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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

The big differences are:

  * UK requires appliances to be eco friendly - that means for most appliances they only take a quarter of the energy to do the same job.   Dishwasher/washing machine/etc.

  * UK housing has really high insulation requirements for new builds.   Your body heat will keep it warm most of the year.  They are starting to require retrofits for old buildings too.

  * Widespread use of LED lighting and expensive electricity

  * Smaller houses - less rooms etc.

  * Tumble driers aren't widespread (big energy user).

  * Electric water heating is rare (most houses use gas or oil).

  * Air conditioning isn't widespread, despite the climate kinda needing it in the middle of summer.

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UK climate "needs" AC for 1-2 months, one summer in three.

And a fair chunk of that is the summer holiday season, when a lot of people won't be home anyway.

It is possible to mis-design houses and apartments to need it more than that (extreme sun traps essentially); schools/offices and public transport are a different case because of the number of human bodies in a small space.

But our homes need A/C so rarely that it's not worth it, same as most people don't have winter tyres or snow chains, or even know how to fit them. Materially significant amounts of snow for a few days one winter in three, unless you live in Scotland or the Pennines.

These days its practically every summer tbh :P The last two have been super bad for me, as my apartment is south facing and doesn't have any AC. I'm not looking forward to this summer at all haha

Having living spaces too hot has a substantial effect on productivity. Bad sleep, lethargy, etc.

As a government, it's probably a good move to encourage installation of AC in your citizens homes even if it only gets used a couple of days a year simply for the productivity benefits.

Unfortunately, current UK policies on Heat Pumps specifically discourage installation of AC (you become ineligible for various grants if your heat pump system has a valve to allow use as an AC system).

Indeed, I think price of electricity but also climate explains the large difference between UK and US air conditioning usage.

Many people forget that London (UK) has about the same latitude as Vancouver (Canada).

Indeed, and similar mild, rainy maritime climate.

If you install heat pumps, which are the most efficient single-home way to heat a house, then you get AC for free.

Houses rarely need AC - we usually only get a few hot days in a row, with time for houses to cool down in between hot periods. It is also usually possible to get airflow through a house, and cool things down enough.

Different story for badly built apartments, though. We used to live in a 1950s apartment, top floor with a flat roof. It reached 38C inside, when outside was 36C, and then wouldn't cool down at all during the night. It was unbearable, and we moved out!

Yep, definitely possible to design and build unpleasant sun traps! But also mostly possible (even for curtain-wall apartments) to avoid it with good design.

Not much help if you buy an existing place whose builders didn't take hot summers into account though!

> UK housing has really high insulation requirements for new builds. Your body heat will keep it warm most of the year. They are starting to require retrofits for old buildings too.

UK housing is mostly quite old - an average age of 50 years or so. Modern insulation requirements only became law in the last 20 years. Most houses aren't particularly well insulated - and most houses haven't had much retrofit work done. The UK is really far behind most of Northern Europe in this regard.

I think the rest of your reasons are valid. Average floor area is probably half that of a US house. Domestic air conditioning is almost unheard of. Almost everyone heats with natural gas.

Heating is a huge part of energy demand - around 25% of UK total energy goes into space heating - so if you're not doing that via electricity then average energy consumption per house will be much lower.

I'd agree with the article authors figures. I have a small family home in the UK and use about 2000 KWh a year electric only. I have gas heating and water.

Electricity cost is currently running at about 28p/KWh. I presume that's a lot more than the US. Electric heating is indeed rarer because gas is about 1/3 of the cost.

I'm thinking your points about air conditioning is likely the major difference combined with the average US home being larger so more space to air-con. Few UK homes have air conditioners (offices do) as it doesn't usually get hot enough. Although this has started to change in the last few years and I'm seeing them occasionally popping up now on neighbours houses. I wouldn't have needed one this year at all so far. Last year, maybe for one week. I was thinking about it but by the time you've looked into organising something the heat has gone and you forget about it until next year. There is a push to move to heat pump heating instead of gas and those units often can do air-con as a byproduct so that may be a driver for change.

Tumble driers are easily available and definitely widespread in the UK. The lack of tumbler driers is a bizarre myth I see again and again on lists of differences between the US and UK. I have no idea how the authors of these lists come to this conclusion. The only idea I have is maybe people from the US who come to the UK rent a furnished house and the landlord cheaps out and decides not to supply one. I do have one and it runs to about 2KWh a load maybe? I don't think that would explain the difference in any case.

> Tumble driers aren't widespread (big energy user).

My 20 year old drier uses about twice amount of kwh as my 7 year old dishwasher (on actual clean mode, not "eco: everything is still dirty and you should do it by hand mode"). I also use it far less, so on average they are about the same.

A lot of the USA also uses electric for the stove, oven and all household heating.

So does the UK. Everywhere I've lived in the UK had electric stoves; everywhere I've lived in the USA had gas stoves. I'd be interested to see stats if they exist.

Also in the USA you see gas-fired tumble dryers, which you never see in the UK, probably due to 240V all round.

A lot of that doesnt apply to old dwellings does it?

I recall in my great grandparents old terrace house, the kitchen was set behind the neighbors fireplace. The only rational place for the fridge stand effectively copped 50-80 degrees from the neighbors fire, just radiating from the brick. This lead to the fridge running constantly and having an extremely short lifespan (and sometimes not functioning at all)

That said because it was old everything was air dried.

that sounds like it has got to be an outlying situation though, and things like this tend to work on population averages.

The UK has a ton of old dwellings. Like, a three century old home isn't even a local landmark. It's just a house.

They have of course been retrofitted with electricity and plumbing and gas and modern insulation (usually), but exactly what you get depends on how recently it's been renovated. And "mid 20th century" is a very common answer.

Not really, the U.K. has some of the oldest housing stock in the world. For e.g. my house is pretty typical, built in 1912, it has a double skin wall of bricks but with no cavity. It has three original fireplaces which are all very draughty. I have timber sash windows, and though I recently got double glazing my neighbours on either side do not have it.

Buy a "chimney sheep". Made a huge difference to me.

I had a look at their home town on google maps, and it looked like 1/2 to 1/3 of the town was still made up of old terrace houses. I imagine it would be tricky to selectively demolish them.

Your body heat will keep warm is a stretch - not my idea of warm anyway 24C - maybe 16C which is chilly for most.

New builds require Roofs: 0.11 W/m²K. Walls: 0.18 W/m²K. Floors: 0.13 W/m²K. Assume 2024 houses are 7mx7mx5m high and terraced.

So you have 70m² of wall, 49m² of roof and floor. Total 24.6 W/K. So, with the average UK electricity consumption (300 watts), plus the body heat of 3 people (300 watts) you have 600 watts of heating, which should keep that building 25 deg C above the outdoor temperature.

The UK in winter normally averages about 5C, so you'd have an indoor temperature of 30C - plenty toasty.

Obviously many buildings don't meet the required standards, people aren't home all day, there are air leaks, etc. But, for most buildings, heating is still not required most of the time.

A free standing house at only 49 m^2? Is that typical in the UK? The US average size for single family homes was triple that back in the 1970’s. Today it’s more like 5 times that size.

2 floors high - so 100 m^2 of living space.

Yes, it's small, but new houses are mostly very small because they try to be 'affordable'.

Most people with lots of money buy an older house which is bigger, sometimes knocking down and rebuilding the same house if you want to modernize (in many areas you have to rebuild something the same size, shape and appearance).

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