can go on.
Basically, the idea that Democrats and Republicans are nearly identical is popular only amongst people who don't pay attention to politics because they are wealthy and privileged enough to not be directly affected by any of it. But if you ask a low-income woman, for example, I guaran-fuckin-tee you that she will gladly educate you on the finer details of decades of Republican oppression of women.
I'm not going to defend Bill Clinton. He made a lot of mistakes, including, as you say, making drastic, misguided changes to welfare and being "tough on crime". Although, for what it's worth, he has recently apologized for some of those mistakes [1].
In any case, fast-forward 17 years to today. Democrats and the Republicans are very, very different parties. I stand by my original statement: the only people who believe the two parties are similar are those who aren't paying attention.
--
[1]http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/15/politics/bill-clinton-1994-cri...
There are a handful of figures to whom this does not apply, but the greater party apparatus fights tooth and nail against any substantive change (on the grounds that the current strategy is the only way to win elections, even as they lost all three branches of the national government and are irrelevant in more and more states) so I'm not holding my breath.
Bill Clinton had an agreement with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security that was only stopped because the Lewinsky scandal broke.
>Democrats don't want to ban gay marriage.
Who passed DOMA? Obama was against gay marriage until it became clear that it was going to get passed.
>Democrats don't work their asses off trying to suppress minority votes.
No, they just work their asses off to keep minorities poor and beholden to the state because that makes them good Democrat voters.
>Democrats don't want to prevent refugees from war zones from seeking shelter in the United States.
We wouldn't have refugees in Syria seeking shelter if Obama hadn't bombed Syria so much we literally ran out of bombs.
>But if you ask a low-income woman, for example
If that woman became a high income woman, she'd be much less likely to vote Democratic. The Democrats have no incentive to actually help her, only to make her more beholden to the state.
That, and generally Republicans tend to do far less cutting than they say they are going to. They talk about it to get votes, but they rarely actually follow through. Again, see the last time they had control of Congress, when spending was considered to be through the roof when the deficit was only $187 billion. And, that was when they could actually manage to pass legislation, unlike the current mess they're in right now.
So, no, it's not actually me being Pollyannaish at all. I'm being extremely cynical. I think they're basically lying about wanting to and they're too incompetent to manage it even if they did want to.
[0] http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-470
"GAO's investigation shows that Energy Star is for the most part a self-certification program vulnerable to fraud and abuse. GAO obtained Energy Star certifications for 15 bogus products, including a gas-powered alarm clock."
Failing all of the above, stoicism isn't that bad, honest, neither are life style changes that shift high activity periods to later in the day, they are widely practised in Mediterranean countries.
Right now according to my phone we're at a high of 89 F (31.6 C) and 83% humidity, low of 80 degrees tonight with that same or possibly greater humidity. If I open my windows tonight I get to experience my sheets sticking to my body like sweaty clothing every time I move and a thin layer of moisture on all of my possessions (including electronics) tomorrow morning. And this is not atypical of summer on the mid-Atlantic.
I just flew out to Calgary and we have a nice hot day with 40% humidity and it feels great.
If you've only ever lived in dry areas I can understand not being aware, but even with AC, in places with high humidity it's just disgusting in the heat, and chilling to the bone in the cold in a way that dry areas just never get.
Okay, but where is this 30% jump in efficiency going to come from? That seems like a pretty big leap!
* A lot of home conditioners are fighting the weather in conditions with poor insulation, running when nobody is home, or running in rooms when people are in different parts of the house.
* Office air conditioners are often set too cold, subjectively speaking, sometimes resulting in workers bringing sweaters or even space heaters to their desks. This is shockingly common. Multi-zone cooling can make things more uniform, and if you can get people to stop using space heaters during the summer, that can make a big difference. Gender is supposedly a huge factor in temperature preferences, and offices are set to men's cooler preferences. In some locations this is exacerbated by the fact that men wear suits and ties while the women wear skirts and weather-appropriate tops.
Personally, I want an air conditioner system that isn't set to a specific temperature, but instead reduces the extreme temperatures outside. So instead of keeping it set at 22 degrees, maybe it would be set to 22 degrees when it's 27 degrees out, but the AC goes to 25 degrees when it's 35 degrees out. I find this more comfortable, because there's less of a shock when going outside or coming inside.
