huh. I was just looking at air conditioners being really inefficient and it being really hard to keep a thing cool passively because all the stuff we do/have makes heat nowadays.
It’s easier and more efficient to wrap yourself up with blankets and covers and use minimal heating (with decent home insulation) to warm yourself up than it is to cool down when you are too hot.
Its pretty US centric though so I think one would have to contrast that against the UK and Europe which generally has homes that are brick and concrete rather than lumber, we also have (I believe) tighter insulation regulations and - just generally - vastly smaller homes.
I think if US houses were built to European regs and sizes then the numbers would look much different.
Would you say the same about places where it gets well below freezing in the winter?
Edit: Many older houses don’t have AC in Vegas. They use evaporative cooling mostly.
yeah if you don’t have heating (wood, pellets, gas, fossil, electric, whatever) you can’t live in that climate. its, like, a thing.
but its way easier to heat a thing and keep it warm than cool a thing.
The laws of thermodynamics disagree
Pepperidge Farm remembers
huh. I was just looking at air conditioners being really inefficient and it being really hard to keep a thing cool passively because all the stuff we do/have makes heat nowadays.
It’s easy to passively cool things, as long as you’re okay getting them wet :)
On the other hand, ACs are heat pumps, which are generally efficient for transferring heat energy (both to warm and cool)
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It’s easier and more efficient to wrap yourself up with blankets and covers and use minimal heating (with decent home insulation) to warm yourself up than it is to cool down when you are too hot.
At an individual level sure, it’s easy to throw on a blanket when it’s cold. But at a household level, much more energy is used to heat homes.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-10/why-we-always-fight-over-air-conditioning
Interesting article!
Its pretty US centric though so I think one would have to contrast that against the UK and Europe which generally has homes that are brick and concrete rather than lumber, we also have (I believe) tighter insulation regulations and - just generally - vastly smaller homes.
I think if US houses were built to European regs and sizes then the numbers would look much different.