EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on | Hacker News Reader

EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on

politico.eu

139 pointsspwa4157 comments

Just adding some context on the AC and the building as well which was explained by journalist David Carretta (who follows EU politics, written in Italian) here https://x.com/davcarretta/status/2071592636260012175.

To summarise, AC was turned off floor by floor, with the switch off starting from 16:00 over a Friday, a time when most administrative personnel is getting off work for the weekend. The entire building had AC switched off by the end of the day, including the upper floors. Note that AC was working fine this Monday.

Oh please, I needed my daily dose of internet rage and EU hate and here you are with you damn facts.

(Seriously, look at these comments. What is happening to HN? Is this what previously productive people now do with their free time while their agents are churning?)

I stopped reading that Twitter the post the moment it said "so the deniers (or former ones) are now building a new campaign" which was the second sentence. But only after I had already dismissed the Politico article as ragebait.

From <https://www.euractiv.com/news/heatwave-shuts-down-berlaymont...>, corroborating the Politico report:

>Staff working in the building told Euractiv that the air conditioning failure did not affect the floors above level 8, where Ursula von der Leyen, her European commissioners and their cabinets are based.

The first image is telling: A glass building in front of a white hard-floor plaza with just one small tree for shade

Nothing specific to the European commission though, we just don't hate mainstream architects enough

It would burn less, if not all these abstract architects would sit in old art nouveau buildings near a park, with the AC tastefully hidden in the backyard - and there they sit on the MAC, shitting out these etched waver under the ERM buildings and cities for the rest of us to be miserable in.

It once struck me that so called school chairs are actually far more fascinating than one would think. To me, they are the ultimate symbol of something one would never buy to use yourself.

https://www.google.com/search?num=10&sa=X&sca_esv=9e14c54052...

Look at those torture devices! They don't even look like chairs.

Oh, but that is what came from the Bauhaus- because back then wood crafted furniture was ridiculous expensive- and these are just the cheapest thing anyone can afford. Bend pipes and one wooden back plate steambend. Clank it out of a factory for 5 $ and everyone be seated.

That is where the hatred for ornamentation originated from- labour was expensive, craftsmen where rare, ornamentation was luxury and a display of wealth disparity. Today everyone could have all the ornamentation he or she wanted. Have your whole insta-history as 3d relief 3d printed as gypsum on your house facade.

But thats still mor expensive then ornamentation. Capitalism loves ugly and hates its customers.

It's not exactly the Council of Elrond. It's appropriate for the design to be closer to Barad-dûr than Rivendell.

If we're pulling LotR references, a white plaza with one tree is the Court of the Fountain at the top of Minas Tirith

What's up with the knee-jerk hate on EU lately?

Not the EU, just the Commission.

The US is going to shit, and the Americans want to pretend everywhere is equally bad and it's not just them..

It is, of course, just them.

Thousands of people died in the EU over this heat, and you think it's American that isn't doing well?

"more than 1300 excess deaths have been recorded since 21 June linked to the extreme heat in Europe"

"There were approximately 489,000 heat-related deaths annually between 2000 and 2019, according to modeled estimates."

https://wmo.int/media/news/record-breaking-heat-spreads-thro...

What? Did the EU cause the heat wave? This thread is clearly about politics, and the parent claims that Americans complain about the EU and its politics because their own have gone completely off the rails. Disparaging the EU over a crazy heat wave is like criticizing a country because it has had a major natural disaster recently.

The EU caused the deaths, not the heat. People have been dying from heat in the EU for decades now, and the EU has done ........ nothing (well other than declare superiority to the US).

More people die from heat each year in the EU than from guns in the US. Which topic gets more attention?

I still don't see how you get from 'many countries mismanaged their response to heat in the wake of the climate becoming more extreme' to 'the building of the European Commission is the bastion of evil' that the parent was pointing out. This ignores the context and just tries to find any reason to claim that the EU as a whole is bad.

