Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

Yep, they should be, and now they are anything but. In Austria at least getting AC installed in any urban environment is de facto impossible. There is no law against it, but you need various approvals from multiple parties that you will simply not get. Moreover, Austrians are very against AC in general for various reasons.

I am trying to get AC installed and these are some of the responses I got:

> Air the room properly, wrap a damp towel around yourself and get on with it. With energy prices like these, that's just throwing money out the window, not to mention the environmental impact.

> I don't think it's bad yet. It's important to keep busy when it's hot, not to moan "it's so hot" and do nothing. Get used to the fact that it's getting hotter every year. Wear more clothes in the cold season. Get used to warmer clothes. Try to do more for the environment. Drive less, throw rubbish in the bin instead - don't get lazy, vote for parties that tackle the climate crisis and don't deny it.

> I just sit around in my underwear and sweat, I prefer it.

I can't even...

It's similar in Germany. I understand that historically AC was absolutely not needed and that there were only a couple of weeks where it was uncomfortably hot.

But now it can be multiple months where everyone's productivity clearly drops because it's too hot at the office. And suggesting to improve the conditions by installing an AC or heat pump will invariably result in getting looks like you are a crazy person.

I'm not sure why a majority of people insist in gaslighting that it's not a big deal. If people are actively sweating while sitting at the office they are for sure not at 100% mental effort. Besides, if it really is only a limited time per year when it's needed, you can just not use it the rest of the time, right?

> If people are actively sweating while sitting at the office they are for sure not at 100% mental effort.

Lee Kuan Yew, first prime minister of Singapore, said this about air-conditioning[1][2]:

> Question: Anything else besides multicultural tolerance that enabled Singapore's success?

> Answer: Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.

Everywhere is getting hotter; Europe is seeing heatwaves that exceed temperatures seen even in the tropics. In summer Europe gets 15-16 hours of sunlight, and the fairly high humidity doesn't help. The tropics—especially those countries almost bang-smack on the Equator with Af Köppen–Geiger climate classification—are mostly uniformly warm and wet, with extremely hot (> 37 °C) air temperatures quite rare because of the uniform day-night cycle. And even then the very high humidity means the daytime heat is carried into the night, and the urban heat island effect necessitates air-conditioning indoors in highly built-up cities like the aforementioned Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and many parts of Indonesia.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5842.2009.01120.x

[2]: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

Most countries have some collective delusions, but the german ones are so obviously odd.

When people talk about head pumps, they usually mean a different type of product than a cooling only AC though, so I'm not quite sure how it's relevant?

(Yes, there are two-way heat pumps, but those are surprisngly rare get and install across europe).

It's basically impossible to buy "cooling only" AC in the EU, everything is also a heat pump now (and it makes total sense, making AC heat instead of cool is just a matter of adding several cheap components to reverse evaporator/condenser roles).

Yeah, but when people talk about heat pumps in Europe they predominantly mean heating installations and not AC.

(The majority of installations are for heating only with separate A/C units if they exist at all.)

Actually I am trying to get to install a two-way heat pump. As I said, AC is very rare here, but two-way heats pumps are definitely in the collective mind of the few people who care about ACs and heat pumps in Austria. All the AC companies offer them, it's just that you can rarely get a permit to install them.

Strange. I think it should be illegal to build any public or commercial space without thorough air conditioning. Because of air quality, dust, allergy and stuff, and now after Covid, also a concern of viral particles, a proper ventilation system is definitely a necessity - and it costs too little to make a newly installed, good ventilation system into also an air conditioning system, to pass on that possibility.

Can you say more about this? Heat pumps don't by design ventilate or exchange with outside air. That would be the role of an ERV or HRV or just an exchanger.

That's when we are speaking of an individual system installed in a flat. When we are speaking of a building as a whole, almost all of the cost of installing either a heat pump or just a ventilation system is modifying a building to install air ducts. Which is sometimes a highly invasive, destructive procedure equalling to a near total refurbishment of a building (so this is typically combined: heat insulation + ventilation ducts + general refurbishment, as doing any of the 3 separately won't be much cheaper than doing all 3, anyway). Then you have a single large pipe where a large mass of air enters and and another one where it exits the building. Then it's comparatively not at all hard or expensive to add a massive heat pump so the inlet pipe passes through it (and a heat exchanger between outlet pipe and inlet before, so-called regenerative heating, which will achieve some of the same result, but for free).

That's why i think that buiding-scale ventilation systems without heat pumps make no economic sense. They mean leaving a very low hanging fruit, hanging.

> That's why i think that buiding-scale ventilation systems without heat pumps make no economic sense. They mean leaving a very low hanging fruit, hanging.

That makes some sense. But your call for criminalisation is silly.

Your argument that it makes sense to install aircon might be a good one. But I don't understand why that justifies in any way criminalising buildings without aircon?

I mean, equally cooking tasty food is not actually that much harder nor more expensive than cooking yucky food. But similarly, that's not a reasonable excuse for outlawing any cuisine (or execution of a cuisine) we disagree with.

In a way calling it heat pumps work as a mind trick for people with their head still stuck in the 60s? 50s? 40s?

> In Austria at least getting AC installed in any urban environment is de facto impossible.

What happens if you just wheel in a portable AC unit and duct it out a back window?

Generally nothing, but those are 1. loud[0], 2. very inefficient and ineffective[1], 3. in the EU there are no dual-hose units for whatever reason.

I still use one but it's very far from ideal.

[0] so loud that neighbours might complain, I had neighbours complain about my computer fans running 24/7.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-mBeYC2KGc

> in the EU there are no dual-hose units for whatever reason

You could import one.

> Generally nothing

I'm surprised, then, that the EU AC bans we're discussing don't lead to mass noncompliance and civil disobedience.

What kind of permits are required? Are AC installation also a problem for new buildings too?

In fact it's even more of a problem for new buildings. For old buildings you can complain that the building is unsafe to live in without AC, but new buildings are required to be livable (<26C) without air conditioning, so it's very easy to get a blanket rejection for this very reason alone.

Of course even though new buildings should be livable without AC, this is not true in practice. I live in a new building and right now I have 33C indoors inside my apartment. But some bureaucrat signed that it's 26C certified so who am I to complain!

Wow, ridiculous. In Croatia almost every condo built in the last 20 years has AC already pre-installed (or at least conduits and installation location prepared).

City management is idiotic for not covering the houses with tree canopies.

I live in a 2-floor building covered under trees (built in 1936) and even when it’s above 30 degrees it is pleasant in our house.

We pay a lot for the trees to be properly managed, but it’s for sure less than cooling the house with A/C would be.

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