> We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building.

Same for Germany, at least in many places. And if your building gets reclassified as being under Denkmalschutz (cultural heritage management) you've won in the Lottery of Pain.

While I hear you, I think AC is better centralized for the building, along with heat and water.

Yes, there are numerous reasons why this is harder to do than just doing it ad-hoc per apartment, but if we’re to see it as infrastructure, it should receive the same level of consideration as other utilities.

> ensure consistent placement of condensers

You can install one on the balcony below the railing level.

The housing company is responsible for the exterior surfaces and thus also responsible for whatever happens to fall on bystanders when it will inevitably happen.

AC installers are also notoriously bad at following placement guidelines.

Seems like Poland and Finland might have something in common then. It's exactly the same here and exactly senseless.

You say stupid, but I actually would find it sad to see beautiful buildings that are in many cases hundreds of years old defaced with loads of small condensers bolted on to the face.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.

Is it really so hard to put a small fence around it to hide the ugly?

> I've heard stories of residents being scalded for putting flowers on their balcony

In medieval times, not after, I hope.

I think you misunderstand what isolation does. It will also keep the heat out. Having window awnings to block sunlight from directly warming up the room will go a long way.

wow such beautiful industrial cement buildings how can someone put flowers and destroy the beauty of cement?

if you have balcony you could hide multisplit unit under railing

if you don't want permanent installation there are not basically mobile split units like Midea Portasplit, it's basically same thing you would install on the wall, but mobile on the wheels (personally I have regular AC (Toshiba) and my multisplit unit is on the flat roof invisible from the street, this year neighbor floor below me installed his unit on the roof as well, we are the only 2 apartments in two units with 40 apartments in total with AC, so much for Prague AC statistics, though honestly even under the roof in 35C+ temperatures it was not that bad prior turning on the AC)

I could see this being a good policy for unsightly detrius or debris but they've taken it way too far.

Nothing ironic about that. Using an airco to cool a house is often (not always) a luxury that humans did without for centuries. So people are used to seeing cooling as luxury. Without heating you die.

A heatpump is more energy efficient than most other forms of heating. A heatpump is not always the most efficient way to cool a house.

Heat pumps are just ACs with a lot more energy efficiency. How does that make people hypocrites?

They are. They're also heating indoors up to 4x more efficiently than the best alternative. Nobody is opposing AC cooling for efficiency.

The resistence to cooling with AC comes from way before HP became popular and remains, somehow. Part of it is because it's perceived as a luxury (while heating is not), partly because being relatively uncommon until recently its surprising for some people and therefore the perceived cause of illnesses and malaise.

It'll go away. Because it's really vitally important, and because air/air HPs are perfect trojan horses to normalize AC cooling.

.. That being said, I had to call 3 companies in Germany before I even found one willing to sell me a air/air HP. And the cooling function has to be carefully ignored if you want it subsidized.

The "get a heat pump" narrative is just saying that heat pumps are better than gas heating or electric resistive heating. It is not hypocritical to say "people who already have a furnace and an AC should get a heat pump" while also saying "people who don't have an AC should consider continuing to not have AC."

> But I have to say, AC is not "banned" anywhere in Europe

Exactly, the whole premise of the article is a bit of a strawman. In fact, where I live, the demand for AC installation is so high that you have to wait months for a company to install a unit for you.

These extreme heat waves are a fairly new phenomenon, summers in central Europe just didn't use to get so hot for such a long stretch of time even a few decades ago. Now that they've become the way they are, people are doing what? Correct, installing AC units. Imagine that.

But let's not forget that energy is also on average a lot more expensive in Europe than in the US. The cost plus environmental concerns, which seem to fair less high in the public conscience on the other side of the Atlantic, have also been reasons why people were not keen on AC units in the past.

To be fair, the article doesn't say that AC is banned - it mostly focuses on the HOA-style local ordinances and permits that discourage people from using AC.

It’s not banned, but getting permission to install the outside unit is essentially “hard” in some parts of Europe.

In England, if you own a house, you generally have permitted development rights to install one, subject to some fairly common-sense rules. If you live in a flat, though, it’s a very different story: you will need planning permission *as well as* freeholder consent, and the process generally involves engineering/structural/architect drawings and freehold-consent paperwork. The freeholder can also charge you their legal and administration costs, even if they ultimately reject the application. Essentially it's >5K of paperwork which might be wasted if it's rejected even just to install a single 5KW split.

So in the hottest parts of London and other major cities, where a large proportion of people live in flats, installing AC can be very difficult in practice. In the cooler commuter towns, where houses are much more common, it’s considerably easier.

Why can't they build it into new flat blocks/houses? Nothing outright prevents it but everyone does their best to discourage it. The London Plan, for example, uses a “cooling hierarchy” which 'seeks to reduce any potential overheating and also the need to cool a building through active cooling measures' so good luck getting planning for it.

