Not the source of significance, according to the article:
"New research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California indicates that adding improved efficiency in refrigeration and phasing out fluorinated gases used for cooling, as mandated by international agreement, could eliminate a full degree Celsius of warming by 2100. Given that the “business as usual” trajectory leads to 4 to 5 degrees Celsius of warming, that is shaving off a pretty big slice.
Hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, account for about 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but they can be thousands of times as potent than carbon dioxide "
Those require expensive rare-earth permanent magnets, and BLDC require expensive inverter controllers.
Plus, even though the best BLDC are maybe 93% (after inverter losses) compared to a 90%, that's on the wrong side of the optimization problem, analogous to Amdahl's Law: Doubling insulation means you need half the energy in the first place, while doubling motor efficiency from 90% to 95% only saves 5%.
Many HN users might be too young to remember, but curiously enough a/c refrigerants were also a major issue the last time there was a successful international treaty to help fight a major environmental problem:
> It was agreed on 16 September 1987, and entered into force on 1 January 1989... As a result of the international agreement, the ozone hole in Antarctica is slowly recovering.[3] Climate projections indicate that the ozone layer will return to 1980 levels between 2050 and 2070.[4][5] Due to its widespread adoption and implementation it has been hailed as an example of exceptional international co-operation, with Kofi Annan quoted as saying that "perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal Protocol".
One of the nicest refrigerant choices is, perhaps ironically, CO2. It has negligible warming potential in the quantities that would be used as refrigerant, it's very safe, and it's dirt cheap. The main downside is that the whole system has to be operated at higher pressure that it does for HFC refrigerants.
Can't believe I had to scroll way down to find a comment that actually understood the article!
There are new refrigerants called HFOs that are chemically-similar to HFCs, but do not exhibit the greenhouse effect.
Ammonia and propane also work, and are commonly used in commercial refrigeration today.
I have a Fujitsu mini split that has been awesome in terms of bringing my electric bill down versus window units (we live in Maine, central A/C is less common here, and few homes were built with it until the 2000's). It does, like most splits, use R-410A, but I'd be happy to use something else if it didn't kill the efficiency.
In parallel with refrigerants and efficiency, though, I wonder if the article misses on mentioning geothermal cooling. Those systems are expensive, but if you can bring down the install cost and power them with cleaner energy, you solve some other problems. In developing nations, maybe you try and build larger systems designed to cool multiple residential units - and start to require it for mid/high-rise residential construction?
I have fond memories of helping my father replace the Freon in our window A/C units in the 1990s with products like R-410A.
Thanks to that effort made by many,
"A 2005 IPCC review of ozone observations and model calculations concluded that the global amount of ozone has now approximately stabilized. Although considerable variability is expected from year to year, including in polar regions where depletion is largest, the ozone layer is expected to begin to recover in coming decades due to declining ozone-depleting substance concentrations, assuming full compliance with the Montreal Protocol." [0]
I'd want to see the energy calculations for highly insulated, well sealed buildings. There is more material up front, but the insulation works during the heating season too.
If you want to build a new house in Sweden you need to present an energy calculation for the house so that you meet the fairly strict requirements.
Of the top of my head, a normal family house (150m2, 1-1/2 stories) is allowed to consume between 5000-6500 kWh per year (low number in southern Sweden, same as Denmark. High number northern Sweden above the polar circle).
This generally means >220mm insulation in walls and roof and >300mm insulation in the foundation. In northern Sweden you need a geothermal pump to hit those numbers.
Where they're effective I think people already tend to use them due to how cheap they are. The article mentions the regions that are starting to buy the most A/Cs are places like India and SE Asia, all of which are humid and hot.
As Barack Obama said, "Insulation is Sexy." The less you need air conditioning, the less the particular system matters. For most of the year we shouldn't even need air conditioning, when a building is properly insulated, orientated, and air-circulated.
Not only does insulation have dramatic effects on how temperature is regulated in your building, it only really benefits you when it is installed properly. On top of this, the direction the building faces, placement of windows, proper airflow, and even tile vs carpeted floors all add up to a much more energy efficient home.
How efficient? A building built in Pennsylvania in 1865 can stay cool most of the year (we're talking tops 70F on the bottom floor) by trapping cold air at night and sealing it in during the day. Fans assist air circulation and cooling, and cold air pools in slightly recessed first floor common areas. (It helps to have a stone foundation, too)
Of course you have to mix modern materials and practices with the old-school building constuction to get the most bang for your buck, but it's clear that we do not need to be blasting our A/C half the year. You can also look at models like the Passivhaus[1] for more modern, apartment-oriented designs. (Their underground heat exchanger is another alternative cooling system)
Swamp coolers only work in dry climates, and only when it's not too hot outside. People stopped using them in Phoenix because they really don't work that well in the middle of the summer now. They can also cause mold problems. Some houses will have "piggyback" systems, with both a swamp cooler and regular A/C, so they can switch to the A/C when it's too hot for the swamp cooler, but modern A/C units are so efficient it's probably not that cost-effective to do that any more.
