this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Mildly Interesting
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Lmao grew up with? Most of us have never used AC at all in europe. Here in the UK no homes have AC. The issue is that people are installing it now because of climate change and the result is massively higher energy use.
Not necessarily in your house. I'm talking about the design of the units from when you were a child (Many public buildings in the EU have AC regardless of houses not having it). AC was invented in 1901, and has come a very long way since then, and we have begun combining it with old principles to extract the best of both solutions
Combining modern refrigeration/cooling techniques with well designed passive systems that exploit material properties (Heat capacities, transfer coefficients, etc.) to their advantage is the future of HVAC. It started with CFCs and knowing we could exploit their boiling point with mechanical force to chill air beyond the outside air temperature. Who knows where science and engineering may take us next!
Cooling a ware house, lecture hall or mall is very different from cooling an apaprtement building. In particular because most of the former have been designed with AC in mind.
Not beyond the hard limits of physics. You are not going to retrofit an appartement building built in 1900 or 1970 or 2000 for that matter with an efficent heating/cooling system without major rebuilding.
People in the UK are installing air cons, because most houses are very bad and have no insulation.
This is not true? L1A, L1B, L2A, and L2B exceed american insulation regulations by a huge amount, and they exceed the EU regulations as well. I did some roofing once upon a time.
Most houses in the UK are not new builds, that's the issue.
Some US states solve this by making it illegal for a roofer to re-roof an uninsulated roof without adding insulation.