Americans' Air Conditioning Habit Is Eco-Friendly (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Americans' Air Conditioning Habit Is Eco-Friendly (2015)

bloomberg.com

23 pointsjseliger67 comments

If we used solar power, AC could be close to carbon neutral, because the peak intensity almost perfectly coincides with temperature. Higher temperatures mitigate the big downside of solar to a greater extent.

Compare with heating, which always peaks in the evening hours.

Actually it is possible to have some kind of really eco friendly air conditioning and it has been invented (a thousand years ago?) in Iran. It is called "Badgir" and it is a pity that their invention has not been much more adapted by modern society (Iranians themselves do not built new ones.... what a pity): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher

Prior to air conditioning, many American buildings were similarly designed for natural cooling. Air conditioning has allowed for a style of architecture that's inherently inefficient.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/keepi...

> Air conditioning has allowed for a style of architecture that's inherently inefficient.

While this is true, it's also true that air conditioning has allowed for settlement in places that were basically unlivable before, like much of the American South. You can only go so far with clever architecture.

Oh please, unliveable? People have lived in the mediterranean area, in Egypt and the Arabian peninsular, in the jungles of Indochina, in the Amazon basin, long before air conditioning was even a thing.

Americans' Air Conditioning Habit Is Eco-Friendly

Is there any part of the article that supports the claim of the title? Did I miss it?

It "supports" it with a tu quoque "whataboutism" argument, i.e. a fallacy.

That’s not whataboutism, because people have to live somewhere. Either you live where it’s cold and use energy to heat your home, or you live somewhere hot and use AC.

There are of course temperate areas that require neither, and they’re typically very expensive because they’re temperate.

It is precisely whataboutism, i.e. "What about Europe?" Well, we're not talking about Europe when we say "Americans' Air Conditioning Habit Is Eco-Friendly" are we? Maybe if they had titled it "Air Conditioning America is Cheaper Than Heating Europe" (to match what the article is saying) you could say I didn't have a case. That would be a more modest and defensible (yet still unimpressive) claim. I don't see that; "I see America's AC habit is eco-friendly because Europe."

Sure, but do Americans really need to cool down entire buildings by 10c+ ?

I lived in SF and LA, both my flats didn't have AC, I was perfectly fine. It's true that I actually had to bring extra cloth to my uni/office because it was insanely cold. I'm in Berlin now and I don't use a/c nor heating at all because buildings are properly insulated. I open the window during summer nights and throw in an extra blanket during winter.

You’re describing the temperate areas of America that are insanely expensive. You don’t need to cool a home in a coastal CA town, but you also need to cough up $3k+ a month to live there.

If you live in the south you absolutely want to cool your home by 10c, and it might be a requirement to not die.

> You’re describing the temperate areas of America

Yeah that was part of my point, these places really don't require much a/c yet in the summer they're on full blast.

That’s not been my experience in LA. Most buildings I visit are just ventilated to the outside.

Note: I don’t live in the valley.

I was going to be snarky but I read the article and the linked articles about how AC is eco friendly and there is nothing I can see that showecases that fact. haha. WTF

Yes, the claim is that living in a warmer climate and using A/C to cool 10-20 degrees in the summer is more energy efficient than living in a cold one and heating by 40-50 degrees in the winter.

Something about this seems wrong...like this is a very poor argument to even make.

I wouldn't say so. There is a spectrum of eco-friendliness. Not existing is probably on the high end of eco-friendliness, although someday perhaps an Elon Musk of fixing the environment will be born who will have a net positive impact. Then there are people who travel around the world via airplanes who will probably go to eco-hell. If you're alive and living in a first world country, you have some amount of detrimental effect on the environment. So it is sensible to compare relative levels of harmfulness.

Which is my point. This is like the arguments around cars. Cars and the design of cities that requires people to drive to do anything are one of the larger contributors to ghg's in the US, but we can't expect people in those cities to essentially die tomorrow in order to fix things. This argument that blames people who essentially live in cooler areas seems even worse, you're blaming things outside their control.

You can change street design and work on public transit because those are things we built. You can't change where people live without displacing them. Just like you said, not existing would save the environment too, like bulldozing every spawling suburb and exhurb in the US would save a lot on GHG but it would be pretty cruel.

...why?

Why? I don’t have depth in the specifics, but what’s the critical issue with the argument?

False dichotomy. It's missing the third option of living in a warm climate, but using more energy-efficient architecture to cool homes.

