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Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

Obviously air conditioning is really useful in a hot climate. As someone who does a lot of moving between places with/without it, it's interesting to see how overused it can be in much of the US. Your office in the northeast does not need to be 69 degrees inside all summer long.

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In my experience, this can be due to poorly designed/functioning HVAC systems. My office is regularly in the sixties while the guy on the opposite side of the building is sweating.

It's useful in warm and humid climates. In warm and dry climates, a swamp cooler will beat the pants off of an airconditioner in damn near every metric you can think of.

So, sure, in the swamps of Florida, we should be OK with using the AC. But in the dry heat of Texas? Or southern California? Why doesn't America do even the simple things right? In city planning, in cooling, in HOA's dictating lawn upkeep and on and on and on.

Former Houston resident here chuckling about the “dry heat” of Texas.

Right. People don't realize just how big Texas is, and what a wide range of climates are actually found there.

The absurd overuse of AC seems like a peculiarity of the United States. Walk into an American household in the summer, and you find people watching TV with blankets or a sweatshirt because the temperature is so low. In the winter, the opposite is true: the house is overheated, so everyone wears short sleeves. You’re pretty much forced to do this in older apartment buildings where you have no thermostat and the landlord cranks the heat up to Saharan temperatures. The only way to regulate the temperature is to open windows, and that doesn’t always work well. Tell me that’s not wasting energy. Maybe start there if you want to actually contribute meaningfully.

Such a bizarre set of practices. The point of HVAC is to bring the temperature to a comfortable level while you wear season appropriate clothing, not to eliminate or invert seasonal differences.

It's a thing in the nicer parts of India too, but I agree. I remember going to NYC when it was quite hot and seeing Toy Story 3. The cinema was so cold, each seat had a huge AC blasting on it at an arctic temperature. I'm not sure what the intention is. It does seem to me, as you say, that the greatest desire of americans is to live in the southern hemisphere, whether unconsciously or consciously. My guess? Americans have a strong erotic lust for both power and the subversion of nature, so it is almost sexually arousing to demonstrate enough power, even unnecessarily, to totally reverse the seasons. See also: guns, massive cars with 10 cup holders, huge interstate roads with 5 lanes in each direction, extremely consumer-engineered foods, etc.

I once heard that certain car models couldn't be sold on the US market without changes because the AC didn't cool the interior fast enough after sitting in the sun.

I'm not sure if this was just a joke. I could totally see this being true whichsays a lot already.

For shared housing like apartments I kind of get extremes opposite the outside temperature. I can be in my underwear (work from home for the win) still a little warm and my wife will be wearing long clothes and one of those hoodie blankets. If there were a weight differential I imagine this would only get worse. Multiply that by everyone living in a building, you're going to get some people far from the mean. Things like wearing tons of clothes in the AC and opening windows in the winter are just ways to give more granular control so it's not trying to fit everyone into one bucket. In single homes it tends towards more plain inefficient as the number of people to optimize for lowers but that leads to the next point.

In general I don't think efficiency is really a problem. It's self regulating, being more inefficient costs you more so you must find it worth it and that's your choice. The real issue is the incentive mismatch of dirty energy sources being cheaper than clean energy sources. There is nothing inherently problematic with someone deciding using 2 mWh instead of 1 mWh in a month is how they want to do things or deciding it's not worth trying to change things around to optimize.

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