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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

For each 100 people telling us to "just install more solar panels", only 1 person will consider ways to reduce power usage. Instead of scaling our battery banks to our needs, we chose to adapt our needs to the available space for batteries and surface for panels.

The world could stand to learn to apply such habits and mental models more generally.

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This article is about boats but if you are suggesting this thinking for the home, its just kind of pointless. Almost all home power usage comes down to heating and cooling. Calculating the power usage of a macbook is a drop in the ocean for power usage.

And people talking about efficient heating, cooling, and insulation is a very common topic that has been thoroughly discussed. No one talks about switching your tv off at the plug because it's a lot of work to save virtually no power.

> Almost all home power usage comes down to heating and cooling.

What is it about a house which makes these things more of a requirement than on a boat? People have lived and do live without these things in their home as well.

Because a boat doesn't have an enclosed space to heat. Well not usually anyway. And yes of course many people can live without heating and cooling in their homes, but that comes at a significant comfort cost. If you come to me with the suggestion of "Don't use any air conditioning to reduce power usage" its a non starter because air conditioning significantly improves my enjoyment of life. If you came to me with the suggestion of "Lets allocate more government funding to renewable and nuclear investments" I am much more interested in the proposal.

It might sound selfish but this is how everyone feels. No one wants to give up their most important comforts if they don't have to. And they don't have to.

And yes of course many people can live without heating and cooling in their homes, but that comes at a significant comfort cost.

It doesn't have to be that way. You might try looking up passive solar design..

That usually only applies to the tiny fraction of people who can build new.

It used to be kind of the norm. We just called it vernacular architecture back then and chalked it up to "local style" rather than fully grasping that it such regional styles were the product of using locally sourced materials and then designing to the best of our ability for human comfort given the local weather and climate.

It used to be people just didn't live where it was too hot to live without AC. Now they do.

I grew up in the Deep South. Rest assured, people lived there before AC was a thing.

Houses were designed for cross ventilation with open windows.

Some houses had wrap around porches on three sides so windows could be left open even when it was raining.

Historically, they made a second outdoor kitchen so you could cook in summer without heating the whole house. To this day, grilling out in summer weather is a common practice.

Etc.

The population of the south basically doubled after air conditioning came in. So yes people lived there, about half as many.

The world currently has nearly 8 billion people. I imagine an awful lot of places have much higher populations than they used to have, regardless of climate, available tech or quality of life.

So unless you can cite sources that can show this was due entirely to AC per se and not at least partly due to population growth generally, that little factoid may well fall under the heading how to lie with statistics.

Well, I don't think I cited any statistics, but here's some crap I just found on google:

http://www.scienceofthesouth.com/some-like-it-cool-the-impac...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2208474

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-29/cities-th...

Basically doubled would be what some folks would call a statistic.

Crap you found via Google -- so likely crap I could find if I cared enough to bother to look. And you didn't bother to do pull quotes to support your position.

Color me unimpressed and unswayed. In my experience, good passive solar design makes for more human comfort, not less, than our modern tendency to build crappy cardboard boxes and tack on HVAC.

Source: I have been living without AC in the US for some years now. I've spent more than four years now living in old buildings and it's such a shame we just don't build them like we used to. Life is better if you can achieve a comfortable temperature most of the time without AC.

If you spent as much effort investigating as writing that comment you'd know the truth!

That’s basically making the best with what shitty technology there was back then. It’s not nearly as good as air conditioning or else people would just build houses the same way.

Essentially the entire Phoenix valley is unlivable in the summer without energy assisted cooling either with A/C or evap. The native Americans didn’t even live down low during the summer. You can’t beat physics with some well placed windows.

The “deep south” you referred to is about as easy of a climate you can get to live in the continental US without energy assistance apart from maybe Southern California. The air conditioning energy spent to cool down a home 15 degrees in the summer in Mississippi is a drop in the bucket compared to what it takes to heat New York or Minneapolis homes in the dead of winter.

> Because a boat doesn't have an enclosed space to heat.

All ocean capable boats do. Nobody lives in canoes or row boats.

And refrigeration. That's a big power draw in my home.

I tied that in to heating/cooling. Basically all energy in the home is spent making things hot or cold. Lighting, TVs, laptops, etc may as well be free for the power they consume.

They're more or less of a requirement depending on where you live (or where your boat is). People have frozen to death both in houses and on boats.

I can't plot a course for my house that keeps me from freezing. Boats can, if course planning and timing allows, be kept within a habitable climate range more easily than a house (unless your house happens to already be built within a region that doesn't freeze solid five months a year - mine is not).

> Almost all home power usage comes down to heating and cooling

This is only true in some places in the world. I live in the tropics, and don't need to spend any power on heating or cooling my residence.

You mean the western world? The rest of the planet live with/on very little.

Maybe he should've said the developed world.

the west is definitely wrong however, as there are wealthy nations all over the world

I said exactly what I meant. I would like to see a trend towards passive solar design and similar principles for humans generally.

All humans, even those for whom that would be a huge step up, not just those who might currently think of it as some kind of virtuous personal sacrifice.

I would like to see a world where The Haves are not obscenely wasteful, The Have Nots are not screwed by a system that makes it impossible to find some means to get your needs met on a budget and the middle class is not being exterminated by our social practices, policies, etc.

I'm too old to believe in faerie tale endings, so I'm not holding my breath here and waiting for anyone else to agree with me. But I'm also old enough to speak my mind anyway and say exactly what I mean rather than what I think other people will find palatable or expect based on their current mental models and world view.

Much of the world lives in poverty and then lusts after what wealthier nations have and usually tries to emulate their methods.

This is about living well without living wastefully. Too much of the world believes we can either live in poverty or ruin the biosphere for future generations.

If you make no effort to both live well and live within a reasonable footprint, it shouldn't be surprising when you fail to achieve both goals.

My father does this: he tried to decrease energy use years before he started generating his own energy. By using timers on most hallway light switches, by installing energy saving light sources, adding thermal insulation, thinking a lot about when the heating ia on for how long etc. Which devices are running etc.

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