A good point someone made, we replace about 1% of our housing stock a year. And build 2-3% more. At that rate the effect of passive house regulations won't have any effect on CO2 emissions over the next 20-30 years.

So you aren't going to fix anything with expensive passive houses. Especially since passive houses need major repairs every 10-20 years.

What's needed to to ban gas and oil fired furnaces and make the grid 100% renewable. Everything else is a distraction.

Currently, in the Midwest US, you'll pay around 3-5x more per month for heating in the winter using forced air electric vs gas. A reasonable winter gas bill of $150/month would easily push $400/month using electric.

Of course, most energy efficient would be to live in a warmer climate and just live with the warmth, or live in a colder climate and dress appropriately, as mankind has for ages.

People have also been using fire to stay alive in cold places since long before the start of history.

Wood fire is environmentally friendly as long as you use replanted forests, right?

No.

A properly designed and insulated building should not need very much of either.

So where are the KWh / sq m comparisons? Or comparing insulation levels? How did she reach this conclusion?

Maybe it's better than heating in a comparably insulated building. No chance of finding out from this rubbish.

Given McArdle's background, I probably shouldn't expect the piece to mention any of that.

> A properly designed and insulated building should not need very much of either.

Haven't the standards for what that means shifted considerable the past 40 years? These days it seems like there's a lot more expected indoor/outdoor air exchange than was done in the 1980's.

> Maybe it's better than heating in a comparably insulated building.

Cooling has one big advantage in that solar can provide a lot of the power needed during peak usage time. My instincts would tell me that if you make the right choices, the carbon impact of keeping a house cool in a hot climate may be less than of keeping a house warm in a cold climate.

> A properly designed and insulated building should not need very much of either.

Where are these magical "properly designed and insulated buildings?" Also, how does insulation help keep out infrared radiation, which is a key heating source if your place has sufficient windows.

Not sure if my experience is the norm but most of the flats I lived in (california) had single pane windows, most of them weren't sealing, and they had next to no wall insulation.

A properly insulated building doesn't replace a/c but it sure lower the needs for both.

It's like if you used your freezer as a fridge by leaving the door cracked open, it works fine to keep beer cold but there might be more efficient ways to do it.

>Also, how does insulation help keep out infrared radiation, which is a key heating source if your place has sufficient windows.

Low-emissivity glass, plus shutters and screens.

http://glassed.vitroglazings.com/topics/how-low-e-glass-work...

Well double and triple glazing, usually with coatings to minimise solar heating are readily enough available.

A lot of the rest of the magic comes from old approaches found in most regions before we had cheap heating and cooling that encouraged cheap building that paid no heed to locale. Usually working with the local environment - to encourage shade, cooling, airflow, or to retain heat. Simple stuff like solar chimneys, windcatchers, or for cooler areas encouraging a greenhouse effect, far removed from full blown passive houses.

Most of which can benefit from modern materials and controls, and be combined with aircon and central heating to achieve comfort for a lot less fuel.

> A properly designed and insulated building should not need very much of either.

If you are talking about the hermetically sealed buildings in Germany that have great energy efficiency...they also have a pretty stuffy, like no air is circulating.

I don't understand the article. I'm ok with the fact that an hotter city requires air conditioning. But it seems that, quite often, US indoor temperatures loom around 18-20C, while in EU we usually aim at around 24-25C.

That's the most common objection we make to American tourists, and the article says nothing about that.

When I lived in the States it felt unbelievably weird that people in summer would wear sweatshirts because it was so freezing cold inside. My fellow American colleagues thought however that was the most normal thing to do. I still don’t get it.

They want to make everyone happy. If you feel it’s too cold, you can throw something on. In the other direction, you don’t have any option if you feel it’s too hot after you’ve taken off your sweater/jacket.

Everyone except the environment (and therefore future generations)

But where is that mythical person who is sweating in 22C/70F while wearing summer-appropriate (thin) clothes? I've never met anyone like that.

Besides...forcing lots of people to carry sweatshirts around during summertime, just so they have some additional layers of clothing ready to be put on when they enter a home doesn't sound like "make everyone happy". It sounds like a huge inconvenience.

I sweat at very low temperatures when the humidity is high, 20C is fine, 24C my arms will begin sweat up a bit, 26C then I'm thinking I should just quit for the day. Then I'm writing code, so that sweat sticks down to whatever desk I'm using, especially if I'm wearing short sleeves.

