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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

I find it amazing that these regulations exist but apartments aren't even required to have AC. I remember spending many a summer in the Bay trying to survive by putting ice cubes in front of my desk fan in the day, under my pillow at night, etc. It was especially bad on days where fires meant that opening the window was bad for health.

When I first arrived, I was shocked to realize that AC was considered a luxury feature in the Bay. I've lived in dwellings in developing countries better capable of managing summer heat than most Bay Area apartments.

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You probably shouldn’t move to Seattle. Quite a bit hotter summertime, and quite a lot of rentals explicitly prohibit AC window units.

In new york a bunch of people use those portable rolling type units that sit inside and vent out the window with a big flexible accordion style tube. Always an option if a window banger isn't and much easier/safer to install/uninstall.

True about the AC. But Seattle is slightly cooler year-round, right?

I compared average temperatures with a few SV cities and the Seattle average is indeed lower than some. I compared recent years and it’s the opposite. Our all-time record this year (112-116 depending on where measurements were taken) certainly threw some of the averages off. But Seattle summers have been increasingly hot for the better part of a decade and I don’t expect that to trend the opposite way.

Probably depends where in the Bay Area you're talking about. The microclimates vary a lot. SF or the Santa Cruz mountains is one thing. The middle of Silicon Valley is something else.

> I've lived in dwellings in developing countries better capable of managing summer heat than most Bay Area apartments.

Developing recently has its advantages. They’ll install reversible AC mini-split systems primarily for cheaper heating than gas/oil/LP, but with the side-benefit of AC.

Then again, a lot of Western Europe (hello France!) won’t use AC because “air conditioning makes you sick”. I’ve even seen it unused in a car during a heatwave for this reason, and it wasn’t an economic issue.

Here in the UK we don’t generally use A/C not because of health concerns but because there’s only about three or four weeks of the year we’d actually need it so in practice fans and complaining heavily during those three or four weeks does just fine. Our climate is generally damp, grey, and mild; the summers don’t get very hot and the winters don’t get very cold.

This might change with climate change though, I suspect in the future we’ll need better cooling and better heating if the jet stream gets interfered with. We’ll also need better drainage but there’s no shortage of scummy housing developers putting their underbuilt and overpriced shoeboxes on flood plains.

Even mildly uncomfortable heat can effectively waste 10% or more of the time you spend in it. And that number rises pretty fast as the heat increases.

So even if you remove discomfort from the equation, it doesn't take many tens to hundreds of hours of heat to justify a £100 air conditioner that costs £0.05 an hour to run.

We’re finishing the gut renovating a house in the south eastern US were you definitely need both heat and air conditioning over the course of the year.

We tore out our central hvac system, all the equipment, all the ducting and replaced it with mini splits.

They are sooooooo much better. More effective, more flexible, and cheaper. Heating bill cut by 2/3. They let us heat and cool each room independently. No dust,smells, or heat gets moved between rooms. They even have a dehumidify setting.

It is moronic that something similar is not standard practice in homes.

What's your fresh air system? My current home (in a mountain state) has problems with CO2 buildup with its central air system, so I'm curious what people with minisplits do to handle CO2.

Good question...a couple nested systems. Noting that the house was designed to be 'a passive house' (air quotes) in the early 1980s so it has some quirks.

1) we have a large stove so needed a makeup air fan anyways to match the hood. I worked with them to design the makeup system so it is quiet and pressurizes the second floor 'landing' and is larger than necessary...rather than just immediately pumping air into the exhaust.

2) We also have high ceilings because of the shape of the house (it...should help?)

3) the high ceilings also have remote openable skylights (originally they had hand openable crank skylights) that are already really affected at releasing any heat buildup

4) an excess of windows and two multi-panel sliding doors which, because we are only heating and cooling rooms when they are occupied, can be kept open more frequently. All of them are under deep overhangs and 75% of them are south facing so they are great at managing solar heat gain and we can open them often.

I'm curious how it will work and we have some backup plans. We're putting CO2 monitors in the bedrooms and the kitchen when we move back in and if needed a bunch of the systems can be connected to home automation rules if needed. Even the exhaust fans for all the bathrooms are on the home automation system already.

We lived in the house for about a year before rennovating it with 2 mini splits retrofitted (long story). It's 1900 square feet and we both worked from home. At night, we heated the bedroom, during the day we heated the office. During winter the sun heated the rest of the house. Our total power bill was around $70 a month.

Any airtight home will require a heat exchanger to provide the necessary ventilation. The source of heat or cooling doesn't matter. (Wood stoves and furnaces require make-up air, which should be supplied directly, not by infiltration.)

For example:

https://www.venmar.ca/air-exchanger.html

I see what you mean, but these are countries I visited 10-15 years ago, so not recent by any means.

>I find it amazing that these regulations exist but apartments aren't even required to have AC.

If anything, regulations should discourage having AC -- to reduce the energy consumption...

AC is generally optional especially in non-urban New England as well. It's probably pretty standard in new houses. But, in general, people in older homes, will put it in as part of a broader renovation, just stick in a window unit or two in the summer, or just make do with fans and it being overly hot for a few weeks a year.

I rarely experience more than a few hot days a year on the peninsula, even these days. I can’t imagine having AC.

I also have a house in the sierras there the summer temps are unbearable. But where I’ve lived in the bay (SF, Palo Alto) I don’t see the point.

The SF apartments I lived in for a few years would have been unlivable without A/C -- indoor temps would exceed 80F often. Not sure if it's because multi-story buildings don't get shade from trees, or something else.

Ah, 80 degrees seems like a normal living temperature to me and I would not make any effort to reduce that. But even in PA the temp doesn’t get even that high for long.

I lived in SF for 20 years and never once used AC. Heating, on the other hand, I used every winter. But temperature is very subjective.

Many houses in San Jose don't have air conditioning.

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