It's exacerbated (good word) by the fact that the large front office has mostly women sitting at low-power PCs, the offices are mostly men at powerful workstations (aka space heaters), and the HVAC ducts run though the office drop ceilings, meaning anyone doing physical projects in the central work space is the least cooled while our receptionist has been seen with a space heater.
Source?
"Gender differences in thermal comfort and use of thermostats in everyday thermal environments". Building and Environment, Volume 42, Issue 4, April 2007, Pages 1594-1603
The biological reasoning, as I understand it, is that men have a higher ratio of heat-generating muscle than women.
When I first moved to NYC, I was bewildered by all the women walking around with scarves and summer dresses; it was explained to me that this was a strategy to optimize being comfortable in the outdoor heat, and then having something to withstand the frigid offices.
(Personally, I'm of the opinion that one should acclimate to their climate, and folks who hate the heat wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't coddle themselves with AC all the time.)
I agree, to an extent. I mean, bumping the temperature that you can be comfortable in by 10 or 15 degrees is reasonable (up or down). I lived in southern Arizona as a child, where 80 degree nights were heaven after 110 degree days. I'd argue that AC wasn't coddling there, though. "But it's a dry heat" has special meaning for me. AC was usually set around 80 or 85.
During some of those same years, we stayed with family in my Grandparents' house: 2 aging window ACs, 90 degree heat, 90% humidity. We spent most of our time outside and slept in an un-conditioned room with the fan blasting. It's doable, but not my preference. A few weeks certainly wasn't enough to acclimate, and I think after a few years I'd probably still prefer to be in a (somewhat) cooled room.
On the other hand, I lived somewhere cold during my early teens. The home was often around 50 degrees with all the radiators blasting, and we dealt with that too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/chilly-at-work-a-...
WFH = less traffic, less industrial building construction, less heating/cooling of empty spaces (offices at night, homes during day), less indoor lighting usage (homes are usually very well lit from outside light while most cubical jungles are lit by fluorescent lighting).
Wanna save the environment? WFH!
No-one should mind if they have it on 18 in winter and the sun heats the room to 20 in the afternoon, but a heat pump on auto will start cooling to maintain the room at 18.
A less straightforward change for further automation would be to make that temperature depending on the humidity. On a dry day, 28°C is perfectly fine, on a humid day it's way too hot. I can't be bothered to adjust my desired temperature depending on humidity, but a computer could easily do that.
Although to be honest where I live, we wouldn't need it. We never really need to heat and cool on the same day.
On the Lowes.com site they have a specification checkbox for "high/low temperature setting" or something similar on each model's details but it doesn't seem searchable there. I don't see such a feature designation at HomeDepot.com as of right now. Amazon's are mixed depending on the seller and model it seems.
I know Nest lets you set separate heating and cooling points if you do the manual programming instead of letting it autolearn. https://nest.com/support/article/What-is-Heat-Cool-mode EcoBee and Hive I'm sure have similar features.
Having separate heating and cooling setpoints only seems natural for something that automatically switches between heating and cooling.
- http://www.fujitsugeneral.co.nz/heat-pumps
- http://www.mitsubishi-electric.co.nz/heatpump/c/7656/high-wa...
I wonder how many people have respiratory problems that they chalk up to allergies and whatnot that are actually due to the breathing overly-dry A/C air.
In one office I worked at, the AC controls were not accessible, and because there was no dress code whatsoever, everyone complained about the temperatures being too low. There was a TI office in the same building, and because everyone was in business casual or higher, they didn't have the same problems.
Designing uniforms which look professional and composed but which also ventilate correctly could considerably raise optimal office temperatures.
Just look at the hoodie pre and post zuckerberg.
If Mark had instead wore a tank-top and board shorts 50% of SF would be wearing that year round instead.
Hoodie and jeans is an okay uniform inside a business (though I would argue that if they're not well-kept, it lowers the standards of the people in the office), but in customer-facing roles I think it's inappropriate. It can be done well, but most hoodies and most pairs of jeans are an aesthetic disappointment, since they're built for casual warmth and gold panning respectively.