Comparing heat deaths to gun deaths is beyond absurd, but people keep repeating it because it's a good soundbite that makes the US seem good and the EU seem bad. It's like ranking places by comparing flu deaths to war deaths. Gun-related deaths are direct and attributable. The heat deaths reported are counted as 'excess deaths'. The number of people who actually die from the heat is small if compared to the overall number. Excess deaths counts all cases where people's existing issues were exacerbated by the high temperatures which eventually pushes them over the edge - old age, heart disease and the like. Heat mostly doesn't make healthy people drop dead in the streets, unlike a direct cause like guns. It diminishes everyone's health which makes already vulnerable people die earlier of their pre-existing conditions than they otherwise could have. These are different metrics.

Except the hate is coming from Europeans not americans as they're the ones suffering from lack of AC.

Oh, we definitely hate them A LOT in Belgium, for what they did to the historic district. The revamped EU district is an ugly, inefficient, traffic-heavy abomination. It’s crazy that we destroyed all the Art Deco and Art Nouveau townhouses to make space for the EU’s steel-and-glass nonsense.

> The heat wave has prompted a renewed discussion about the lack of air-conditioning systems in homes and offices across much of Europe

Discussion, common sense requires discussion. All you need to know about them in one sentence.

Most ordinary working people can't afford the cost of installing a system. Even a portable one.

Edit: Downvoted because HN users don't understand living paycheque to paycheque. Talk about an echo chamber.

What are you on about. They are not expensive at all. What they can't afford is to pay the electrical bill of running one.

unless they also come w/ rooftop solar?

new mini splits are way more efficient than older systems as well.

insulation in older homes/buildings might be an issue though

Ironically- while often having solar on the roof.

My multisplit system costs <€60 a month to run even during the hottest months, which is way below heating costs during winter. And that's keeping entire apartment at constant 22ºC - people with higher "comfort temperature" can keep the bill significantly lower.

I got a 7000BTU one last week. One of cheapest I could find (I suspect some price gouging given the timing of my purchase). Very small, works in one small room. It was about £400. None of my family or friends have £400 sitting around that they can spend on a whim to save them a few weeks of suffering. A huge number of people live paycheque to paycheque and have no savings or credit lines available to them.

Most people can’t afford private jets, let’s ban them for those officials then

Sounds good! It was a waste to begin with. They can handle first-class.

A 12K BTU mini-split system is about 300EUR. How is this unaffordable for most people? Even an 18K unit is about 500-600EUR.

Realistically a decent mini-split that won't break in a year and won't make too much noise starts at ~€600-800 + €400 installation in a low-labor-cost country (Latvia), in high-labor-cost countries such as Germany the installation bit might be twice-thrice as expensive.

Relative to buying the house/apartment in the first place, that's still not much money.

Where? The only mobile split unit i can find is 899

Something is very wrong with the EU if ordinary Europeans can't afford a $150 window unit.

It's not the money. In many places you need to go through permitting to get it and they do not want to give it to you. Often you also need a signed approval from every person in the building.

so yes something is very wrong

There is something very wrong in the EU if installing a life saving window air conditioner requires a permit or signed approval from every person in the building.

They literally built a new hospital in germany without AC. 28C/82F degrees in surgery.

How? I thought hospital AC had the dual role of air filtration to reduce spread of bacteria and viruses

Because when it's "free" healthcare you get what you pay for.

Yes, something very wrong in the EU compared to the land of HOA's...

This is true. In many places you can't install the outdoor unit on the street-facing side of the building without approval, and you won't get it in most cases, and this is indeed in addition to getting approval from your building's residents association if you live in a flat.

From what I understand, windows in Europe are very different than in the US - they don't slide open but swing, like doors. So an American window unit, which seals the window opening, is not feasible. They have portable units with air hoses, but I am also not sure how you can get such a hose out of a swinging window without leaving a big gap for the hot air to come back.

Those type of windows exist in America and for $20 you can buy a kit for them on Amazon.

"A kit for them" to do what?

