Study: Home air conditioning cut premature deaths on hot days 80% since 1960
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The quick adoption is probably just cheap mass availability of the technology?
I share your sentiment, by the way. There are quite a few days in Germany where its unbearable in the summer. Alas, aircon here is mostly fans.
95°F isn't an extremely hot day. We get 95°F days in the summer in Seattle, the city of perma-drizzle (47° North). From personal experience, most houses in this area don't have air conditioning.
In the South, people regularly see much hotter days (I think Arizona (33°N) tops 110°F / 43°C during the summer).
And the price is rock botton. you can have a simple one that can cool a small to medium room for about 200$ and a bigger one for the main room is about 500-700$. installation is usually another 150$. 4200$?? - crazy.
These are placed in the yard away from the house. Here's a picture: http://www.getgreenair.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/home_h...
The point is if you can't afford to spend $4K on air conditioning, $600 might be within the budget.
Also I'm not sure central one is more efficient. it cools entire house while using individual units you can cool just one room. Of course it has the capability to limit the airflow per room etc, but I'd guess most people don't do that and just cool/head the entire house.
My time in Israel was rather cold and required a jacket most times :)
Here in the southern US, even when it's only hitting 90 F during the day, the low might be in the upper 70s which isn't low enough to passively cool a house.
I see two reasons for that.
Firstly, people simply do not know how to keep their houses cool. On hot nights, people will do the right thing and open windows to cool down the house. However, at day, they will not close windows and curtains to keep the cold air in and the heat out (opening windows will not cool your house if the air outside is warmer than the air inside, as it lets in warmer air)
Secondly, some houses simply are poorly designed for hot summers. Windows on the south are great most of the time, but for the (few) hot summer days, you need something that prevents the sun from shining directly into your room. A simple solution is to have a balcony; that takes away the sun when it is high in the air, but not when it is low, as in spring, autumn and winter.
(this assumes houses with 'real' walls that have some heat capacity. I do not think the almost-cardboard style walls so common in the US fit that bill. That may be a reason air conditioning is so popular there)
Is it internal, bodily factors or external factors (e.g. the house absorbing the heat? I don't buy that, though, as I can have all the windows open blowing cool air in and still not sleep).
There are probably some biological factors (still, I feel colder when sleeping, but of course I have a bad time sleeping when it's hot)
"When you sleep, your body’s internal temperature actually drops to its lowest level, generally about four hours after you fall asleep. Scientists believe a cooler bedroom may therefore be most conducive to sleep, since it mimics your body’s natural temperature drop."
The UK's per capita GDP is only 3/4 that of the US so they don't have as much disposable income and the weather tends to be much colder there than the average in the US so there's not as much demand for AC.
[edit] oh, and my impression is that a decent sized house here is quite a bit smaller than in the States.
A decent-sized house in America is 2000-3000 sqft (185-275 sq meters). You will usually get two floors and a two car garage. And if you pay a little extra, a finished basement as well.
And of course, the entire house, top to bottom, back to front, has central air-conditioning and heating, controlled from a single point. If you get fiber-glass insulation in the attic, properly insulated walls, and double-paned windows, you can easily survive a Midwestern summer (during which the number of days the temperature is above 40C can easily be a dozen or more) without ever opening a window or breaking a sweat, and you won't break the bank doing it.
Not being able to do that in Europe is probably the biggest reason why I would never able to live there (or in places like Seattle, where central air isn't common). Even if it only gets hot occasionally, having to essentially "condemn" most of the house to the outside temperature and just sit inside one room the whole day is not a lifestyle I could tolerate.
Spent a few holidays in places where it was regularly 35+ degrees and only really struggled for a day or two, I can't imagine it being worse for you if you live there full time since you'd be much more used to the weather.
Personally, heat makes me literally sick. My blood pressure plummets (even though I have very good health), I can't think straight (productivity drops to like 10% of what I'm able to accomplish in winter), and I feel extremely stressed. I also get skin rashes and abdominal pain frequently.
Thank God I'm moving to Seattle next month :) I know it can get very hot in the summer there, but at least they get short summers. Our summer lasts 4-5 months.
Here in the states, my house had no AC, and we have weeks of >100°F/38°C summers with high humidity. All your fine mammal evolutionary adaptations are useless. Panting? Nope, air is hotter than you. Sweating? Nope, won't evaporate. Radiating from hairless skin? Nope. We did have a tiny window unit air conditioner that about half worked that came with the house. We'd build a tent over the bed and just barely stay comfortable.
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[1] But not many. I just looked in amazon uk, and your choices are slim compared to the states. I say free standing, because a window unit can tear up the window frame pretty badly and if you are renting that isn't polite. The free standing units just have an adjustable width panel with two holes that you shut in the window sash.
It is not possible to deal with (humid heat) without modern technology.
The only workable evolutionary way to do it would be to significantly shut down self-heat production, short of a biological heat pump (that does not exist AFAIK)
But of course, in the UK, it's hot for a couple of weeks, as opposed to the US where depending of the region is hot from half-year to almost the whole year.
In this area SE Canada summers are usually low 20s usually 25C is a typical hot summer day, but now 30C to 35C seems to be the new normal hot, I think it got to 38C this year. It's also very high in humidity here 80% to 90%, which makes sense being on an island.
Anyway dad has a lung disease (IPF) and heart problems plus bearing 70 years old and overweight, this portable unit I see almost as life support.
It would be bad for any elderly person to die due to the heat but I think in area where it only gets hot for a month or less it's deceptive. Most elderly would think it wasn't hot in the old days and they can't afford or pay for an AC unit and will probably die from heat stroke.
London and Paris July average high is 73-75. And there's a world of difference between 75 and 83.
Even if you go all the way down to Toulouse, it's still not as hot as New York.
However, it is interesting to note that A/C sale in Europe has been taking off for the past 10-15 years, presumably because it is indeed getting hotter in Europe.
One key advantage of heat pump systems is that they can often be run in reverse, serving as both heating and air conditioning. Currently a heat pump is no cheaper to run than gas central heating, but that is set to change within the next few years.
tl;dr, it was hotter and for longer and English houses were not already better suited to keeping heat in and out, you'd likely see more air conditioners.
Meanwhile, you can buy one on Amazon if you can't keep your curtains closed for those multiple days of 95f.
"England it's getting hotter and hotter" - Wolfram Alpha would disagree with you there. At least it hasn't averaged any hotter since the 70's.
Because a significant part of America is hot, and England is not(I had lived in England for years). It is not an "It will be fine if we install AC", but an "if we don't install air conditioner we will die" and I am being serious here, Las Vegas would be inhabited without AC .
Also England is wet so this means that before cooling the air, you will have to condense the water, and that takes lots of energy, making them inefficient in UK.
South of North America is very hot in summer but also dry, so it is very efficient in energy consumption.
35c on multiple days!! That is nothing. In most of Spain you will get 40-45 peaks with 35c minimum over months in summer, very few clouds for three months.
Florida for example, was largely considered largely uninhabitable until the invention of refrigeration and pesticides to control the Malaria-spreading mosquitos.