To Ban Air-con

[chaosmaker]

On a rapidly heating planet, shouldn't we be looking for ways to build/fit housing for all sorts of extreme weather?
Air-con just makes it hotter for everyone overall as it adds heat into the environment and makes it worse overall.

I live in Mallorca (currently mid to late 30s temperature) and I have air con but I never use it. We installed ceiling fans everywhere and use them all year round (they push heat down in winter). However, I have a stone house built for warm weather. Even when the temperature hits the 40s it’s bearable.

my partner works in a wooden home office which is like a sauna so he use air con in there!

I hate air con so try never to use it - I feel like it’s sucking all the moisture out of my body.

Some medications, including several antidepressants they tell you don’t expose to too much heat.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62496985

Dear me. We're all fighting like rats in a sack whilst those huge data centres are using all that power and raising the temperature in their operating areas. One of them is the size of Manhattan apparently.

That generally means keep them on a fridge. I work in the pharmaceutical industry and we measure stability at -70C, 4C, 25C and 40C. Tablets will be fine at most temperatures, anthing liquid will be fine stored in a fridge. You do not need to keep your entire house at 19C to store your medicines.

They won’t care what happens to us at all. They are replacing their workforces with AI so they will just have more profit. They get richer we will get hotter as the climate crisis deepens. It will become a fight literally for water between humans at the lowest level and the AI of the super rich. We are absolutely ruined.

I do. We just have ceiling fans.

Air con dries my sinuses out terribly so I am one person who will never have it! DH complains i wont use it in the car but there's something about the air that gives me a headache

I work with people that have heat affected disabilities. my post was more about air con making the problem worse by heating everything up more because of the way it works. I also have a condition affected by the heat.

The post was a question, not an attack.

That sounds miserable and poxy and appalling design. I don't know what the answer is. You sound like you need a better place to live or something that will keep it cool. A family i work with use a bottle of frozen water behind a fan and that then blows icy air round the room until it melts and it works really well.

We lived in a country where temps regularly topped 45 in the summer, 50 once or twice. It was a less developed, desert country. Newer (badly) built buildings had Aircon, traditional buildings didn't really. People would say you would get sick if you slept under it. We had blinds, stone everywhere, and a cross breeze in the evening to ventilate the flat. I can count on one hand the times I had it set to cool rather than fan. It dries you out!

We need to start designing it in. The problem is we've been chucking up new builds and putting bloody glass everywhere for years. It is hard to retrofit, but for example our bog standard terrace is pretty cool (minimal outside walls, just normal windows, highish ceilings). We need trees everywhere, it should be illegal to pave your front garden and put down plastic grass and we can use air source heat pumps for cooling as well as heating, solar powered. You can design cities for heat, it just needs imagination and planning regs. In the meantime though we've got loads of tiny flats and new build houses that the freeholders won't sort out.

If course and ai uses water and energy.
I can't get upset about people wanting air con.
Many live in flats with poor insulation etc and are really suffering with no outside space.
I'm lucky my house is quite cool .

Yeah while people are distracted by governments fighting over land, religion and so on, these massive tech giants are quietly taking over the world.

Huge amounts of resources are being diverted to these data centres for power and cooling. Resources like water that humans need in a planet that’s rapidly heating up.

Jobs are being lost. As usual the government has its blinkers on and thinks all this is somehow in our interest. Huge swathes of white collar roles are being lost each day. The only people benefitting are the mega rich.

Air con is seriously the least of your worries!

In places like Germany and Switzerland they have very poor air con though and they do restrict it so you cant change it.
I've been madly looking at reviews for air con specifically and people say the houses with the supposed in design air con are utterly crap !
One hotel apologetically said our building is designed to be cool.so we don't have air Don bit if still can get hot !

And yes to indigenous building techniques! Mud is incredible (and we used to build houses with it in the UK, we do actually know how to do this stuff, mud and thatch is brill). There's a desert town in the south of Libya made of mud and basically underground that the government relocated to a nearby 'new town'. The former residents all go back to the old town every day because it's so much more pleasant. Loads of beautiful mud built buildings all across the Sahara and sahel.

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/362/

OP, I take your point about air conditioning making global warming worse. Air con is like using a sticking plaster over a big wound. Massively inadequate. What should happen to fix the wound is

1. change the building code so that new builds by law are built to be comfortable in hot conditions without excessive use of air conditioning.
2. Invest in retrofitting homes that are currently uncomfortable. Shutters, insulation, etc. Initially prioritize people who are the most likely to be affected by heat.
3. Educate everyone on how to keep a home as cool as possible.
4. Use air conditioning as a second line of defence against heat only.

And crypto.

On my smart meter, a day when I have used my split a/c system for 12 hours is showing up as costing less £££ on the meter than on a day when I've had the heating on for 12 hours. You're talking about £5/day with a/c and £8/day with heating.

So both a/c and the boiler generate heat, but the a/c less so.

Greta, take note :-)

That’s worth knowing thankyou!

We are looking at it for our extension room. Also looking at external window film and a roof vent.

OMG that reminds me.........Persimmon Homes yes i will name them have built new flats in Cressing in Essex. Long large windows just so much glass I will lay money that they havent got air con They will be sweat boxes.

I always find it interesting the way that MN goes on about how important it is to be in line with environment issues, how terrible governments are that don't Persie environmental policies that activists want. And as soon as someone says, time to give up air con because it uses massive amounts of electricity,it goes out the window.

Yeah, it's totally possible to live in hot places without it. You need to build properly, and also not have stupid social practices. Like, working in the heat of the day, instead of the cooler morning and evening. Being in Nairobi years ago with the army, keeping stupid North American hours, while any sensible local was taking a nap.

Yes, and the majority of people living in those countries just get on with it - unlike so many Brits who can't seem to cope with anything even slightly out of the ordinary.

Not everywhere in Australia though. My house would be unbearable without air con. We have solar panels to try to mitigate the usage.

I have a multi-split heat pump system for heating and air con.

A heat pump doesn’t create any additional heat at all, it just moves already existing heat from inside to the outside for air con or it moves heat from outside to inside for heating.

If is a split heat pump, no heat is generated. The cost of electricity reflects possible heat generation if you’re not on a green tariff. If you are, no heat.