To prevent the cold air from escaping.

I see, all I found is a piece of cloth you tape around window opening though. I don't think it's doing a great job of insulation, and, paired with an inefficient portable unit, what kind of temperature difference can you get inside vs outside?

> what kind of temperature difference can you get inside vs outside?

Enough to prevent death. When I was growing up we used duct tape and cardboard boxes.

It really makes no sense. Death from heat is caused by the absolute temperature, not a difference. If it's 30C outside and you can get get 10C difference then it's 20C inside, which is not going to cause death per se so it's "enough to prevent death" but if it's 40C and you are getting the same 10C difference it's 30C inside which is likely to kill frail people.

I don't understand the push back and all of the excuses about this. Europe's heat waves are deadlier than American gun violence [1]

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...

Well, yes. How does it make window units feasible though? I used to rent an old house in California, it had central air but also wrapped wooden windows with single pane glass. I ran A/C whole day in the summer and could only get 10F (80F inside with 90F outside), which was a relief but far from ideal. A window unit with an open window, covered in cloth is not going to save you from heat IMHO.

It's not that expensive. There are other reasons why people can't install one in Europe than money. Mostly for people living in apartments. In an apartment building you need the approval of other apartment owners to "modify the building facade". And some people have terrible neighbors. Another thing that happens in Europe is that if the building is 100+ years old, it's facade may be protected as a "historic building" and then you need another approval from some bureaucrats which are responsible for protecting historic buildings. And of course if you're renting, you need to convince your landlord if you want a proper AC not a portable one.

People on here will literally write walls of text over the most mundane nonsense.

Get a free standing unit like this: https://i.imgur.com/giewYeK.png

Shove the plastic tube outlet out of a window. End of installation. You're welcome.

Seriously why is this so difficult and what is this learned helplessness? You would rather be miserable than do literally anything?

I have one like that and so do my parents. But they're much less effective than classic split AC with an outside unit. A regular split can cool a bigger room to 24 even when it's 38 outside and is basically completely quiet. A portable AC cools down smaller rooms to ~27 when it's 38 outside and is noisy (50-60 dB).

That's cause you got the cheapest one and think all of them are like that. They come in different power levels and you can in fact find ones that are quiet.

People don't know which to buy. I got a really big one that doesn't make a lot of noise. I think on dehumidify it can suck 1.5 liters per hour out of the room. I think this because with 98% humidity the 0.5 liter tank is full in <20 minutes. The tank isn't removable, it has a lid 3 cm above the floor. Just low enough that one cant leave a large enough container under it.

Some of them use the waste heat to evaporate any accumulated water and have it come out of the heat exhaust as slightly humid air. The one I got when I lived in Hawaii had a hole where water would drip out of and you could attach a hose to it.

If the bottom of the window is 80cm or less from the floor you need safety glass. Therefore most windows are much further from the floor than that tube can reach. We also have very few sliding windows that allow such neat finish. A lot open at the top. Many turn left or right and are half the size of a door (because there is no AC) Running a crappy tiny portable single hose AC with the window open doesn't do much. Extra fun if you have roller shutters (for shade) with windows that open outwards.

Duct tape and card board is your friend. Get creative.

right, but first have to wait for the wife to overheat enough to allow it.

The tube for my portable AC unit would quite easily reach the ~250cm to the tops of my windows and it is not unusually long. I'm not sure what makes you think that would be a problem.

you don't need that on balcony, most of the apartments have balcony, stupid excuse, same applies for historical buildings with balcony

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If there is a balcony and you install it there, so nobody can see it from the street, is there an AC installed? Can you even use your balcony the way you want and place there big cardboard box if you need? Same thing. Facade is a one thing, balcony is something completely different, if you can't even use it, what's the point in having it.

> Most ordinary working people can't afford the cost of installing a system. Even a portable one.

I just watched a video where a person bought a £200 portable unit. He was using it in the UK and said he spent about £0.89 / day. And I'm assuming they won't use it for that many days a year.

