"Ty Colman, a cofounder and the chief revenue officer at Optera, a carbon-accounting firm that helps organizations quantify their emissions, said that in general, a fully remote company with no offices has the lowest impact-per-employee per year, at less than 1 metric ton of carbon-dioxide equivalent. That includes the uptick in energy used to power computers, keep the lights on, and maintain a comfortable temperature at home."
(versus 1.4 tons for hybrid and 1.7 tons for full time in the office). There's quite a lot more about the effects on the environment in the article.
I doubt there are all that many people meeting the following conditions: work for small companies with one office, live far enough away from that office to need to fly, work for a company with enough extra money sitting around to fly everyone out, work for a company that wants to fly everyone out, are willing to fly out. I really doubt there are enough to have much impact on carbon emissions.
If remote work means people switch their city flats for suburban or rural houses, the impact could reverse
Impact is pretty much more heating/cooling required for house and I'd imagine that would compensate at least part of that.
https://inrix.com/blog/2022-traffic-scorecard/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/15/road-con...
https://www.itdp.org/2021/03/22/the-next-pandemic-surge-traf...
Do you think people riding public transit pollute more or less than people who don't commute at all?
>Heating/cooling office buildings might be more efficient than everyone doing this to their homes.
Not to mention the fact that houses aren't completely empty when the adults aren't there. Kids, pets, plants, and last but not least, pipes with water in them. All of these will die horribly in cold temperatures.
- What if they are two adults working from the same home vs two different office spaces. - What if you have kids or taking care of elderly at your home. They don't need heat? - What about the quality and amount of food consumed? Would restaurant/sandwich shop near your office have the same preferences for your vegetables? (e.g. not imported from the other side of world, organic, fair-trade?)
They had kennels but they didn’t have doors or anything.
They would nap in the snow and let it pile up to keep them warm.
https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/wild...
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/hut-shackleton-antarctic.h...
The energy lost from your home to the environment is dependent on the temperature difference. A warmer house (during the summer) loses less energy than a house that's cooled the entire time. Therefore at least from a pure energy use perspective, it's always cheaper to only turn on the system when you actually need it (ie. when you get home) than trying to maintain the same temperature.
>remember to account for wear and tear on the relevant HVAC equipment.
Without an accurate wear/tear model of HVAC equipment this can easily go either way. You could argue that having the equipment run for longer cycles shortens life because it has to work "harder", but you could also argue the opposite because most of the wear originates from the system starting/stopping and/or thermal stress from it being on/off.
I want to come home in a comfortable house. My parents used to do that. Turn off all heating. Come home, it's cold outside, cold inside and you have to wait until the radiators start to heat up. That takes a while.
But it worked, radiators can heat up a room quite fast.
On the other hand, if we consider heating with a heat-pump, or cooling with a heat-pump (i.e. just a normal AC) they rely on continuously heating up (or cooling down) air (or water in the case of an air-to-water or water-to-water heat-pump).
So you just can NOT quickly change the temperature in a room. So I leave the AC on 78 all day. If I go away for a couple of days I'll set it to 85, but anything higher than that is not recommended.
Having your home heat up to 90 degrees while you're doing some weekend errands only to crank the AC to cool it back down to 70 to 75 will often times use more electricity than if you just set the AC to 80 while you were gone.
I've seen similar statements a few times, even in this HN thread. Most articles just repeat the statement without showing any numbers. This article does show numbers and the graphs. From the article:
> What we found was that even when the A/C temporarily spikes to recover from the higher indoor temperatures, the overall energy consumption in the setback cases is still less than when maintaining a constant temperature throughout the day.
Full data on https://theconversation.com/does-turning-the-air-conditionin...
I don't think it's always true, which is why I listed the factors that can influence it.
But I am also getting into home automation and just watched a video where some one ran through the numbers on their specific house after getting electricity monitoring connected to their heating and Home Assistant. It's not that clear cut and really depends on your specific home.
1. You run the A/C all day: the gas stays both cold, and dry. Cold, dry air is, it turns out, ok as an insulator. Not very good thermal conductivity at all.
2. You turn the A/C on at the end of the day in a warm, humid environment. The air is moist, which causes two compounding problems: first, the volume of air you need to cool just holds more energy than it would if it was dry. But second, because moist air is more thermally conductive, it's better at coupling heat in from the outside, so more energy is coming into the system as you're trying to cool it.
At least, that's the argument. I haven't run the numbers to check orders of magnitude or anything. I wasn't expecting the difference in thermal properties of dry and moist air to be that significant, but there are some very interesting numbers at https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/moist-air-properties-d_12....
One main reason is that when AC is off is that humidity increases which causes cooling harder. This is because the cooling process of an AC unit involves removing humidity from the air as well as heat. When the air is humid, the AC unit has to work harder to remove the excess moisture from the air, which can decrease its overall cooling efficiency.
The other reason is that house and furniture will store heat and then cooling will get harder.
Also AC runs more efficiently if its constant.
I think that's just power companies not wanting everyone to turn on AC at roughly same time is the reason for those power "saving" tips.
Your refrigerator will also work harder as the ambient temperature climbs.