I would not trust a bank which faces its customers with hoodies, T-shirts, and jeans. The appropriate attire for a clerk usually involves a shirt (especially with a vest) or one/two tone blouse, and trousers or a skirt. Makes you look kempt, but dynamic. A unifying visual theme for staff also makes it simpler to identify them. If the clerks all have a consistent uniform, the custodial staff a different but thematically matched uniform, it makes it simpler to navigate a customer-facing office. I think Hooters does a good job of this, it is easy to locate and discern the staff from other guests, and contributes to the environment (a casual, consistent dining establishment which has attractive, well-trained, and helpful service staff).
You say that "face customers with hoodies, t-shirts and jeans" except this is exactly hooter's uniforms. everyone wears uniform t-shirts. The non-wait staff wear jeans or shorts (depending on season/climate).
You're just showing off your innate biases based on current fashion. There's nothing innately better about a specific functional form of dress over another. A suit is not inherently more powerful than a Thawb or a Kimono. If we were going for pure power we'd all be in hockey or football pads or suits of armor.
Uniformness you have somthing on. But you can be uniform on just about any type of dress. Hell you can be uniform on color and totaly different on form and it'd still work.
This also might point out that you are basing things on appearance instead of form.
I did not say that, I explicitly said that the quality and fit of the clothing is of primary importance. You could make the argument that the ceiling is much higher for Kimono, they seem to start around ¥200,000 JPY, and going up from there not for the faint of heart. Thawbs are sorta self-limiting, little can genuinely be done for their quality, about as limited as the range for white dress shirts; some have weird things like false lapels.
A lot of people just leave their computers on (with sleep disabled), just because they don't want to wait 30 sec for the boot or to start their apps.
If you have a one stage furnace - your only option is a one stage AC (vs 2-stage or variable speed AC). You need to upgrade the furnace/blower to take advantage of the more efficient AC model
Mini-Splits are great but much more expensive to purchase (~4k USD per Unit which covers 400-500 sqft). They also don't heat as well as a traditional gas fired furnace.
Heat pumps are probably the way to go in moderate climates but I haven't looked into them in much detail.
http://news.mit.edu/2013/madmec-design-competition-1017
Better summer clothes will help too. I've been pretty impressed by advances in cooling undergarments that are designed to wick away moisture and encourage air flow.
Anyway, all of these seemingly unrelated things contribute to improved AC efficiency.
https://energy.gov/energysaver/geothermal-heat-pumps
The amount of efficiency increase you get depends on the ground temp, which varies by latitude, but I've seen 70% reductions in electricity usage quoted for systems installed in North America.
A side benefit is you no longer have a big, loud heat exchanger running on the side or top of your house. The pump unit for a ground loop can sit inside your garage, it's about the size of two mini-fridges and only emits a quiet hum.
Sidenote: When I bring up ground loop air conditioning in conversation with people, no one has ever heard of it. The technology has a marketing problem. That makes sense in states where electricity is cheap, but in places like California I'm surprised the state hasn't mandated them for new installations and offered tax breaks to give it some momentum.
Also, the ground-source heat-pumps aren't cheap. They are in the $7-10k range - just for the unit - and not many people know how to repair them as they are a bit of a specialty item in the HVAC industry.
1. Drilling the wells is not actually that expensive depending where you are.
For me, 3 300 ft wells, bored, piped, and grouted, was about 5k.
2. The units can be gotten for that price with install.
You need to take into account the fact that they are significantly more efficient at both heating, and cooling, and hot water, over their lifetime.
(also, their specs and submittal data usually have real numbers, giving you mappings from incoming water temperature/etc to EER, not BS numbers like most outdoor air A/C units)
They would also be cheaper if they sold more of them :)
3. The units are much easier to keep working, and pretty much never die. They are made much better than the average heat pump. As for your coils, yeah, doing horizontal loops is not a good plan in most cases, though cheaper.
With the 30% federal tax credit that used to exist, a state tax credit, etc, i paid 10k all told.
I made that back in 2 years (the electric bill in the winter went from 600 a month to 100. Yes, the heat pump was functioning properly)
In areas of the country where well drilling is more common, it's a great option. I wouldn't do it in say, the bay area.