Seems affordable enough for "most ordinary working people"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOmzVWTH3xo

As a side note, it's nearly impossible to buy a dual-hose portable AC in the UK and Europe. For whatever reason, the market has converged on inefficient single-hose portable ACs.

As an oblivious Europian I was breaking my head on how the design with a single hose could be considered good enough.

Other funny stuff:

- I haven't seen a single portable AC with a hose long enough to reach the window. Some come with tents and plastic things to seal the open window. The machine blows hot air out of the tube and air from outside is inevitable sucked in. If you could only hang the tube a few feet out of the window it wouldn't be sucking in the exhaust hot air back in.

- I've seen dozens with barely readable labels on the buttons in poorly contrasting colors. Some also have bright glowing leds next to the illegible text. Even if I switch on the lights (in the middle of the night) I cant read it because the leds are to bright. The buttons are spread out in some artistic arc with a nearly invisible fine line and lack a bump in the sticker they are made from.

- People here seem to love swamp chillers, some wet sponge or fabric with a fan pointed at it. Not sure what the ratio is, I think they roughly increase humidity by 10% for each 1C in temperature reduction with some favorable sweet spot above 90% humidity.

Then I see a video from an Amish dude hanging soaked bed sheets in front of the window explaining they don't have AC, they don't even have electricity, the wet sheets cut the temperature by 10 degrees apparently.

funny take

Bulgaria is one of the poorest EU countries and I have seen there way more ACs than in much richer Czechia or elsewhere, this is not about price at all

heck, even in Czechia I find much more ACs in some poor cities compared to the richest Prague, I've seen bigger AC ratio per apartment in my small poor ~40K hometown than in Prague, in our 40 units building in Prague I was the first one to have AC, after many years now followed by neighbor under me, 2 out of 40 units in relatively rich Prague, crazy (though it's true our top corner of the building is warmest from all apartments)

More precisely, it’s the poorest country in EU and ~80% of households (highest share in EU) have _at least_ one unit (mini splits). Most households use them for heating also during the cold season.

There are no subsidies and/or regulations around this at all. The downside is that it doesn’t look pretty most of the time (unless it’s a new build with infra for multi-split traces).

In that context, this whole “europoors” narrative feels like some weird psyop to me.

>The downside is that it doesn’t look pretty most of the time

Neither does Paris with all those white hoses coming out of the windows and windows with tin foil glued to them. At least the Bulgarians have the sanest and most energy efficient option.

But in Bulgaria you need one during at least the whole summer and I suspect also a bit longer, while in Czechia you could have gone without one the whole year and really need one only for a week or two in the summer. So most people didn't think it was worth the expense. Now that's changed and the attitude will change too.

In my newish (25y old, well insulated) flat we really started to feel the need to get one only 2-3 years ago. Until then it was nice to have but not necesarry.

there is significant resistance to air conditioning in Europe at many levels (all of which are invalid or solvable):

* "not technically feasible" - people talk about old buildings with oddly shaped windows

* "can't afford it" - as you see here. people talk about the units themselves and the electricity bills

* "our infrastructure can't handle it" - this has to do with things like grids overheating, failing

* "our infrastructure can't handle <the regulations>" - things like nuclear reactors in France not allowed to raise the temperature of rivers by another N degrees during a heat wave

* "it's bad for global warming" - a little late for that, probably should save lives first

literally hospitals in europe don't have AC throughout the entire building yet. global warming is really coming at them fast

I don't know how well it translates to the EU countries, but there seems to be this idea in the UK that air conditioning is a decadent frivolity, and really only for the weak.

And yes it does seem to get singled out as bad for global warming, which is odd as people in the UK most often use gas to heat their houses, where AC is very efficient and can use electricity from whatever source. It also works as very energy-efficient heating in winter.

In the past with harmful refrigerants and lack of renewable energy AC simply was not justifiable in most of Europe. Progress on both fronts plus global warming is changing that only recently.