So you can tell me (a) my arms shouldn't rest on the desk while I'm typing. Maybe, but it's not like I'm a "typist", I'm a programmer. And (b) maybe I should sweat at such low temperatures. Honestly, a lot has to do with the airflow and it seems difficult for buildings to circulate air without cooling things down unless they are throwing heat into it.

> Besides...forcing lots of people to carry sweatshirts around during summertime, just so they have some additional layers of clothing ready to be put on when they enter a home doesn't sound like "make everyone happy"

You really don't have to carry it around. Many people keep light sweaters at work. Bottom line, they are thinking about the difference between a programmer working at 100% and one working at 50%.

And we are splitting hairs here: 22C is pretty ideal. 26C is not ideal at all. But people are all over the map on this. OSHA claims that anywhere from 68F (20C) to 76F (24.5C) works well. But you also need to consider humidity, and oftentimes the only thing that can take humidity out of the air is...the HVAC.

> In the other direction, you don’t have any option if you feel it’s too hot after you’ve taken off your sweater/jacket.

A ceiling or pedestal fan could work and would require far less energy to operate.

In an open office?

If by "work" you mean "spin on the ceiling without perceptibly affecting the temperature", then sure.

Americans don’t think this is normal, but rather a nuisance that we have to put up with for some unknown reason. The building engineers responsible for maintaining the temperature of large office buildings presumably haven’t recalibrated their best practices from the days when offices were largely populated by obese men in suits.

This is strange but where I grew up in the hot humid south there was almost a subconscious association between cold AC and modernness, cleanliness, efficiency etc (traits a business would want to project) and inversely between weak AC and cheapness, backwardness, poverty etc. It actually makes sense in a hospital or supermarket but it was quite a relief to break this association and now 75 feels relaxed.

I could see that but it doesn’t explain why my recently refurbished downtown Yankee office building is a frosty 67F in the height of summer. :P

18 is pretty cool, I only push the ambient temperature down to that level at night, for sleeping. During the day 24 would be entirely normal for many Americans. If I tried to keep it at 20 during the day my wife would be pretty unhappy with me.

My house is heated to 55-65 at night and 68 in the day. This is how I grew up in Europe: if it is cold out, the house is colder (within reason) and you adapt your clothing. In the US I still find it strange that people set the heat so they can wear a light t-shirt inside no matter the weather outside. It seems wasteful and also somehow disconnected from nature.

Something that's bothered me in Shanghai is that indoor spaces, like malls, are kept at a comfortable temperature regardless of what it's like outdoors. So to go _to_ the mall in winter, you need to dress for the 3°C outdoors you have to cross, and then you get into the mall and overheat badly.

I don't see an easy solution to this -- I don't think "we need the indoors to be just as frigid as the outdoors" is going to catch on -- but it certainly is annoying.

Go further south where there is no indoor heating at all. I was in a train station in Hunan in winter, and the girls in the train station selling candy and food and such, I felt so bad for them, they had to wear gloves otherwise their hands would freeze up.

My coldest winter was 5-10C in southern China. The lack of indoor heating beats you down really quickly.

That seems about right in my experience. 68F is about where I choose to keep the heat during the day, I'd go colder but my wife and daughter get uncomfortable.

It may be different in other parts of the United States, it is a pretty big country with a lot of different climates. I live in the Pacific Northwest, which has a climate similar to northwestern Europe.

Isn’t 24-25C bad for typing? I know my arms sweat-stick to the desk at those temps.

> But it seems that, quite often, US indoor temperatures loom around 18-20C, while in EU we usually aim at around 24-25C

I wonder if it has to do with the US having a higher obesity rate than the EU?

Anecdotally, I'm in the US and a few years ago I lost a fair bit of weight. Before that I would heat my house to 65 F (18.3 C) in the winter, and turn that down to 62 F (16.7 C) at night. As it got to warmer parts of the year, I was comfortable up to maybe 68 F (21 C). If it got over that, I'd consider it too hot.

After losing a fair bit of weight, I find those old winter temperatures too cold. I now heat to about 68-69 F (20 - 20.6 C) in the winter. Below that, and I'm wearing a sweater. In the warmer parts of the year, I'm now happiest at 75 - 78 F (23.9 - 25.5 C), and can go without much annoyance to maybe 81 F (27.2 C) if I turn a fan on to blow air over me and maybe take off my shirt.