But note: none of the wells have to be that expensive to drill, and in fact, when done during new construction, they are often really cheap.
It's just a matter of, in various parts of the country, limited set of people have well drilling rigs because it's not that common. So part of the cost may be "having some guys drive a well drilling rig 5-6 hours to come handle it"
I have three friends/co-workers that had the systems installed. None were particularly impressed with the average cost savings. They said bills went down, but not dramatically. One person had the whole system redone at the suggestion of another HVAC contractor (saying the first cut many corners) the re-done system wasn't much better.
While they may "pretty much never die" this is basically the "cheap on average, but expensive for the unlucky person" argument. This quickly turns into a prisoner's dilemma. No one buys because of potential repair costs, therefore everyone suffers (from higher bills, and eventually global warming).
Wells are not always an option depending on what your land is sitting on. If you are over a big granite deposit, good luck.
Yeah, i lived near a place where wells were incredibly common, so there were plenty of well drillers. I can believe 30k installed. With the 30% federal tax credit that used to exist, and Maryland's 30% state tax credit, it can be worth it. Now, without the 30% federal tax credit, it's probably only worth it on new home construction.
"I have three friends/co-workers that had the systems installed. None were particularly impressed with the average cost savings. They said bills went down, but not dramatically. One person had the whole system redone at the suggestion of another HVAC contractor (saying the first cut many corners) the re-done system wasn't much better. "
This depends a lot on where you live, the climate, etc. Also how much you are spending on heating/cooling. You know all this. I was in a fairly large house in a climate that seems 90+ summers and ~25-30 winters. This kinda sucks for heat pumps. It's also the case that, as it's become more popular (relatively), there are some crappy untrained contractors looking to make a buck. I definitely did a bunch of research, and talked to a bunch of contractors before doing the system. I think out of 5-6 contractors, 1 was clearly a snake, and 1 didn't really know what they were doing based on the questions i asked. 3 could tell me intricate technical details about the systems (IE one launched into a discussion of the merits of parallel vs series vertical piping and reynolds numbers), etc.
FWIW: I've also meant plenty of happy vertical closed loop people. I haven't met any happy horizontal open or closed loop people.
That said, unlike the air based units[1], all, for example, of the waterfurnace units have detailed submittal that tell you, for a given entering water temperature, what the EER/COP will be, what the pressure drop should be, the leaving air temperature, etc.
http://www.waterfurnace.com/literature/7series/SD2700AN.pdf
Most of these things are easily amenable to sensors. I had an arduino and a bunch of sensors that told me whether the system was performing okay.
After they first flushed the lines, they weren't sure they got everything out of it and told me to try it. So I did, and the measurements told me something was off. System worked, when cooling, water temps were raising too quickly. They ended up digging the manifold back up, and there was a rock in it (terrain is fun!) After redoing the manifold, everything was perfect.
So i can also believe that if you aren't watching the till, you may not know if the system is doing okay. But at least, unlike most random heat pumps, i feel like I could know and track that stuff pretty well. Overall, my system actually overperformed (which means they probably didn't need to go as deep as they did, but such is life).
[1] This data exists, it's just not usually easy to get for air source heat pumps unless you are an installer/technician.
So they do something like:
outlet | | manifold inlet in the ground | a bunch of pipes formed into U's, stuck in very deep vertical holes filled with thermal grout | | manifold outlet in the ground | | inlet
The manifolds look like this: https://www.geohydrosupply.com/index.php/fittings/socket-fus...
If it's done in series, each u-bend connects to a set of two outlets on that manifold. If it's done in parallel, each u-bend connects to a single outlet on each of two manifolds, one in, one out.
Here's a drawing: https://blog.heatspring.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/paral...
If you can imagine a really huge refrigerant loop, that's what they are, with water+glycol as the refrigerant going through the pipes. But the water only moves in this loop, it's never going into the ground, etc.
Open loop systems exist, and those are the ones where they are sucking something in one pipe, and pushing it out the other.
Sometimes this is done in a pond, sometimes a well, etc. What happens depends a lot of the design (horizontal, vertical, etc).
Open loops are pretty uncommon.
