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Comment by amenghra | Hacker News Reader

The Swiss consistently make laws to protect the environment which end up doing the exact opposite (and I’m sure the Swiss aren’t the only ones doing such things). Eg you aren’t allowed to install an A/C unit in most condos, so people buy portable A/C units (which are smaller and less efficient) and then hang the exhaust tube on an open window still (very inefficient since the open window lets the hot air in).

Another case: you aren’t allowed to have the kitchen exhaust go outside in newer buildings. As a result, people keep their windows open when cooking which is very inefficient in winter time.

I can go on and on, I have a half dozen examples.

Making laws which favor climate is good but there should be a process to regularly review these laws to make sure they are working as intended.

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Given that there's a billion dollar smear campaign going on around this subject, it feels safe to assume that many of these laws have good reasons to exist and are in reality effective.

I'm not denying that poor laws and regulations exist and have negative consequences, just that the probability that any specific example exists, compared with it being an example of someone who learned about it from a focebook meme or hard-right newspaper opinion column and decided to repeat it on the internet in an angry game of telephone, is quite low in my experience.

But, you never know, maybe I can Google it and an actual reputable source that genuinely cares about the effectiveness of climate change legislation will have reported on this.

That's assuming the laws even have anything to do with climate change. Commonly laws intended to do one thing are re-interpreted as failures to do another completely different thing.

> you aren’t allowed to have the kitchen exhaust go outside in newer buildings

Is that because of energy efficiency? That's impressively stupid. At least they could have some sort of a switch that opens/closes the flap.

In the UK a lot of housing comes with the extractor fans above the cooker that just use a filter and vent everything inside the kitchen itself.

Right, we have the extractor that vents everything inside. The only sane way to cook is to open the kitchen windows (which we luckily have plenty of).

That sounds so dumb that I have to question if there’s some deeper reason, because otherwise that suggests certain things about the intelligence of Swiss regulators.

I couldn't find anything specifically swiss, but modern passivehaus standards recommend a combination of recirculating cooker hoods, that filter the big stuff like fat, and then combined with a whole house ventilation system that actively recirculates the whole house air, exchanging internal and external air.

These usually pull from the kitchen area (and bathrooms) to create a directional flow of fresh air through the house.

The extra cooker specific filter prevents the main filter getting clogged with fat. Previously people tried systems with a way to bypass the filters when the cooker hood was on.

This kind of system doesn’t really make sense. How could you ever filter out obnoxious smells like overly spicy chilli, or Indian curry, or oily stir fry, burned foods, etc…?

Can’t imagine anyone would want that to be ‘recirculated’.

Please go on, reading stuff like this is always interesting for me, even if it concerns other countries.

The Swiss don’t typically install larger washer/dryer units. We have tiny units with ventless dryers. Maybe the smaller units are more ecological to manufacture? In USA, I can do a load of laundry + drying in 90min. In Switzerland, it takes about 4-5h. I fail to see how 5h of energy usage can be more ecological than a bit of steam exiting the home.

It gives the humidity time to evaporate between heating cycles. If it's a heat pump unit then it wastes even less energy because it reuses the latent heat in the vapour to heat up the wet laundry. It's just stupid to vent out the humidity as vapour.

Heat pumps also waste less because they’re not venting the air that your furnace or heat pump worked so hard to heat up.

Energy usage isn't measured in "time the dryer needs to run".

A typical US vented dryer has a 5500 watt element, although it doesn't use that amount of power continuously since it cycles on and off.

I have no idea how much power a typical dryer uses in Switzerland, but the heat pump ventless dryers you can get in the USA now typically use around 1000W when they are running. They typically take around 90-120 minutes to dry a load depending on how big it is and how much water there is to evaporate.

This white paper has a nice graph that shows power usage over time: https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/pt_awards/SEDI_Fact_S...

You may notice that, while the heat pump dryers take longer to dry, they use so much less power that it more than offsets.

…while the heat pump dryers take longer to dry…

I’m not even sure how true that is with the latest all-in-one washer/dryer combos. The ones released in the U. S. just this year, one of which we have (GE) can do a full load wash and dry in about two hours, which is probably about how long our old separate units would take. Or at least close enough that we don’t notice or care. A load of blankets might be 2.5 hours.

And if takes a few minutes longer, the lack of a vent and the fact that it runs on a 120V plug more than makes up for it.

> I’m not even sure how true that is with the latest all-in-one washer/dryer combos.

Haven't used all-in-ones, but one possible concern: lack of pipelining (to use a CPU term).

I wash darks first, and when they finish washing I put them in the dryer. While darks are drying, I can put whites in the washer. When the darks are dry, I remove them, and then put in whites to dry. (Continue for any further cycles/types of clothing.)