On the bright side they’ve probably waited long enough to roll out heat pumps instead of window ACs, right?

As far as I know, a heat pump and an AC unit are essentially identical. Although some heat pumps can be reversed, and act as heaters in the winter. But one isn't more efficient than the other, they employ the exact same physical refrigeration cycle.

I think GP's point is that winter heating can shift to nuclear- and wind-powered instead of mostly burning fossil fuels.

Oh, I had them filed in by brain under “more efficient temperature control” but it looks like they don’t have an advantage over ACs when cooling. (Just over typical heaters, when heating). Oops.

That’s true however moving heat in the winter is much better than burning things.

Gas furnaces are 80%-98% efficient, heat pumps are 300-400%.

Does that take into account the efficiency of transforming the gas to electricity first? Ah, well we have other power sources as well. But if you were to use gas, it doesn't seem to make much difference (if the gas power plant doesn't utilize the extra heat for district heating etc.).

Some of the discussion going online, has asserted that heat related deaths in Europe exceed gun related deaths in the USA by some margin. If true, it has been ignored as a problem for too long.

Yeah, annual heat deaths in Europe (about 70k) exceed annual gun deaths in the US (about 44k) in absolute numbers. They're slightly under US gun deaths if you adjust for population (about 13 per 100k gun deaths in the US, and 12 heat deaths per 100k in Europe).

In comparison, fewer than 2k people die annually of heat in the US, well under 1 per 100k. And for symmetry, there are about 7k gun deaths annually in the EU, which is just slightly under 1 per 100k.

The WHO claims it's over 170k heat-related deaths per year, not 70k.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766

So in summary, the chance of a person dying from heat or guns is roughly equal in the EU and the US.

You can't trust those numbers, though. If you get drunk and jump into a river and drown it's counted as a heat related death.

You can't really trust any numbers. The gun death numbers in the United States include suicide, which account for as much as 62% of the totals.

Well the Greens in Europe handed Russia leverage thanks to relying on natural gas instead of nuclear, which it opposed (thanks German Greens).

In France these ideologues oppose A/C becauase it's evil: it makes us comfortable when we should be uncomfortable - if we are comfortable in an era of climate change, we'll only make it worse. And it's all America's fault anyway because of their emissions.

When do we vote out ideologues and have logical people in power?

This nuclear argument is getting quite stale. Germany seems to be investing quite a bit in other energies just fine.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

120GW of nameplate solar capacity is nothing to sneeze at even with the latitude challenge. That's more solar than almost all of California's energy generation combined, or most of the eastern United States.

Did I misread? I hover over the Nuclear and it literally says 0% of electricity is nuclear" for Germany.

Its true everywhere: Lots of homes in New Jersey don't have AC: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/05/heatwave-dea...

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

This exact quote ran through my mind and I was tempted to post it.

This is a reference to Animal Farm, right?

No, Scrooge McDuck right before he sodomized Donald Duck.

"even with working AC, the temperature inside was still 25.7 degrees."

So 78F. I wonder what temp the lower/non-AC floors are at. It's reasonable if they want to prevent the upper floors from becoming insanely hot, since hot air rises.

Reminds me of Animal Farm.

"A third staffer working on the 8th floor told POLITICO on Friday that even with working AC, the temperature inside was still 25.7 degrees."

I set my AC to 26 degrees. Otherwise it feels too cold.

Air conditioning weirdness around the EU: I live in the EU and everyone I know, including not too well off people on benefits and pensions, have aircon. I have multiple houses and dozens of aircons, but many friends in small apartments have them too, mostly since covid. In one house I have them running summer and winter 247 and the electric bill is still below 100E, way lower than people with swimming pools.

It depends on the country. If you live in a place that - traditionally - had only an expected few days of really hot temperatures every summer, it wasn't worth the investment. With climate change, the temperatures are now higher and the heat stretches longer.