I'm surprised about the earth movement ruining coils. The installations I've seen pictures of show coils with pretty large radii (maybe 18"), I'd think the earth would have to move a lot to do that, and if it's doing that I'd worry about the foundation. Were these small coils? Is the surface really close to the water table?
We have winter lows below 10F/-10C and summer highs above 85F/30C. But the ground temperature is a relatively uniform 50F - useful for both heating (less important, because natural gas is cheap and efficient) and cooling. It's not so useful when the average temp is above your desired room temp.
In the same vein, rejecting heat to the cooler night air is a lot more efficient than using hot day air.
You can operate a chiller at night and generate a bunch of ice efficiently. During the day, you can melt the ice for cooling at day -- without operating any sort of compressor.
Once the melted water gets higher than the desired chilled water temperature, you can turn on the chiller, but you use the water for heat rejection -- which is still colder than the hot outside air.
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/ice-energy-will-provide-1-mw...
Though the NYTimes article points out that the improvement from AC efficiency is mostly related to peak demand shaving as well, so it serves a similar purpose.
Their commercial page is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Note: the more potential uses of a resources, the more vulnerable it is to Jevons effects, where people use a resource more in response to being able to use it more efficiently.
The real benefit of energy efficiency is not that it reduces energy use by itself, but that it reduces the utility loss from implementing the caps and taxes necessary to actually reduce total usage.
Is there really an HFC replacement - what is it? I wasnt aware.
This is not the same as actually replacing the refrigerant with propane (or a propane/isobutane blend). Still seems less risky then a gas dryer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
> It was agreed on 16 September 1987, and entered into force on 1 January 1989... As a result of the international agreement, the ozone hole in Antarctica is slowly recovering.[3] Climate projections indicate that the ozone layer will return to 1980 levels between 2050 and 2070.[4][5] Due to its widespread adoption and implementation it has been hailed as an example of exceptional international co-operation, with Kofi Annan quoted as saying that "perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal Protocol".
There are new refrigerants called HFOs that are chemically-similar to HFCs, but do not exhibit the greenhouse effect. Ammonia and propane also work, and are commonly used in commercial refrigeration today.
In parallel with refrigerants and efficiency, though, I wonder if the article misses on mentioning geothermal cooling. Those systems are expensive, but if you can bring down the install cost and power them with cleaner energy, you solve some other problems. In developing nations, maybe you try and build larger systems designed to cool multiple residential units - and start to require it for mid/high-rise residential construction?
Thanks to that effort made by many, "A 2005 IPCC review of ozone observations and model calculations concluded that the global amount of ozone has now approximately stabilized. Although considerable variability is expected from year to year, including in polar regions where depletion is largest, the ozone layer is expected to begin to recover in coming decades due to declining ozone-depleting substance concentrations, assuming full compliance with the Montreal Protocol." [0]
Of the top of my head, a normal family house (150m2, 1-1/2 stories) is allowed to consume between 5000-6500 kWh per year (low number in southern Sweden, same as Denmark. High number northern Sweden above the polar circle).
This generally means >220mm insulation in walls and roof and >300mm insulation in the foundation. In northern Sweden you need a geothermal pump to hit those numbers.
Incidentally, he's about to put the place up for sale, if anyone's interested in a nice home in the "not Chicago" part of Illinois...
There are climates where evaporative cooling is not effective, but perhaps they would be useful in the majority of climate regions.
http://atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/swamp-c...
Authority: I live in Colorado.
Not only does insulation have dramatic effects on how temperature is regulated in your building, it only really benefits you when it is installed properly. On top of this, the direction the building faces, placement of windows, proper airflow, and even tile vs carpeted floors all add up to a much more energy efficient home.
How efficient? A building built in Pennsylvania in 1865 can stay cool most of the year (we're talking tops 70F on the bottom floor) by trapping cold air at night and sealing it in during the day. Fans assist air circulation and cooling, and cold air pools in slightly recessed first floor common areas. (It helps to have a stone foundation, too)
Of course you have to mix modern materials and practices with the old-school building constuction to get the most bang for your buck, but it's clear that we do not need to be blasting our A/C half the year. You can also look at models like the Passivhaus[1] for more modern, apartment-oriented designs. (Their underground heat exchanger is another alternative cooling system)
I don't mean to spoil the moralizing fun here, but cooling uses less energy than heating. So perhaps you should put on a sweater when it drops below freezing where you live. You'll get used to it. Or you could move.