With an all-in-one I have to wait for darks to completely finish before anything can be done with white (etc). Is this a problem for you?

In EU a common classic dryer absorb 2000W, a heat-pump one around 800W. Of course they have a certain load limit, you can't dry an entire winter bed lingerie all together.

Anyway most washing machines (those who also dry and those who only wash) and dishwashers absorb around 2kW when they heat the water, for washing machines typically only one time (two if they also dry) for dishwashers 2 or 3 times. Running time depends of the program you choose: the quickest wash in general is 15' as the quickest dry, a typical wash for misc clothes is 1h/1h30', drying is 20' (much depend on how quick you can run the washer spin cycle, at 1500rpm 15' drying is enough in most cases). A dishwasher takes typical cycle is 1h30'.

Of course professional dishwashers run in few minutes, and they are far larger than the "standard 60x60x90 cm size", washing machines and dryer take the same times even at nearly-industrial product.

Since condos typically don’t have a per-unit HVAC system, the heating is managed centrally for the entire building. In winter time, it’s always too hot (in every building I have lived in), so we have to cool down our unit!

Apparently, the central heating system takes ~24h to heat up (floor based, heated water pump), so they can’t adjust the temperature on an hourly/daily basis (it’s set and forget).

Have you done the math that shows that the centralized "long time to heat-up" system, even assuming a certain amount of wasted heat, is actually less efficient than per-unit, fast-to-heat-up system? It's quite possible that

1. the loss from people opening their windows because it's too hot is still actually less than the loss of having a per-unit heating system.

2. the expense of adapting the system to allow per-unit controls is actually higher than the loss of people opening their windows because it's too hot.

I mean, it's also possible that the decision to centralize it was based on false assumptions, and that it actually is less efficient. But never underestimate the power of efficiencies of scale.

Typically, at least in EU, heating systems are regulated per unit in condos, meaning you can choose how much water you allow to flow in the local dissipator/heat exchanger, so the fact there is a single source of heat does not means individuals have to heat too much or too little.

The central heater have a job: keep hot water at a certain temperature, the distribution system have a job: keep hot water flowing at a certain rate, so you can get more or less water per unit issueless (at least in a certain range, projected up front where pumps are dimensioned), individual thermostat valves have a job decide how much water have to flown locally in an apartment or depending on the heating element per-room.

The issue happen with badly designed systems. There was an era in the '60s where heating fuel (oil at that time) was so cheap that builders decide it was cheaper to heat much and open the windows as needed instead of design a proper system with margins. Back than there was not much climate analysis when you project a new building. Most condos was built just for speculation, with little attention to the tech. Most buyers do not care much even today.

In order to own a dog it's strongly recommended to follow a dog owner's course and then pay a yearly dog tax. The dog also needs a licence which it must wear on the collar in public places and one needs to buy private liability insurance for the dog. Of course, all dogs also need to be microchiped.

https://www.angloinfo.com/how-to/switzerland/family/pets-ani...

It's forbidden to flush the toilet in condos during night hours.

I fully agree re dogs, other's freedom end where my begins, and such laws and regulations always come after enough fuckups pile up. Some dog owners are fine generally, some have their own version of reality to be polite. As a father of two small kids, I applaud this and can't be happier about it.

Re that flushing, I heard it so many times. Never, ever had I faced it, neither in Zurich, Lausanne, Geneve or rural Vaud where we live now, 14 years here. 1am showers and flushing were not rare.

It must be true, I heard expats on forums complain about this a lot (top complain along with churches going mental 24h, this I saw only in Zurich, never in french Romandie where I lived), but somehow I managed to avoid them. Generally cities are easier with these.

> I fully agree re dogs, other's freedom end where my begins

Probably why most pet owners in CH elect to keep cats instead.

I support dog policies like cleaning after crapping, leash walking in public, maybe even barking hours, but dog licenses? License numbers? Mandatory insurance? Dog tax? This is a bit too much. What about working dogs, like sheep herding dogs? Switzerland is definitely not for me, even though it's nice to be able to vote minarets out of Geneva. I live in a country where dog ownership laws are not enforced and there are incidents every couple of years with people getting mawed or killed by stray dog packs. You also get to be chased or harassed by free roaming dogs as a cyclist or hiker, so it's a good idea to have pepper spray or hiking poles on you.

What about churches?

I was ready to question the court's decision. How much impact could a 8.7M nation living in a pristine country with a lot of train and bicycle usage for transportation have on GHG emissions, right? Then I saw the first post and thought about it, maybe the court was right?

It's quite funny to have so many laws around dogs, considering that eating dogs in legal in Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat#Current_laws .

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