It's a common misconception, at least in the US, that AC uses more power than heat. Tons of people leave the AC off to "save power" but almost nobody turns down heat in the winter.

The article touches on this, but AC in hot areas is far more energy efficient than heating in cold ones, because humans prefer a balmy ~75 degrees. Even in the hottest places, there's only a 30 degree difference inside and outside. In areas where temps get below freezing, you need to maintain 40 degree+ difference.

What the article doesn't mention, is that AC is also 3-10X more efficient than heat even without factoring in temperate difference. In warm areas we can use heat pumps for heat and AC which function by moving heat from one side to the other. The downside is that they don't work well in cold temperatures.

In cold areas you can't move heat, there's just not enough of it, so you have to create it. This is massively inneficient and makes living in warm/hot areas far more eco friendly than somewhere like chicago

In dry areas, you can also use a swamp cooler, though you might be SOL if you don’t have a backup during typhoon season.

> The downside is that [heat pumps] don't work well in cold temperatures.

There are now low temperature or "hyper heat" heat pumps which can function effectively to temperatures well below freezing, some as low as 5° F (-15° C).

Your point is not "wrong", but simply "somewhat less true than it used to be".

Temp delta to cool in the south may be lower than to warm in the north, but not convinced it's a net energy savings.

Not an AC guy, but the figure bandied about in the data center was that it takes 2W of power to remove 1W of heat.

Anyone have a less hand-wavy figure?

Modern data centres are a lot more efficient than that. Google currently uses 0.11 watts of overhead per 1 watt of compute, and that overhead includes voltage conversions. [0]

As for residential systems, typical AC unit efficiency ranges from ~15 to ~25 SEER, which is essentially BTUs of cooling per watt•hour under "typical" conditions. Stripping away the weird units, that's 5-7x efficiency. So 5-7 watts of heat removed per watt spent, under whatever the EPA's definition is for "typical" conditions.

[0] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal

Good on Megan then! I'm in the south. We have a lot of Germans down here who bitch about how we do everything--AC included.

I'll have to send her a thank you card.

I think it's in bad taste to voluntarily move somewhere and then complain about everything.

Keep in mind that heating efficiency can also be better than 1:1. Pulling heat from the outdoors (heat pump) and putting it inside is more efficient than making new heat (radiator, furnace).

Just had a chance to read this--thanks. From the average, the data center guys I'm talking to aren't wrong in a heuristic sense--just inefficient:

"According to the Uptime Institute's 2014 Data Center Survey, the global average (PUE) of respondents' largest data centers is around 1.7."

From what I recall, Google does AC-to-DC outside of the cooled area, and has their own custom approach to UPS. The article adds that they leave the cool aisle at a toasty 80F+, and make use of free cooling techniques.

Most non-FAANG data centers are using stock Dell/HP/Cisco servers with redundant internal AC adapters, attached to an APC UPS (with its own internal AC adapter)--all actively cooled to 70-something F in some poorly-insulated re-purposed downtown building.

I think Google made many of those improvements a very long time ago. I'd have expected their practices to be ubiquitous by now, but they're not...

Yikes. I expected the average to be worse, but not by that much. No wonder FAANG is eating the world.

As far as the environment is concerned, we'd better get our butts in gear and move to the cloud :)

Aside from the obvious - better insulation - I think deep geothermal can be quite an eco-friendly way to heat homes in the near future.

> Unlike a cold winter with no heat, a hot summer with no cooling won't definitely kill you.

That's very blatantly false. And it's going to get a lot worse if the planet continues to heat up.

2003 heat wave "In France, 14,802 heat-related deaths (mostly among the elderly) occurred during the heat wave, according to the French National Institute of Health."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave

NYT 2003: "The staggering number of deaths in France -- perhaps 5,000 by the government's estimate but possibly more than twice that ... The victims were generally found inside apartments, houses and hotels. In virtually every case, there was no air-conditioner."

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/22/world/lack-of-air-conditi...

It is not false. It says "won't definitely kill you". A cold winter will definitely kill you without heat, but a hot summer won't definitely kill you, it just might kill you.

Perhaps you read it as "definitely won't kill you", which would be false.

Those people definitely died, so the lack of AC definitely did kill them. It was false in their thousands of cases.

"won't definitely" =/= "definitely won't" in this context.

The author almost certainly agrees with you, he was mocking that stance.

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