Brought to you by an American libertarian think tank [1], no less.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

Multiple kids died in my country forced by the teacher to play soccer during a heatwave. This really should not be allowed.

A couple of years ago that would have been correct, but circumstances have changed.

We've had a series of heat waves this summer, and temperatures have gotten very high inside. Much depends on the location of course, and the type of building, and stuff like that, but the fact is that in Belgium alone thousands of people have died because of the heat. Thousands of people that would still be with us if they would have had adequate cooling.

When it's close to 40 °C in your home, a ceiling fan is not going to make a meaningful difference.

And we need to keep in mind that summers are in all likelihood going to get hotter and hotter.

During recent heatwaves ceiling fans will still not help you. They'll help with ac efficiency but you'll still feel miserable

You can use your AC as a fan when it is not too bad.

Forced air cooling require air to be colder than the heatsink surface and evaporative cooling require relative humidity to be less than 100%.

I don't know how bad the situation in Europe is, but we're already at point where there are times and places on Earth where one can construct a primal instinctive understanding of that by simply walking out of an air conditioned room(to which you SHOULD return within half an hour and MUST within an hour). "Just get fans bro" is tone deaf.

I live in Sweden. You are incorrect. Having your home basically unlivable a few weeks every year is not ok, and ground heat exchange pumps that provide cooling are energetically basically free, so just do it.

>Many homes could get by on ceiling fans

Tell me you're German without telling me you're German

> I set my thermostat to 65F in August.

Ouch, that's far too cold for me in the UK. I have the house at 20C during the day (68F), and only drop to 18C (64F) at night.

When I had poor insulation that meant heating was regularly on 8 months a year, although it's on less now I live in a well insulated house.

That's where the image of AC in general matters. It needs to be seen as a life saving tech just like heating, not a luxury item for rich people.

If it was just a matter of red tape it would be fine, but in France people would fight you on AC because it's ugly/noisy/warms up the street.

So you can get it rejected by people who live in a flat where heat is not as much of a problem as your (ground floor vs higher floor, window orientation) or by landlords who don't even live in the building.

> co-owners

HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?

Anyway HOA is something that shouldn't even exist. Or at least not with power to prevent people from having air conditioning in their home.

Not in the land of the free, Great Britain. You can put anything on your house, even a 25ft fibreglass shark diving into your loft.

Of course. But isn't this debate more about the case where you are the only owner?

Don't get me started on how it works in my country.

People who don't have a balcony are screwed and are entirely dependent on homeowners association which arbitrarily can agree or not, or they can stay indecisive about it and not let you do anything.

Well, if you have a balcony? you just put it there and make the necessary holes for it, problem solved.

The effect is exactly the same - you just have AC installed. In one case you have to go through totally unnecessary hoops, and in other case, you just do whatever you want.

What's even the point of it?

>Midea pre-filled mini-splits went from €700 to 2000-3000+ and months of lead time. It's crazy.

They're back to normal prices now. At least in Germany. Make sure to grab one before the next Summer hits :)

The problem with monopolies is that they can hike prices at will. This has certainly happened with district heating in Sweden. You can't do that with AC and solar.

Most building professionals, urban/city/master planners/engineers are explicitly incorporating resilience into their designs at all levels. This includes both new designs and retrofitting old buildings.

Places of emergency cooling refuge, parks, backup power to ensure energy/water continue, passive features like solar heating, natural ventilation, bioswales, air quality filtering, cool roofs/roads, water features, overhangs/louvers/awnings, insulation, thermal mass, etc, etc.

These are things grass roots can do now to mitigate impacts while governments dither and punt hard decisions into the future.

Or use the calories extracted from the air to heat your water heater.

Technology Connections has a new video exactly about it.

Hearing that ac at home is a luxury in France when piss poor romania/moldova do install them left and right sounds borderline satirical. Ffs an ac is not that expensive. And running it is not that expensive, especially with french nuclear

>Here in Norway AC is not the standard in hotel rooms.

Since when should there be AC in friggin' Norway?

I think you're under-estimating how hot it gets inside well-insulated European homes. Your mileage may vary across European countries, but in the north where it gets cold in the winter our homes are built to trap heat. Opening windows won't get you very far as the temperature radiates through the windows and traps in the walls. Closing blinds will help, but not by much. It got over 40c in my office this summer. This is not livable conditions with a fan.

The problem is when humidity rises it makes it harder forbthe body to expel hear via evaporation. This is what is happening in places like UK this time around. An AC helps get rid of the humidity as it cools the air. I don't know about necessity now but 20 years down the line, who knows

I am from an SE-Asian country, AC usage has increased a lot, and, also we are hell bent on devastating every green that is available, as much as possible.