Agreed, the EU is not that small and Southern countries had to go before northern but now I feel it is pretty normal. Might be my circle of course. Or in a shorter way; YMMV. I know zero people without aircon and one couple live fulltime in a yurt.

I don't know anybody with an aircon. Not a single house.

What really appalls me is that they have now started to blame Americans for the heatwave that the hot air from AC units are to blame and doubling down on their insistence that AC are harmful to the climate and telling people to not use AC.

I really think that this is the straw that breaks the camel's back moment for EU. Right now people are learning that EU = unbearable heat and other things.

Are you talking about the Paris deputy mayor, or did someone else also do this?

If the people in the lower decks were allowed to go home, I don't see the issue.

If they were forced to work without air conditioning and it was me, I would go to a doctor, tell them I am suffering from heat exhaustion, and get a voucher for not returning to work until the situation gets fixed.

The shutdown began at 4pm on a Friday. So, yes, much of the building was on its way home for the weekend. And the higher floors are mostly allocated to the leadership/commissioners, who are more likely to work after hours.

Now, why can't the building handle running the AC without an emergency shutdown? No clue, seems odd to me, unless there was a neighborhood-wide power issue?

And all of those Europeans that had comments about the Texas ERCOT warnings of heavy loads during extreme weather. Although, it's been a while since I've received notices/requests to adjust the use even if they were bump it up a few degrees vs turn it off.

With new inexpensive mini splits that do not require ducts, one would think adoption would go up?

Related and a little ironic: houses in northern Europe nowadays typically have "AC" in the form of air-to-air heat pumps that both can heat and cool. Houses in southern and central Europe dramatically lag behind in terms of adoption.

Imagine offices- who have temperatures of 30+ directly beneath the roof. AC where the heat-exchangers are built inside the buildings and other nonsense on top. Europe is so not ready, while preaching to the world about getting ready.

don't wanna sound like shill but for all people claiming you need some permit when installing one they should look into something like Midea PortaSplit - it's portable, but at same time it's like your regular multisplit unit, much more efficient

personally I have at home Toshiba, father has Mitsubishi, but when living in China had experiences with all major Chinese brands like Gree, Midea, Haier, etc. and would have zero worries about their quality, they produce shitton of them for CN market

This is Daily Mail (or Fox News for fellow Americans) level tripe, and you can be almost sure of this just based on the title. Designed for dopamine maximization.

Yes Minister on point as usual

https://youtu.be/x-HBsT6GmMs?t=69

wow that’s an ugly look.

Kinda weird though even for Europe that a high profile 10+ floor commercial building doesn’t have suitable climate control

Up vs down, always. Not surprising in the least.

The whole conversation about upper and lower floors is absurd. Obviously the upper floors are absorbing more sunlight and need more cooling.

Ground level and basement floors have been known as the coolest places in skyscrapers for centuries.

Any building with modern (last 100 years) insulation is going to have relatively equal distribution of heat between the floors. Except the bottom floor, where people enter/exit and mix in outside air.

Except it wasn't the basement and first floor.

It was the first seven floors. Coincidentally, also the floors most of the higher-ups don't work on. Or at least that's how it's being reported, so I don't think people's outrage is absurd.

4pm on a Friday, people were likely already heading home. This is being blown out of proportion.

The broader discussion about AC in Europe is good to have, but this specific story seems to be borderline click-bait.

> Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day

It's like satire. What is AC for if not extreme heat?

Normal day to day cooling, I mean, obviously? Like if you have a system designed to operate in 25-30C(normal summer in most of Europe) but then you have a spike of temperatures going to 40C for a few days in a row, it shouldn't really be a surprise the system doesn't work in conditions it wasn't designed for? The compressor overheats and shuts down, especially if it wasn't installed in the shade.

Just like heat pumps for heating in winter are amazing for our regular mild-ish winters, but if you get a really cold spell and it drops to -35C, it's just not going to work at all to a point where it might not even start - you could also say "well what's the point of a heating system that can't heat in extreme cold".

The extreme is the keyword.

