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Comment by cbarnes99 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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?

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...

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

Seems like power shortages:

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

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