Dehumidifier works pretty well, provided it's built in to the AC unit, portable one's will increase the room temp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_QfX0SYCE8

Portable one's heat dispenser is inside your room, AC unit's outside. But the issue being, as it disperses the heat outside, it's probably still increasing the ambient heat?

People in Asia are in those conditions from the birth.

Like they literally put on the sweatshot/hoodie in the early mornings with effing 27 degrees Celsius

That’s not a normal temperature for Europeans.

Also I could not imagine doing some serious thought work in temps like this.

There are a lot of studies of how mental performance is correlated with temperatures with men needing couple degrees even lower than women (eg 22 vs 24)

—

Airflow helps a lot, of course. But it must be in swinging motions / constantly changing direction — nervous system doesn’t like same constant stimulus to the point of neuralgia if prolonged.

During heatwaves the fan is no longer sufficient. It can improve ac cold air spreading though. A fan alone will not help you when your walls are warm and when even at night outside temp is above 20dg and humidity is high

Fans stop cooling you once air temps approach body temperature. The EU sees tens of thousands of excess deaths each summer, mostly among the elderly.

> But A/C it a necessity like water/sewage/electricity? In Europe, nah.

s/Europe/all parts of Europe/

I.e., Europe has a lot of different climate (sub)zones, and it heavily depends on where you actually live.

I'm fine with a fan in the Alps, where I sleep at 1,000 metres above sea level, and nights with the minimum temperature above 20°C are still very rare. I even don't bother turning the fan on most of the time, or just for an hour or so to clear the trapped heat in the bedroom at like 22:00 o'clock once outside cooled down enough.

OTOH I'm NOT fine in my Vienna flat with just a fan. There, this summer we got quite a few nights where the minimum temperature did not go below 25°C, even some with a minimum of 28°C and a maximum of 41°C. The flat is an old building and has only windows on one side facing a small curtilage without any trees or grass, so it traps heat, and I cannot even cool it well at night, even if the outside temperature goes a few degrees below the inside one, as the yard also traps heat.

Without an AC I could not sleep at all-even with a fan, it's very hard to sleep well above 25°, and frankly even above 23° for me. And I had to buy a much less efficient portable one (before the Midea Portasplit was a thing) because of braindead local regulations.

Ironically, in the winter the local gov suddenly starts calling those "bad ACs" again by their alternative "heat pumps" name, and they become the best thing ever for heating. I really cannot figure out how one can do that mental gymnastics without getting a headache.

Anyway, don't assume that your local conditions hold for all of Europe.

You should come to Texas and tell me how well you get along with just a fan. We have had like over 40 days of 40-45 C in a row. The wind feels like a blast furnace and at night it can still be 38 C outside. Even the birds have fled to cooler locals. It is so intense that you can not walk barefoot outside around your home. If your car broke down on the side of a road, you would be dead in less than an hour, even in the shade. I like to tell people that Texas is the next stop after Hell and too be honest it is like living in the Arctic compared to Arizona where the temps are even worse.

I was in Vienna this summer and the inside of the apartment was over 40 for the entire week. Thank god, we were able to buy a portable AC unit from Mediamrkt before they ran out.

people in middle east literally use keffiyeh which is just a scarf in a head lmao

Spot on. You're doing heatpump based cooling without floor heating? I didn't realise that was an option.

The reason is that one allows you to destroy harvests and ecosystems while the other does not.

Because weather engineering is experimentation with potentially huge unintended consequences both for the people in the relevant region as well as people in neighbouring regions and potentially even further.

How would you feel if your neighbour started doing something that was good for them but disastrous for you? Or something with good intentions that turned out to just be a huge mistake causing billions in damages, maybe even lives lost?

Weather engineering is extremely risky, we can barely predict the weather a few hours in advance. We have no idea what kind of havoc we might cause trying to do it on a large scale.

The author works for CATO and writes in WaPo.

They think global warming is a minor threat that requires minimal to no changes in regulations, but heat waves (that, according to her, have always been the same every year) are a massive threat to the public and requires immediate changes in regulation.

You can already get small portable air conditioners but until recently, most people with low incomes wouldn't spend £300 on something they might only need for 4 weeks per year and needs storing the rest of the time. That might change of course as time goes by.

What some people in the UK do is go to local air conditioned public buildings like libraries (which they are welcome to do) and occasionally a large air conditioned store or shopping centre.

The compressor unit is just too big and heavy for that. COP is too low for Peltier cooling elements(aka Thermo-Electric Coolers). First generation of those will be/are based on regular ice of H2O or a frozen coolant pack with some engineered high temperature ice; H2O is going to be more convenient since they can be drank and replaced.

Japan already did it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cjej4y3gvzlo

Stick your feet in a bucket of water. My colleague does it: it's magical.