I only know of two mechanisms that could make holding a temperature more efficient. Heat pumps in winter time should be left to maintain a temperature. If it is well below freezing outside the heat pump may need to fallback to a secondary mechanism of resistive heating. Therefore it's better to not setback the temperature immediately when the home is unoccupied. Variable speed fans on higher end furnaces use less energy at lower RPM, so running a system at full effect requires more power.
although personally i disregarded that because eight years of living in overpriced CA apartments that were built during the kennedy administration has conditioned (no pun intended) me to feel more comfortable with the AC off.
Cold house running during middle of hot day should be lowest efficiency during the day
I would fully support legislation requiring a minimally-programmable thermostat in rental housing.
Most programmable thermostats need batteries, which now have to be changed on a maintenance schedule. One more task for the superintendent.
These batteries often fail without warning. Which means pipes can freeze, leading to property damage. Most homeowners don't even know they have batteries till the heat stops working and they call the HVAC guy.
When property management does not pay the utility bill they will furnish apartments with the cheapest energy hog appliances. When they do pay the utility bill they will lock the thermostat.
If you select an premium apartment and the market is not tilted in favor of landlords as it is in most cities then they tend to care about the customer experience. Since they're making their margin on the higher rent already and they know too much BS will lead to people switching away.
Oh those dumb stupid Americans, like Willis Carrier.
This seems pretty legit. I also remember getting similar tips from PG&E here in California. Do you have any citations as to why turning off AC/heater is better than leaving them on when we leave home?
[1] https://home.howstuffworks.com/green-living/should-turn-ac-u...
> I also remember getting similar tips from PG&E here in California.
Company that sells you energy telling you to not stop consuming energy...
Aside from that, I'd imagine they also want to limit power usage spikes. Everyone coming back from the weekend then running AC on the full blast just consumes a lot of power.
Our office was actually given same advice (just leave AC running over weekend) but it was explicitly said it was to avoid power usage spikes, as cooling back down space that big just takes a lot of power for a long time.
There might be some truth about saving money, if say the rate for power when you'd be turning AC back on is high, vs having that spread over lower rates, but certainly not kWh, at least not if you go out for a whole day or two.
> Do you have any citations as to why turning off AC/heater is better than leaving them on when we leave home?
Basics of thermodynamics ? I think easiest comparison would be boiling water. What makes more sense, to turn off a pot of boiling water after making tea, or to keep it running till you want next cup of tea? You can keep it running to get the next tea instantly ready, or turn it off to not.
It's the same for AC. Turning it off saves power, but it will take longer to get back to the cold state)
You need to keep moving energy (whether heating or cooling) to/from the system to keep it at temperature different than ambient.
The bigger the difference, the more energy needs to be moved.
Keeping AC on constantly is like keeping a pot boiling, you need to pump that energy constantly.
Turning it off means that you stop, and while yes, you have to dump more power to get back to the desired temperature, you save all that power that you'd need to use to keep it at previous temp.
That might be the main reason behind PGE's suggestion - they charge more for 4-9pm usage and it is much cheaper to pre-cool the house between 12-2pm when the demand is lower.
Heating/AC might be the only area where energy consumption isn't reduced by WFH.
If we don't decide social norms by what we consider to be pragmatism, how the hell do we decide them at all? I'm not a big believer in climate change, but when people are driving less, the price of gasoline tends to go down even as I need less of it myself. I can get behind that.
The idea that people must work in the office, even when no one can articulate why that's a good idea, is some obscure form of lunacy that is transmitted by being bitten by rabid upper management.
So while the impact of a public transport user is higher than someone staying at home, it's still smaller than that of someone driving to work each day and has greater potential for being shrunk in short order.
If they need fewer because of WFH, they build fewer.
WFH is a net win, if you care about this stuff. And, it turns out, it's a net win even if you don't. Might want to pull your money out of commercial real estate if you have any of that though.
Yeah, at least for busses that's annoying. Like sure, buy the ecological ones but don't just trash a perfectly good bus
- public transport does not run "anyway". If no-one goes on a route, any sane transit system will schedule less frequent services
- heating a big building may be more efficient than a house, but isn't it really dumb to heat it efficiently if you don't have to heat it at all? It's not like people can switch off 100% of their home climate control when they go to the office. Likewise, the building is likely kept in a certain temperature range 24/7.
On the flipside, how many people even have climate-controlled homes year-round? When I used to live in California, air-conditioning was a rare and valuable treasure in a $3k/month apartment. I think I've heard euros claim they don't have air conditioning, too.
This. I don't know about Italy, Spain, and the like, but here in Paris, people mostly don't have A/C in their homes, but basically every office does.
So yeah, carting people to the office and back consumes energy, then you have to consume some more to keep them cool. Bonus points for an impossible number of people burning gas in their cars while waiting around on gridlocked highways and polluting the air. At least public transit uses (mostly) nuclear power here.
Go up to the Bay area, and I'd think it was fairly rare.
In the mild climates of the Bay Area and similar places, sure, but not, at least in the last half century or so, in the LA Basin and the Central Valley.
Basic physics shows that energy = force * distance = mass * acceleration * distance.
So moving more mass, further distances uses more energy than not, especially via the personal cars that are used in the US.
That might be true but doesn’t this assume that people stop heating/cooling their homes whilst they are at work?
Add to that many apartment buildings share utility cost across the unit so there’s even less incentive.