Hacker News Reader

Comment by mediocregopher | Hacker News Reader

> Almost all home power usage comes down to heating and cooling.

What is it about a house which makes these things more of a requirement than on a boat? People have lived and do live without these things in their home as well.

View on HN

Because a boat doesn't have an enclosed space to heat. Well not usually anyway. And yes of course many people can live without heating and cooling in their homes, but that comes at a significant comfort cost. If you come to me with the suggestion of "Don't use any air conditioning to reduce power usage" its a non starter because air conditioning significantly improves my enjoyment of life. If you came to me with the suggestion of "Lets allocate more government funding to renewable and nuclear investments" I am much more interested in the proposal.

It might sound selfish but this is how everyone feels. No one wants to give up their most important comforts if they don't have to. And they don't have to.

And yes of course many people can live without heating and cooling in their homes, but that comes at a significant comfort cost.

It doesn't have to be that way. You might try looking up passive solar design..

That usually only applies to the tiny fraction of people who can build new.

It used to be kind of the norm. We just called it vernacular architecture back then and chalked it up to "local style" rather than fully grasping that it such regional styles were the product of using locally sourced materials and then designing to the best of our ability for human comfort given the local weather and climate.

It used to be people just didn't live where it was too hot to live without AC. Now they do.

I grew up in the Deep South. Rest assured, people lived there before AC was a thing.

Houses were designed for cross ventilation with open windows.

Some houses had wrap around porches on three sides so windows could be left open even when it was raining.

Historically, they made a second outdoor kitchen so you could cook in summer without heating the whole house. To this day, grilling out in summer weather is a common practice.

Etc.

The population of the south basically doubled after air conditioning came in. So yes people lived there, about half as many.

The world currently has nearly 8 billion people. I imagine an awful lot of places have much higher populations than they used to have, regardless of climate, available tech or quality of life.

So unless you can cite sources that can show this was due entirely to AC per se and not at least partly due to population growth generally, that little factoid may well fall under the heading how to lie with statistics.

Well, I don't think I cited any statistics, but here's some crap I just found on google:

http://www.scienceofthesouth.com/some-like-it-cool-the-impac...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2208474

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-29/cities-th...

Basically doubled would be what some folks would call a statistic.

Crap you found via Google -- so likely crap I could find if I cared enough to bother to look. And you didn't bother to do pull quotes to support your position.

Color me unimpressed and unswayed. In my experience, good passive solar design makes for more human comfort, not less, than our modern tendency to build crappy cardboard boxes and tack on HVAC.

Source: I have been living without AC in the US for some years now. I've spent more than four years now living in old buildings and it's such a shame we just don't build them like we used to. Life is better if you can achieve a comfortable temperature most of the time without AC.

If you spent as much effort investigating as writing that comment you'd know the truth!

That’s basically making the best with what shitty technology there was back then. It’s not nearly as good as air conditioning or else people would just build houses the same way.

Essentially the entire Phoenix valley is unlivable in the summer without energy assisted cooling either with A/C or evap. The native Americans didn’t even live down low during the summer. You can’t beat physics with some well placed windows.

The “deep south” you referred to is about as easy of a climate you can get to live in the continental US without energy assistance apart from maybe Southern California. The air conditioning energy spent to cool down a home 15 degrees in the summer in Mississippi is a drop in the bucket compared to what it takes to heat New York or Minneapolis homes in the dead of winter.

> Because a boat doesn't have an enclosed space to heat.

All ocean capable boats do. Nobody lives in canoes or row boats.

They're more or less of a requirement depending on where you live (or where your boat is). People have frozen to death both in houses and on boats.

I can't plot a course for my house that keeps me from freezing. Boats can, if course planning and timing allows, be kept within a habitable climate range more easily than a house (unless your house happens to already be built within a region that doesn't freeze solid five months a year - mine is not).

And refrigeration. That's a big power draw in my home.

I tied that in to heating/cooling. Basically all energy in the home is spent making things hot or cold. Lighting, TVs, laptops, etc may as well be free for the power they consume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com