Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I find it difficult to imagine life without air conditioning.

I'm generally hot and without it ... can't imagine how I'd make it.

I sometimes think I"m not far from living life like the people in WALL-E, tied to my machines (in their case chair) unable to manage otherwise.

View on HN

I'd have to move way North to be able to sleep OK without AC. Or maybe to a desert area with high elevation, for those nice, cold nights.

Discovering how much better I sleep when the temp is in the 62-66F range has made a big difference. I'd hate to go back to trying to sleep with temps over 68F, certainly. Over 72F and I basically can't sleep. I mean I'm sure I'd acclimate to some degree, but it's not like I was already used to sleeping in colder temps before I tried it, so I'm pretty sure that range is absolutely better for me, regardless of what I'm accustomed to or able to tolerate.

I converted it to celsius and just realized it means you can't sleep if the temperature is above 22C. IMO, that's a reaching the level of a physical handicap: it's a very mild temp.

The unspoken variable in many of these cases is body fat percent.

Eh, seemed to hold true even back when I still had the good ol' six-pack.

Not sure about this, I'm 110 kg (242 pounds), and I sleep fine with temps up to 30C (86F). Higher than that is less comfortable, but not to the point of not sleeping. It starts to suck above 35.

I think it's more a about if you have lived with AC most of your life or not.

While being fat does mean I get more heat, I have witnessed drastic differences in body temperature adaptation that are independant of the weight of the person. Your ability to change your blood vessels dilatation, produce sweat, and work out your mitochondrias probably plays a big role, and I would imagine they are worse when you are overweight, and better if you lived in Africa or Canada.

That is in no way a physical handicap. Sleep quality (in terms of actual rest and recovery) is highly dependent on temperature. The optimal temperature is about 18 °C for most people. This article has an extensive list of references if you want to dig into the research.

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/bedroom-environment/best-tem...

I'm going to continue running my AC at night when it's hot.

The entire world didn't have AC just a few decades ago and most people slept fine.

If in less than a century of introducing a tech your body becomes so dependant to it it impairs a critical body function if you don't have it, yes, it's a handicap.

Well, another way I can sleep OK in most any condition (short of becoming badly sleep-deprived) is to get a ton of physical activity during the day. Wear myself right the hell out, so I'm dead-tired by sundown. I bet physical activity levels were way, way higher pre-AC, too.

Indeed, and they were outside more, which means more exposed to the weather.

Also food was different. I noticed that some food make my body temperature rise a lot, and that may play a role.

Actually people often didn't sleep fine at all. Or let's see some evidence that they did because I don't believe you. I know my own grandparents complained about being unable to sleep soundly during the summer when they lived in New York without AC.

22C is not summer temp. It's spring temp.

Complaining about not sleeping well in the middle of a hot summer is very different from not being able to sleep at all in the middle of spring without an AC.

It's pretty rare for our nighttime lows to be above 72, even in the Summer, and I live in a fairly hot part of the US (though not the South proper). Even when it's in the high 90s or low 100s during the day, which is typically only a few weeks a year, usually it still gets down to 75-78 at night. We're in the high-80s this week and nighttime lows will be as low as 58F.

Spring nighttime temps are more like 35-55.

The main trouble's the damn humidity. A very-humid 72 still feels gross. And maybe I could sleep like a baby on a night when it gets down to 60, but if that's a spring or summer night I'll wake up nasty and covered in sweat unless I've got some serious dehumidification going (that's what happens when I go camping—might be cold enough to sleep well, but unless it's Winter or late Fall the high humidity still has unpleasant effects). Plus you get mildew and mold problems if you let a modern, very-sealed-up (so, efficient for AC) house get very humid too often, so it's better to just dehumidify with the AC even if the outdoor temp matches what I'd like it to be indoors.

We didn't have weeks long heatwaves over here a few decades ago.

20 years ago people still bought cars without AC, because we had like 10 actually hot days every year.

For the last 3-4 years people have been buying heat pump ACs like crazy every year, because the heat is getting unbearable.

It's not your fault, it's your house's. Modern houses are designed to be mechanically ventilated. Older houses were designed to have better thermal mass and better airflow. I have a friend who lives in an 1800s-era "summer home" (designed specifically for the wealthy to live in during the summer). It is quite comfortable during the summer without the AC on.