This means that the carbon angst directed at AC is primarily a puritanical impulse. It's a new thing! It feels nice! So it must be a sin!
However, refrigerants are bad for climate because they have huge greenhouse gas potential multipliers.
So the solution isn't really to improve air conditioner efficiency, it's rather to find refrigerants with less warming potential.
And move everyone out of New York and Boston - their climate conditioning is very carbon intensive.
"It matters, researchers say, because cooling has a direct relationship with the building of coal-fired power plants to meet peak demand. If more air-conditioners are humming in more homes and offices, then more capacity will be required to meet the demand. So 1.6 billion new air-conditioners by 2050 means thousands of new power plants will have to come on line to support them."
We https://flair.co offer demand response tech for minisplit control that can help prevent having to build all the 'peaker plants'. This gets extra interesting when you add intermittent supply (solar/wind) and grid tied storage (Tesla has been making big pushes here among others). Hopefully, we are able to scale these up in parallel to prevent a bunch of coal fired plants from being built for the 1-3% of the year with the hottest days.
Or not, where California has brought enough solar power online to the point that during peak times it has to pay to offload power to other states because some natural gas operators can't (won't?) shutdown...
You could argue that people are not willing to go vegetarian or even vegan - but at least level the numbers when comparing it with other solutions: If everyone would go vegetarian, their source states 132 gigatons of CO2 reductions.
I also liked this quote from the report:
> As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change.
You can still eat your way to obesity on a vegan diet - oreos are vegan, after all. Considering that the obesity epidemic is currently the number one driver for health care costs in USA, and it's only expected to get worse (http://dailybruin.com/2011/10/26/obesity_has_become_an_overs...), we could probably vastly reduce costs (and therefore emissions) by just eating a little less, vegan or no.
Edit: why the downvotes?
See this paper on effective CO2 reductions: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
I speak without bias on the subject, since I am actually a vegetarian myself. Going by the numbers, it's moderately effective, but not the most effective.
The Earth radiates a fixed amount of energy into space every year. But when we produce electricity etc. no matter how we do it, more than half of the energy escapes as heat - a byproduct of boiling the water or whatever!
This isn't sustainable in the long run either! We are basically raising the temperature of the atmosphere even without greenhouse gases.
Tell me where I'm going wrong:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
As long as we still have cold seasons, it is safe to assume that solar inputs are dominating our own.
The waste heat from solar panels is just the energy from the sun, less whatever gets turned into electricity. No new energy was created - if there was, you could just create a perpetual motion machine to solve the problem.
The only effective ways we have to store solar power are batteries, supercapacitors (once they're viable), large heat masses (such as stone or water), growing plants, or putting energy into chemicals for later storage (electrolysis and storing the hydrogen, forming artificial hydrocarbons, recycling aluminum for aluminum/air power cells, pumping water uphill to power a turbine later, pressurizing gases to later drive a turbine, stuff like that).
Not all of the things I mentioned work at every scale. Some of them are more efficient than others. They may all have advantages and drawbacks.
Imagine sitting in the sun on a warm but not hot day. Now imagine you are sitting in a car in the same spot in the same conditions with the windows rolled up. There is no extra energy being released, just the plain old sun, but the temperature you experience is going to be much higher. Indeed, the temperature increase doesn't grow without bound, but it is meaningfully higher.
Do I still have to go through the imagination exercise?
The Earth radiates a finite but not fixed amount of energy into space every year. Radiated power goes up with the 4th power of absolute temperature (modulated by greenhouse effect). The effects of increasing the greenhouse effect from fossil combustion are much greater than the direct waste heat from fossil combustion, because the greenhouse effect slightly amplifies the warming effects of the ~10^17 watts of sunlight reaching Earth's surface. Fossil combustion directly accounts for ~10^13 watts of terrestrial heating. Note the 4 orders of magnitude difference.
The efficiency focus is itself misguided in several ways. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-efficient-is-energy-effi...
http://www.happonomy.org/get-inspired/salt-water-air-conditi...
https://www.cnet.com/news/salt-driven-air-conditioner-looks-...