Acs are not that expensive. The problem is getting approval

It's not that simple. If you have a gas boiler, you're most likely exchanging heat using radiators which are _designed_ for certain amount of heat exchange. With high water temperature, you can get away with smaller radiator and deliver the same amount of heat.

The story gets worse when you put heat pump to the same system - now you have to run it to its limits to have just enough heat in the water to make the radiators release enough heat to barely heat up the room.

Of course, it's only that simple to replace one heat source with another, why wouldn't anyone do it already?

I live in France. That kind of aircon is garbage both in how much it can cool a room and how efficient it is due to under pressure.

You can get a portable split-system if you have a balcony.

But installing a real full-size AC with a large external unit is prohibited in most cases. If you’re renting you’re of course out of luck. An apartment, even one you own-forget it.

If that's the case, then why do all European cars have AC? There's an anti-electricity sentiment, but that's a very different thing. It's why most of those anti-AC places use gas heating.

Just fine in completely different types of buildings.

There's a lot of buildings to tear down and convert if you want to legitimately make comparisons.

Yeah, with AC

I've been to a little town in Pakistan where they sell meat out in the open and you can get a hair cut on the street. Houses are run down as you would expect but you better believe they all seemed to have AC units.

All these countries are pushing EV's so I don't understand how it could be about energy use lol?

Are we going to build a dyson sphere some day or are we not? That's some hell of a "increasing our energy usage".

[dead]

The reason why they aren't much of a problem for the grid is solar. Right now we already have the issue, that in some areas we're throwing away the majority of the produced electricity. Very common in e.g. southern germany.

Conveniently, cooling is especially needed when the energy production from solar is at its maximum.

I've been part of projects building 20-40 MW solar installations in southern germany and on average we throw away >50% of what we generate.

There is SO MUCH SOLAR now, we don't know what to do with all the energy.

>while I definitely believe that European hospitals and retirement homes sadly need ACs now (thanks global warming), I'm not sure everyone and their dog needs one.

If a 10-day heat wave cuts work productivity by 10% (which is optimistic IMO, it's probably worse in countries where people aren't used to it), that's equivalent to a 1-day general strike. If the workers actually managed to pull off a general strike in modern times, you can be sure the state wouldn't be happy with business as usual.

Most of the grid is built for winter. Summer has huge overcapacity. That's also why France exported every single day and hour this summer despite all the stories of shut down nuclear plants

Europe had tens of thousands of excess deaths from heatwaves this year. It's not about american think tank but basic will to avoid suffering

> I also have reservations about why an American libertarian think tank writes about what Europeans should do, but that's probably on me.

My thoughts exactly, except in my mind it's pretty clear that it's about influencing the climate change discourse... The less people are bothered by the rising temperatures, the more they will acquiesce to environmentally unfriendly policy.

I presume the original had affiliate links to air conditioners on Amazon

It wasn't needed but now it is, so things need to change because people are already dying.

But hey, at least we preserved the nice 19th century Parisian landscape.

The other side is: my grandmother could survive heatwave just because her house wasn't heating up that much. It's old, it's stone, stone is just good at keeping temperature even. And the air coming through the windows passes through trees that are good at lowering temperature.

Even if it got a bit hot – like it does in mine, that has less volumetric heat capacity — simple floor scrub lowers temperature. Evaporating water is just a very good at that, and floor is a big area.

If we take a house made of paper and place it in a place with no trees and a lot of asphalt, I believe that AC could become a necessity. No amount of evaporating water could help you to fight heat rising from the road.

But I much prefer better houses and city planning

For sure. I'm from Germany (but with an AC) as well and am always amazed when people tell me that AC makes you sick. Even young people sometimes replicate this "Oh you gotta be careful not to get sick" and would rather be in 30+°C indoors. How come Germans get sick while the rest of the world seems to be doing fine and is even productive during summer (it feels like Germany grinds to a halt during heatwaves).

Case closed that europe got tens of thousands excess deaths from heatwaves?

I think even when it's 45C and your boomers cook alive in their concrete ovens, I will still see these sneering opinions from the enlightened master race, civilized to the point of welcoming their own extinction to preserve the klimat for someone else's children.

Kind of interesting to think about why an American libertarian think tank would be writing articles about Europe. Is it just to give Americans talking points against whatever europhile they might encounter, or does Cato actually care about European policy now?

This is not propaganda what a nonsense. The fact that more ppl die from cold is not an argument against using ACs. It's an argument to have hvacs to get proper electrified cooling and heating

> If that author is right, then we can and should punish the people responsible for global warming?

So every adult human and corporation?

How are u gonna punish china? do u have any logic? chatgpt 3.5 makes more sense than these types of comments...

> ...Each year? Was it the case every year twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago? What has changed, miss Follett?

Are you considering answering this question? Was it the case fifty years ago? Did anything change?