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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

While I love to hate on forced-in-office work as much as the next guy - the AC point is actually the opposite of the truth. During the hottest hours of the day it's more efficient to cool down a single large space for many people than have everyone running their AC at home - now if your office likes to keep the temperature at 14C and forces most employees to bring in a space heater to keep from getting chills then that's a perfectly valid point... but most offices keep a "reasonable" temperature.

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I can believe as a one-to-one comparison, cooling an office is more efficient. But people aren't turning off their home AC when they go into the office. If you figure that a majority of people won't even schedule their thermostat due to laziness, having other people at home, etc, and if even if they do, having their house cool down for their arrival home (5:30-6PM?) is still during a pretty hot time of day.

I would be pretty surprised if offset you could anywhere near the cooling of an entire office building considering all that.

I'm coming from the perspective of Texas where it's 100F effectively all day during the summer and I wouldn't move the thermostat from it's usual daytime setting of ~76F past maybe ~80F. Any more and it would take hours to cool back down.

That assumes that homes have AC. Here in the UK it’s common for offices to have AC, but almost no homes do.

SF too.

This is just isn't true. Way way more AC gets used when offices are involved than when they are not (especially if the office building didn't exist in the first place in the flipside scenario). They leave office AC on 24/7, and people leave their home AC on anyway, so it has a multiplicative effect on carbon footprint.

how about the offset on all the vehicles on the road? People still need to cool their homes reasonably while at work (people, pets) when they're not there so the difference might be less important. also this makes the assumption you're living in a place that needs AC. Commute is all year, AC usage maybe not.

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