This is a big part of it. Almost anyone who lived in a large house in the past would have "summer rooms" and "winter rooms" - rooms that were more comfortable during those times.

They'd take more to heat because they often leaked, but they were cooler in the summer also.

Now we heat and cool all the rooms, even on those same older houses.

Yep! And that's part of the reason many places probably shouldn't go back to the old way of doing things. Yes, you use more electricity for AC vs. natural ventilation. However, you gain so much efficiency during the winter with better insulation, and heating power use generally exceeds cooling power use above a certain latitude.

Now, there are some indoor air quality drawbacks associated with mechanical ventilation, but new standards around higher rates of fresh air intake and new technologies like energy recovery ventilators (which now even come in ductless options) are fixing that.

The main thing is to know what you have, what the house was designed for, and keep it maintained. Trying to "add" complete house sealing to an existing house without considering things like ventilation leads to sadness.

I'm in the process of updating my home including whole house sealing. Part of it is an air exchange system that brings in outside air and matches that air to the interior temp and humidity before circulating.

I'm not sure if you're talking about an energy recovery ventilator, but if you're not, you should use one for that. It uses selectively permeable membranes to transfer HVAC exhaust heat and humidity to incoming air. They can recover like 85 to 95% of the energy difference between the air streams. They're pretty cheap now too - totally worth it.

Beware of sealing things that weren't intended to be sealed - for example, a crawlspace may have been designed to be ventilated, and sealing above or around it can lead to rot in the cross-members under the floor.

Just spend a couple of weeks without it, you’ll be fine and come out the other side much more tolerant of heat.

This is the case of most “I can’t imagine” situations, just do it for a bit and your fear will prove mostly unfounded.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6924a1.htm

That link says that there's an average of 702 heat related deaths per year. In 2020 there were 38,824 car accident deaths.[1] Yet everyone keeps driving, without question. Is it so much to ask to see if it's possible to tolerate living without AC for a while, just like humans did for several thousand years? Or is a tiny fraction of the number of auto-related deaths enough to make us throw up our hands and say "it's impossible, AC and climate change for everyone!"

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-data...

> see if it's possible to tolerate living without AC for a while, just like humans did for several thousand years?

Ah, do you have evidence that >65s weren't dying because of heat stress for those thousands of years? That'd be cheering.

Deciding the excess heat often now caused by climate change should be allowed to kill large numbers of the elderly when AC can prevent it is quite a take. I certainly hope everyone holding such a belief does so because they have already eliminated all sources of emissions in their life that are not literally life and death.

Just add a datapoint in Japan 2021: 1,528 vs 2,636

There is quite a lot of distance between discomfort without AC and dying of the heat. If you're not doing heavy labor all day somewhere hot, living in death valley, or aged or otherwise health compromised there is a whole lot of room between "I'm hot" and "I'm dying". Heat dissipation is one of the major advantages of being human.

Where I live, elderly people who are used to not having AC (esp. from the time when intense heat was rarer here) often do not appreciate the importance of keeping their own climate controlled. It isn't actually always easy to tell when you're causing already-impaired organs a lot of stress. A lot of the heat-induced deaths occur as "sudden" heart attacks or strokes.

I think you and I agree that for e.g. a young healthy person it's bad and wasteful to keep the same temperature control. However, the comment to which I responded doesn't have the disclaimers you've added; it contributes to a "people should be able to tough it out" narrative that we shouldn't perpetuate when in reality, people are dying unnecessarily.

Yes, if you are elderly or have otherwise compromised health, heat will kill you, because that's just a thing. As your body degrades you get less good at regulating your temperature and need support. That's just a different topic from "I can't live without air conditioning", which, healthy people can. And specifically, pushing yourself to be in a particularly hot environment for a couple of weeks can significantly expand your heat tolerance.

So then this becomes a question of: is it responsible to talk about this with the general "you" as though unhealthy young people or healthy elderly people don't exist, as the parent comment did? To create a perception of AC being generally decadent that discourages it for all, including those who may not know they need it? I'd say it's not a small caveat to elide.

Something like one out of ten people around the world is over 65. In the US, something like one out of four. That's a huge chunk of humanity, not a corner case to handwave.

No. You have to be unhealthy to the extent that it probably isn’t safe for you to live alone and walking across a room is an accomplishment. That’s when you start to worry.