This is very old technology so people probably chose aesthetics over cost. Although when I think tacky, I think window air conditioning units..
I don't know why it never crossed my mind before but now when I transition from indoors to outdoors (and back) I notice the humidity delta as much as the temperature delta.
"New research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California indicates that adding improved efficiency in refrigeration and phasing out fluorinated gases used for cooling, as mandated by international agreement, could eliminate a full degree Celsius of warming by 2100. Given that the “business as usual” trajectory leads to 4 to 5 degrees Celsius of warming, that is shaving off a pretty big slice.
Hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, account for about 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but they can be thousands of times as potent than carbon dioxide "
Plus, even though the best BLDC are maybe 93% (after inverter losses) compared to a 90%, that's on the wrong side of the optimization problem, analogous to Amdahl's Law: Doubling insulation means you need half the energy in the first place, while doubling motor efficiency from 90% to 95% only saves 5%.
For example, how would you passively control humidity. It's 89F and 55% humidity where I'm sitting right now, outside airflow feels like wet hot death.
There is zero reason why American housing cannot incorporate, as a minimum, more thermal mass -- like German apartments routinely do.
Furthermore, many American cities are simply not that dense. There are few places in the U.S. that are really densely urban with lots of skyscrapers. So most passive solar methods would be applicable for most structures here.
I grew up in the Deep South, where 98F was quite common in the summer, with much higher humidity than 55%, and I have lived in the High Desert, where I did my long walks for exercise (up to 6 miles) after the sun set so temps would drop to a cool 99F. The temperature and humidity you list does not qualify in my book as "wet, hot death" and I see zero reason that a building could not be made reasonably comfortable in such conditions using mostly passive techniques.
That's a pretty apt general description of Las Vegas.
s/Las Vegas/Phoenix[0]: http://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/30576/Heating-or-Cooling-...
They didn't give a damn when those cities were first founded. The issue wasn't probably even on the mind of anyone on the planet. Same is true about cities in seismically-active regions.
It's too late to fix that. You'd have to convince millions to abandon their homes and go... somewhere else.
It's easier to irrigate a flat desert with fertile soil than to move the flat terrain and fertile soil closer to a water source.
Food production is a fairly important component of sustainable human societies, and a major reason for the US (California particularly) having inhabited deserts and semi-arid regions.
You can't stop people from moving and aggregating. Relocating hundreds of millions of people into freshly-built temperate cities is obviously impractical, not to mention more resource-intensive in the short and medium term than air conditioning their current residences. We have to develop techniques that work with the world as it is, not just pine for utopias that might have been.
You obviously could live there... it would just be unpleasant.
I lived a year in Singapore where temperatures were in the 80-90 range. I stayed on-campus at NUS and was lucky to have a room with A/C, but it wasn't common. The majority of students make do with big fans and windows. I remember working next to a campus Starbucks outside, marveling at how well designed it was to make students moderately comfortable without A/C. There was an enormous fan, and the area was covered and designed to facilitate air flow.
After my time there I came back to the U.S. and can much more readily handle persistently hot temperatures. It's fairly unusual to expect it to be cool all the time.
I also just got back from a trip to Oman where it was routinely above 90 or 100 all day long, and people there make do without A/C as well.
But, the invention of AC and the development of super-strong residential building codes in response to destructive hurricanes has steered the last ~70 years of home construction towards sealed concrete boxes with air conditioning infrastructure built in.
Many of the classic passive cooling techniques of the old Florida homes are not even legal now. The benefit is your house doesn't collapse in a hurricane.
the development of super-strong residential building codes in response to destructive hurricanes
Evap at 80% humidity is about half the rate at 50%. Still functional.
No, it isn't. I have an enormous oak tree that overhangs the southern roof. My windows have a very low level of solar radiation they allow through. The ambient air temp at night is almost 80F. The house is built of concrete block, and stores heat during the day, releasing it at night. We're routinely at 60-80% humidity.
Just waiting for some solar shingles to be available (hurry up Elon!). Don't much care how long I run the AC every day as long as I net out 0 with solar generation.
