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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

As an American, I can't understand a few of these sentences. I am mostly confused that you say you have a heat pump that cools, and you are sick of AC promotion. There is some kind of disconnect here, because in the US, a heat pump is AC.

Separately, everybody I personally know (Northeast US) considers 26 C indoors to be hot (not warm - hot). It's amazing to me that people can feel temperature so differently.

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It's because it's humid af in the northeast (and all through the East Coast). I moved to CA last year from FL and 75/78 here feels perfectly fine (I can sleep just fine) because it's completely dry. We literally have our windows open all day every day except today when it was like 90 (and tonight it'll be back down to 70 so we'll be able to sleep without AC).

after going through my first quake in valley, years ago, i shut windows at night, cause every strong breeze woke me up thinking a quake was coming. bummer.

Doesn't AC mean air? Air conditioning? There's no air involved here - it's basically antifreeze pumped through the floors/ceilings. The heat exchanger is an enclosed chamber where warm molecules exchange across into a cool chamber, in summer it's warm molecules from the brine that was in our floors/ceilings and the cool air is the 11c brine that runs through pipes in the ground. across a fin/radiator. It's all completely enclosed. The only "AC" is in the enclosed heat exchanger where warm and cold air molecules move between chambers.

Oh I should mention though, there is a compressor that compresses a volatile gas that is the carrier of the heat from the warm to the cold chambers. But it's so efficient that it's pretty much free to cool kostenlos/free cooling) using ground temp (11c here). Heating in winter does cost something because we like to be warmer than 11c.

So an 'air conditioner' is the same class of technology, except (typically) it works air/air . A modern minisplit air conditioner can't get a CoP as high as your awesome ground source system, and with 11C ground the ground source system has a superpower the minisplit can't quite match.

That said, a minisplit is cheaper to purchase and install, is easier to retrofit on an existing home, and still has a CoP well over 1. This is why I think the semantic debate is a distraction when there's practical problems to be solved. I'd think we'd want all our homes electrically heated and cooled with CoP>1.

The debate should be between heat pump technology and older heating methods, not necessarily between cousins.

A heat pump that cools and an Air Conditioner are the same thing

AC means any kind of refrigeration technology used to cool a building lower than the outside temperature.

As an American, what? A heat pump is a heat pump. An air conditioning unit is a subset of heat pumps (that is, a heat pump that can only run in one direction).

I'm just as confused as you are about the temperatures quoted though. I'm most comfortable around 19C or 20C. At 23C I start having trouble sleeping. At 26C I'll be openly sweating.

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