> but if you get a really cold spell and it drops to -35C

Temperatures near 40C have been recorded in Paris dozens of times since the early 2000s. I don't think the winter temperature in Paris has ever dropped much below -20C, let alone -35C. So this isn't a very fair analogy.

What does temperature in Paris have to do with Brussels?

I feel rather silly, all the news about the heat deaths in Paris must’ve crossed wires in my brain. But it seems the two cities have similar temperature extremes, so my point is the same

Historically temperatures above 30C (86F) were rare in Europe, so thats what many ACs are sized for. Now they face 40C (104F), and many AC installations can't keep up

Shutting down AC on floors 1 to 7 likely allows them to get better performance on floors 8 to 13

That's not true. Temperature above 30C are the norm in summer in Southern Europe (which means quite higher in the Sun and in a heat trap location). Now, yes 40C isn't.

But I am unconvinced that AC manufacturers have different "sizing"... An AC unit is for hot places and the outdoor unit may be in a very hot spots with ambient easily above 40C.

Edit: Yes, AC systems for a whole building are different but still the system on the roof experiences the full Sun and very hot conditions, this isn't the issue. Perhaps they simply badly designed it so that it hasn't got the capacity to cool the whole building when it's actually hot so they prioritised (actually now I get that this is what you meant). Obviously it is easier to blame "weather conditions"...

Brussels is however not in Southern Europe

By sizing I simply mean the number and capacity of roof units. Cooling an office building down by 8C is a lot easier than cooling it by 18C. I doubt half the roof units are shut down. Maybe some are, but most will have their output redirected to cooling the top half of the building

In which case it would be just plain bad design if you can't have the whole building on AC when you actually need it...

Edit: it'd be interesting to know how many buildings in Belgium have had the same issue.

You can leave it on when you actually need it - meaning all summer long, in the conditions that are typical for that location.

It's like saying what's the point of having a house if you aren't safe in it during a tornado. It's an exceptional event. The problem is that these truly exceptional events which only happened once every 10 days for a day or two, are now becoming a norm. My own 12k BTU minisplit could cool my house down every summer, no problem, even down to 18C if I wanted it to. But in the recent heatwave it just can't keep up, there is more heat coming into the house than the system can remove.

That building doesn't have the kind of outdoor unit you're thinking of, it has central climate control and gadgetry on the roof. You can see it on Google Maps.

Also 19 satellite antennae, if my count is right.

When there is not enough AC, people sweat. It’s better for half to sweat to death so the other half can remain frosty.

FWIW this happened on Friday afternoon and the AC was back in working order on Monday morning.

Why the fuck does extreme heat require turning off the AC?

Seems like power shortages:

>”The European Parliament has also faced blackouts this week due to energy consumption from cranking up its cooling system.”

The A/C cannot keep up the load, due to the exteme heat. So they decided to just not cool one part of the building, to be able to keep cooling the other part .. It is now interesting who was in which part ;)

If that's the case then the building's system was very badly designed...

That seems true - it's not a historic building - it was built in the mid- to late-1960s.

It was designed for historical, pre-climate-change weather. (Or at least when those were in the know about climate change thought we'd solve it.)

There's probably a "Belgian joke" to be made if their AC is only designed to work when it isn't hot...

Uhh, AC that's designed for a hottest day of 85F or 90F will struggle at 100+F.

Clearly those in floors 1->7 were less important and thus allowed to take the day off and/or work remotely, right?

It was 4pm on Friday, so yes, they were probably heading home already.

The article indicates they were unable to handle the increased electricity load, which caused blackouts.

Additionally, sometimes unnaturally high temperatures break AC systems put in place with poor planning. This is very common in UK supermarkets every summer.

> unnaturally high temperatures

> poor planning.

> very common in UK supermarkets every summer.

What?

Global warming keeps making the temperature unnaturaly high, don't tell me you didn't hear about it.