We've got the technology now to evolve this even further by doing computer simulations to come up with better designs, and by techniques like 3D house printing with concrete to make intricate ventilation systems that can circulate air through the floors and up through walls with zero energy cost.
A thousand years ago you had to build things this way, you had no alternative, but now it's taken for granted that air-conditioning will solve all problems.
Construction makes a huge difference -- especially airflow. Whoever made my current apartment was a genius because in the winter, the south side gets sun through the windows for about 6 hours, while in the summer there is no direct sunlight in any window. My previous apartment was an oven.
North American attitudes to seasonal temperatures are different than where I live now. In the winter here, the lows here are near freezing (1-2C), and we always have a few days in the summer well over 40C (105F) (luckily once it gets over 35, the humidity drops quite a bit). It's quite normal here not to heat in the winter, nor cool in the summer. Experiencing the seasons is considered to be "culturally enlightening" ;-) And joking aside, I've found that I like this way of living. Like you, I would never have thought it possible before I tried it, though.
Having said that, you can't always do it. I need some heat in the winter these days, due to health conditions. I worry about my mother in law who, at 80, usually refuses to run her AC in the summer. You do need to be careful of your health. You also need to be sensitive to the fact that architects build for the prevailing culture. Where I live, they work very hard to deal with this kind of thing. Where you live, they will probably optimise for something else.
Like I said, it's a very cultural thing -- and that's the beauty of the world. There are different cultures and values, each with their own charms. It's totally fair to say that you like the way you live now (and more power to you!) But it's not impossible (nor bad) to live differently.
It's so simple, I do not know why this isn't part of the building code in hot places. People may not like it for their homes, but for commercial buildings with flat roofs, it's a no-brainer.
Looks like good progress. Less penetration into the residential areas, but progress.
Maybe people shouldn't live in a desert if can't handle the heat.
Random Texas river temperature ranges from 55º (winter) to 85º (summer). The world is a big place with lots of climate variety. :-)
In Australia we have houses built with sizeable gaps to allow the frames to warp with the heat, while also allowing air to easily flow in and out of the building. Windows are single-glazed. Exactly what you don't want in a German house, in other words.
In Germany the houses are heat traps and the focus has largely been to conserve energy in winter time (and rightfully so). I've had doors here which stop closing smoothly in the summer because of the slightest warping, the gaps are so tiny. Houses are often air-tight, and the external walls are half a meter thick due to the hefty insulation. All windows are at least double-glazed, one place I've stayed was triple.
New German builds using the Passivhaus specification are generally pretty good as they have constant machine-generated airflow at a set temperature, but as far as I am aware, this specification can only be built new - it's not possible (within reasonable cost) to retrofit an older house to the new specifications. For those, air conditioning seems the only reasonable option moving forward.
what does that do to the river, fish, algae, waste processing, etc. If you ran say houston with river water how many degrees would it be?
Using an open water cooling mechanism would work in hot and dry climates, but then again those are the areas where water is a lot more precious and you don't want to waste it through evaporation. (In a highly humid environment, evaporative cooling does not work because the water has nowhere to go.)
A heat pump is the only mechanism that works for this kind of climate. The exchange could be improved by using water or the ground to absorb the heat, but those solutions are way more expensive to install and can have environmental concerns of their own.
I'm generally impressed with the energy initiatives in Germany and have been following the Passive House movement for a while, but some technologies only work for specific climates or only in one direction.
That said, fiberglass insulation mostly only helps against convection cooling/heating. I.e. through the movement of air. Summertime heat is mostly conductive and radiative i.e. near infrared. Insulation doesn't do much to stop that.
Shade trees however help this big time. A large tree placed in the right spot to shade a house in the afternoon can replace as many as seven window air conditioner units.
The more you insulate the more you need to ensure you have proper ventilation, which is a sort of paradox.
º = ordinal indicator
° = degree
1. How did you notice this?
2. Why does it matter, or when would I want to use one instead of the other for reasons other than being technically correct?
Seriously, this problem isn't going to be fixed until people actually pay the true cost of what they are doing: Electricity + Global Warming externalities.
Can we change the post title to match the article?
"If You Fix This, You Fix a Big Piece of the Climate Puzzle"