Summertime, and the Living Is Easier | Hacker News Reader

Summertime, and the Living Is Easier

mondediplo.com

1 pointandrewl4 comments

Why is air-conditioning in hot places evil, but nobody bats an eye about the need to run heat to make cold places livable? People keep saying that it's "irresponsible" for people to live in places like Phoenix where you need A/C to survive the summer, but it's totally fine, for example, for Canada to exist, despite the fact that virtually every Canadian would die if they had to go without winter heat.

Nobody says that it's irresponsible for people to live in Canada (or Minnesota, or Maine, or Norway, or any other cold place).

Why is it only cooling that draws such moral outrage?

I guess because people aren't doing it very thoughtfully.

You can insulate the heck out of a home. In cold places, helpfully, humans are natural 1000W space heaters, and can also put on additional clothing to stay warm. Europeans have refined the art of insulated homes too. Meanwhile, in a crappily built house in a hot place, if you're hot, your only options are to go for a swim or turn on the air conditioner.

Americans tend to build junky wooden homes with poor insulation in the middle of the desert and consider European staples like double glazing as novel. Australia isn't much better, except they use bricks and concrete more, but still have atrocious attitudes to windows, and dark gray roofing is in vogue too, meaning houses get that much hotter in summer for no reason.

On a side note, ever tried to organize an energy recovery ventilator for an air conditioning setup? It conditions fresh air from outside with the temperature of air from inside as an exchange is performed, so that energy isn't wasted. People act like you're shopping for a T14 hyperdrive. People need to get smarter about insulation and energy efficiency.

Then again, though, American houses in cold places are built the same way (mostly) as American houses in hot places, and so if they're insufficiently insulated to keep cool in when it's 100F outside, they're dramatically more inadequately insulated to keep warm when it is -20F outside. (Few people try to use air conditioning to maintain more than a 35F delta between inside and outside (~80F inside on a 110F+ day), but in cold climates, an 80F delta (~60F inside on a -20F night) or more might be required.

Subhead: In 1960 only one US home in eight had air-con. Now American life is inconceivable without it, and the rest of the world wants to be cool too.

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