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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

I live in Florida.

This entire discussion is bizarro world for me. It costs nearly $400 a month to keep my house at 74deg in the summer.

I live in Copenhagen, and it's also bizarro world for me. :) But mainly because electricity is very expensive here, whereas district heating (hot water produced by municipal plants, which you can draw through your radiator if you'd like) is quite cheap. It would be hard to beat the costs of district heating using a space-heater approach, even given better spatial concentration of the heat.

Wait a minute you get hot water from the pipe instead of heating it yourself? That's interesting.

Most large buildings in the parts of China that I've visited (4 different regions of the country) use government supplied central heating (hot water I think). Interestingly this supply is turned on in the fall based on local policy, which is often driven by economics and politics, So it's not uncommon for people to not get the heat turned on until much later in the year than anyone would really like... :)

This is a wonderful benefit of living in a big city. E.g. Con Edison in New York supplies steam to commercial buildings.[1] Back when they generated electricity "locally" in each borough, the steam was almost free for them to generate as a side effect. But now they actually have to pipe steam under the East River.

But I no longer live in NYC. I don't miss the rats or cockroaches or traffic or air pollution. C'est la vie.

[1] http://www.coned.com/newsroom/energysystems_steam.asp

For many types of powerplants, a significant amount of heat is generated as a byproduct, sometimes even causing significant expense of cooling the plant on a large body of water, such as the nuclear plants near lakes.

That system can also be designed to provide hot water (both as a water supply and as heating) for a nearby city, and many cities do so, it's cheap and efficient.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration for some description if you're interested.

At the University of Illinois there is centrally-heated steam that's used to heat many buildings http://www.dailyillini.com/features/greeks_and_campus/articl... Every building was always super warm in the winter

Same in Helsinki/Finland - district heating (hot water radiators) for most of the city. Even data centre heat is recycled in this way :)

Why are you at 74F? We're having a mini heat wave in Portland, so I've been running my AC. It's set for 76F and I'm quite comfortable.

You need to convince yourself that you'd be comfortable at higher temp and humidity. E.g. in Hawaii the "natives" sneer at the new arrivals who don't like the high humidity.

Fortunately this area has reasonably low humidity. But if I were in Florida, I could probably be comfortable at 78F as long as the AC got rid of about half the relative humidity.

A few ideas:

1. Keep it at 80 for a couple of weeks, you'll get habituated quickly enough and will suffer less outside as a byproduct.

2. Use the AC only in the room you are actually in and close the door.

3. Unless it's very very very warm outside, and once you got used to higher temperatures a couple open windows or a simple fan will do wonders.

Source: I live in Rome, I have AC but I only turn it on when it's over 95 outside, because I have thick walls and good circulation.

Everyone is a bit different. If it's over 76 degrees in my house, I am mentally more sluggish, and have a very hard time sleeping. I don't mind sweating and being hot during the day, but at night I just can't sleep well. Also my computer gear has a tendency to overheat when things get much over 80 in the house at large (home office runs hotter).

While the fact that everyone is different is true, I still think that it's also true that, with some effort, everyone can change their comfort level.

Phoenix, ditto, except $500/80.

Installing solar screens helped a ton. Our power bills are down around 30% this summer since installing them.

Those 3 cold days every other year in Florida are pretty amazing. People wearing every warm piece of clothing they own, old sheets and towels flung over all the tropical plants outside, heat pumps running nearly 24x7 trying to pull a bit of heat out of the air.

Which is an excellent reminder that the challenge isn't heating or cooling, it's minimizing energy use as dictated by the requirements of your environment.

Sounds like your house could use some work. It doesn't cost us that much to cool our sizable house here in Austin, even when it's 100+F every day.

Austin is much drier.

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