Not being an overweight and sedentary young person exaggerating the suffering of being in an 80 degree room.

> You have to be unhealthy to the extent that it probably isn’t safe for you to live alone and walking across a room is an accomplishment.

Citation needed.

Your own citation, 700 deaths annually out of a country of just under 330 million.

If only ~2 in a million die of heat or heat contributed causes per year, either people without air conditioning are incredibly rare (they’re not) or there have to be fairly extreme circumstances to risk death.

Do you really need more evidence or are you just being obtuse? Do you actually think healthy or even most unhealthy adults are risking death without AC in any but the most extreme circumstances?

If you have formed the opinion that it's not warranted to omit the scorn when you talk about people using AC, or to learn more about how it might be warranted, then that's pretty much that.

If anyone else has clicked into the thread for whatever reason and wants to learn, here are resources I'd recommend. US-centric, sorry.

* https://health2016.globalchange.gov/low/ClimateHealth2016_02... - connects with climate change projections, talks a bit about how even sub-"extreme" heat conditions can lead to health issues

* https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/tracking/topics/Heat.htm - pretty cool data resources

* https://www.cdc.gov/climateandhealth/docs/UseOfCoolingCenter... - esp. in places like AZ where the need is really really clear, "cooling centers" are becoming a thing.

* https://www.nationalpartnership.org/our-work/resources/healt... - Heat and pregnancy go together really badly. This piece is kind of lobbying, so less reputable than the CDC stuff, but aggregates some pretty eye-popping statistics; citations on page 5.

* https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP6221 - preterm births, low birth weights, heart defects – bleak stuff.

* https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ocs/policy-guidance/liheap-im-2022-0... - the programs that used to mainly just help low-income households afford energy bills are being directed to help afford AC equipment/installation as well. If you know someone who needs this help, start at https://liheapch.acf.hhs.gov/search-tool/

* https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/heatstress/acclima.html - NIOSH has some useful recommendations about how to acclimatize to heat safely. ("acclimatize" being the individual body ramping up its ability to deal with heat – interestingly, when people in this field use the word "adapt", increasing AC penetration is one of the things that goes into that)

I tried going without air conditioning this summer, after moving to a new state and town in the spring.

I'm relatively far north in the USA, but even where I am, I found the 85F+ heat waves unbearable for WFH and sleep. I grew up without AC and grew to hate summers as a result. This summer I discovered that I just do not function intellectually above 80F indoors.

It's a bit different if you're outside with a breeze, enjoying nature, hiking, walking, biking, etc. I seem perfectly capable of reading a book or having a stimulating chat in those situations. But even with a fan going, there's a pretty low temperature ceiling for me where I can't work productively. And if it doesn't get below 70F at night, I can't sleep well, which has even more impact on my happiness and productivity.

So I can survive without AC. But I broke and got an AC unit a couple of weeks ago. This heat wave for the past week or so in the northeast convinced me that I was right to do so. I'm just not happy without it.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's not "nobody needs AC", but the "oh my god I can't live without AC" is mostly fear. If you push yourself into situations where you're uncomfortably hot/code for a while, you'll find your dependance lessened. That's all.

I'm quite happy with my well-air-conditioned apartment, I have no problem with using it, and it's helpful. But I'm also fine with being outside the perfect temperature bubble sometimes.

Part of it also has to do with us getting fatter on average; it helps in the winter but not so much in the summer.

A trick that can help with that is have "cold rooms" and let the other rooms raise in temperature.

I'm very comfortable above 80° if I haven't been moving around a bunch, but after I come in from outside work I like a cool room for awhile.

I spent six weeks last summer working in my place without AC because the AC had broken and for various reasons it couldn't be fixed right away. I can say for certain that I did not become more tolerant of heat and my productivity was extremely low because I was lethargic all the time. I may have become slightly less uncomfortable in the heat but that didn't help with the lethargy.

I grew up in San Jose without AC. But it didn't regularly hit the 90s in the summer, it was a dry heat, and we had cool nights.

I used a fan. On especially hot days I would have a bowl of water with a wash rag to help cool me down.

Once I went camping in 95+ weather (tent gets hot!) and we would do things like wear wet clothing and occasionally wet our hats to cool off. Amazing how much wet underwear cools you down!