If it's every summer, how is it unnatural? If it's poor planning how is it every summer? There's poor planning and then there's ... what, forgetting that summer happens? It sounds to me like somebody sat down and penciled in some numbers and decided that "it makes less money to let it break?" which seems pretty weird when you consider second-order stuff (but it's not like people tend to do that anyway)

Come on, you expect me to believe you honestly have no contextual knowledge about the changing climate?

No, I think you are opting for disguising your full on climate change denial under a tattered veil of feigned ignorance.

I know the average temps have gone up and there have been more extremes, but it's not like it moved 20˚F. They really don't have that level of tolerance in these systems? USA and other countries have been dealing with global warming too, the A/C still works.

https://www.wunderground.com/history/monthly/be/brussels/EBB... shows lately it was 97˚ in Brussels. In 2005 it was 93˚ around the same time.

The affected building was last renovated in the early 1990s, where average max temperature was around 18 degrees.

But even now "normal" average max temperature is only 21.7 degrees[1] and on the 23 of June temperatures reached 36.6 degrees, which is indeed over 20 deg F hotter than the normal maximum temperature for June.

[1]: https://opendata.meteo.be/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#... see INS 21004

I get what you mean with the normal max temp being 21.7C, but would expect the AC to be able to handle the peaks, and 33.5C wasn't unheard of ~20 years ago. Not sure what the situation was in the early 1990s, but they had 30 years to figure it out.

Based on the little information provided the AC can't keep up. So they cut off the lower half of the building to provide better cooling to the other half

Which, as heat rises, is probably reasonable.

...... what?

This isn't your home with open stairwells and loose venting doorjams. This is a thirteen story office building with elevators and badged access easements.

My dorm room was on the ninth floor of a nine floor building.

I assure you, heat passes through elevator shafts and floors just fine, and office buildings aren't usually built like a BSL-4 laboratory. If anything, they're typically less insulated than a regular old house.

Same

Presumably the AC systems themselves couldn't operate in that extreme heat. A lot of grocery stores in the UK, which are icy cold usually, had major issues with AC and refrigeration systems failing - I think because a lot of the equipment is on the roof and exposed to the heat.

AC systems don't quite care about direct sunlight, they are forced air heat exchangers. Now if the condenser (rooftop) side is undersized and therefore inadequate given elevated ambient air temperature all you can do is shut down a portion of evaporation side (the cold one) off, or the entire system just stops working.

Alternatively one can install water sprinkers on roofs like they do in China.

Its pretty common to se the AC systems on the top of roofs on big buildings in the US. From what I read, exposing the AC condenser unit to the sun should have minimal impact. Air flow through the condenser unit matters the most. Perhaps they were undersized for the extreme heat now happening in the UK.

my guess is that the outdoor AC unit reached its maximum working temperature...

since we're not that used to extreme heat in EU, units with max working temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius are pretty common and the air around the AC unit is warmer than regular outdoors air, doubly so if they're placed on the ground and the glass from the building reflects some additional heat from the sun.

the risk of this was broadcasted in our local news for home AC owners when the forecast reached 40, as lots of apartments have the AC on partly glass-encased balconies, or on walls facing direct sunlight...

Because a lot of electric grids are too old to handle the increased load.

To translate: When it's hot, air conditioners use more electricity. This is because they use more electricity because they have to work harder to keep a cool temperature.

The reason why electric grids are too old to handle the load is because:

Electric grids were built for smaller populations with the assumption that we'll build more as we make more babies; AND; electric grids weren't built to handle the temperature rise from climate change.

>Because a lot of electric grids are too old to handle the increased load.

Well maybe we can cool ourselves with gas/oil burning air conditioners like in winter.

>with the assumption that we'll build more as we make more babies

Babies don't build infrastructure. And EU cities had more migration instead of babies and yet they still didn't build more infrastructure to keep up with the migration population growth. Why is that?

> electric grids weren't built to handle the temperature rise from climate change.

But somehow they're built to handle running all the new heat pumps we want to have in winter?

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