My grandmother grew up just down the road from where she lives now. They didn't have electricity when she was little and remembers clearly working outdoors in the heat. Summers used to get cold enough that when they'd go fetch the cows in the morning they'd run barefoot through the grass to the back pasture and their feet would be so cold that they wanted to cramp and it was a race to see if you could get the cows up and moving (so you could stand in the warm spot from them sleeping) before your feet cramped up. A handful of nights a summer they'd sleep outside because it was too warm inside (there was a banked wood stove running of course) for comfortable sleep. It would be cold enough overnight that they still needed blankets outside.

Now its so hot that she can't imagine not having air-conditioning. An elderly woman (you know how they love the heat) that worked in the fields and cannery her entire life thinks its too hot outside.

You can acclimatize to pretty high heat levels.

Europe gets to 35C and people die. In poorer SE Asian countries they have no AC and temperatures regularly hit 35C with far more humidity, but they do just fine.

Hell, you see workers doing construction work in full gear at those temperatures.

Window ledge air conditioners weren't invented until 1932. There are still living seniors (like my grandmother) who for all practical purposes grew up in a time before air conditioners were affordable and generally available.

The population growth of the south and southwest came after AC.

1950, 10% of Americans lived in NYC

> 1950, 10% of Americans lived in NYC

The share of Americans living in NYC hasn't fallen all that much: 12M in 1950 to 19M in 2021 [1], during which the US population has gone from 151M to 332M. So 8% to 6%.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23083/new-york-city/popul...

My grandmother grew up without electricity--let alone AC.

My dad remembers when they finally got electricity and a (party) phone line—some time in the 1960s.

I'm not sure they got municipal water service until after he was out of the house, probably in the 70s. They used hand-pumped well water, and had an outhouse.

From his stories about his childhood and young adulthood, it seems lots of poor folks and especially the rural poor were still kickin' it like it was the 1920s, well into the second half of the 20th century.

Hundreds of millions of rich Westerners live in places where air conditioners are… well, they might be affordable and generally available, but still considered a luxury. That basically includes the whole Europe. The sentiment is changing now that heat waves are becoming more common.

I'd prefer going without heat... And I'm in the north!

Other than the certainty of frozen pipes

I agree. I can put On a sweater when it’s cold but i can’t undress to cool down

Wear wet clothing.

If humidity is low enough

You can weather a lot with some pipe tape and a slow dribble from the faucet.

I never had A/C at home until I moved to the US Midwest a few years ago. In a hot and humid climate, you just have to design buildings and communities for the climate and adapt your lifestyle so that you're avoiding the heat. In a tropical climate, tree cover and designing for capturing the prevailing wind does most of the work. Urban heat islands are a challenge to be sure, but my apartment was fine. Once your body is used to it, you feel fine going outside and doing things without feeling like it's unbearably hot.

Living in the Midwest in a climate controlled house has definitely changed my tolerance for the heat, and I find it difficult to sleep in the heat when I travel back to my hometown.

It is extremely location dependent. I don't have A/C, just use fans for a few days a year.

I grew up in the inland swampy portion of north Florida. My dad didn't believe air conditioning was necessary and I grew up without it from birth to 18 when I went away to college and then from 22-24 when I moved back home. He designed and built our family home to essentially be one very large room (with bedrooms off the main room) with a huge number of screened windows and ceiling fans.

I assure you, in that climate, it's miserable. After a few years though I guess you just get used to it. Take a shower and never get dry. Sleep with every window open and still sweat constantly and be covered in bugs, too. I remember during a hurricane the power went out and stayed out for nearly a week in mid-August. We pretty much spent that time in our neighbor's swimming pool.

Our refrigerator couldn't handle the heat or humidity and more than a few times we'd pour the milk and it would come out solid.

That said, I survived. You'd be surprised what you can get used to and live through, even if it's unpleasant.

Why covered in bugs if the windows were screened?

First, there's a lot of bugs in the world. Second, many bugs get through gaps/holes in window screens. Plus houses have gaps that aren't air-tight and bug-proof. Trust me, the amount of bugs would be shocking to you if you haven't lived in that kind of area before. We even got the occasional snake indoors (maybe once a year or so)!

Basically screened in doesn't mean bug-proof, unfortunately. You might be thinking of mesh bug nets which are very fine and do provide more protection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com