Not for nothing, but ain't greenhouse gases only the short term problem?
The Earth radiates a fixed amount of energy into space every year. But when we produce electricity etc. no matter how we do it, more than half of the energy escapes as heat - a byproduct of boiling the water or whatever!
This isn't sustainable in the long run either! We are basically raising the temperature of the atmosphere even without greenhouse gases.
Right. When we generate electricity via solar or wind, the heat involved has (essentially) been shifted from elsewhere.
That energy was going to reach our planet either way. Whether we use a solar panel to shift it somewhere we can use it, or if it just heats the whatever it would have otherwise ran into, we aren't adding energy to the system by shifting it around.
The waste heat from solar panels is just the energy from the sun, less whatever gets turned into electricity. No new energy was created - if there was, you could just create a perpetual motion machine to solve the problem.
Fossil fuel is stored chemical energy. Burning it releases the energy. Photovoltaic solar power is converting one type of energy (light) into another (electricity), with the waste heat being the same waste heat the light would've created by shining on something else. Solar thermal energy is using the heat from the sun to do work (which may include heating oils, air, or water to drive a turbine to generate electricity) or to generate electricity (using, say, thermal-piezo conversion).
The only effective ways we have to store solar power are batteries, supercapacitors (once they're viable), large heat masses (such as stone or water), growing plants, or putting energy into chemicals for later storage (electrolysis and storing the hydrogen, forming artificial hydrocarbons, recycling aluminum for aluminum/air power cells, pumping water uphill to power a turbine later, pressurizing gases to later drive a turbine, stuff like that).
Not all of the things I mentioned work at every scale. Some of them are more efficient than others. They may all have advantages and drawbacks.
Newton's law is for convection of heat into the air. The cooling of the earth happens by radiation into vacuum, so it's actually much MORE temperature-sensitive: the heat radiated is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature.
Obviously solar input dominate over whatever energy we add through burning fossil fuels. Nobody contests that. You must have heard of the greenhouse effect. THAT is the issue. By changing the composition of the atmosphere, a fractionally greater percentage of the astounding amount of energy is reflected back to the earth instead of escaping into the atmosphere, raising the temperature of the atmosphere and oceans.
Imagine sitting in the sun on a warm but not hot day. Now imagine you are sitting in a car in the same spot in the same conditions with the windows rolled up. There is no extra energy being released, just the plain old sun, but the temperature you experience is going to be much higher. Indeed, the temperature increase doesn't grow without bound, but it is meaningfully higher.
Technically it isn't a fixed amount radiated every year. many factors influence it, one of which is temperature: the higher the temperature difference between earth and space the more that is radiated. Thus as global warming happens he temperature difference raises and the amount the earth radiates increases. This won't be enough to make up the difference, there is no loop hole to solve global warming. Global warming is about the equalization temperature - when the energy in (mostly from the sun despite all the other energy sources we use) equals energy out.
Yes, constantly increasing energy consumption by a fixed percentage per year projects out to physical absurdities like boiling the oceans or needing to expand colonies throughout the universe faster-than-light. But Tom Murphy is employing a straw-economist ("Note: because I have a better retention of my own thoughts than those of my conversational companion, this recreation is lopsided to represent my own points/words.") to make a point. I thought that was one of his weaker blog entries and I was a regular reader of his blog.
The Earth radiates a finite but not fixed amount of energy into space every year. Radiated power goes up with the 4th power of absolute temperature (modulated by greenhouse effect). The effects of increasing the greenhouse effect from fossil combustion are much greater than the direct waste heat from fossil combustion, because the greenhouse effect slightly amplifies the warming effects of the ~10^17 watts of sunlight reaching Earth's surface. Fossil combustion directly accounts for ~10^13 watts of terrestrial heating. Note the 4 orders of magnitude difference.
> The Lawrence Berkeley study argues that even a 30 percent improvement in efficiency could avoid the peak load equivalent of about 1,500 power plants by 2030.
Okay, but where is this 30% jump in efficiency going to come from? That seems like a pretty big leap!
* A lot of home conditioners are fighting the weather in conditions with poor insulation, running when nobody is home, or running in rooms when people are in different parts of the house.
* Office air conditioners are often set too cold, subjectively speaking, sometimes resulting in workers bringing sweaters or even space heaters to their desks. This is shockingly common. Multi-zone cooling can make things more uniform, and if you can get people to stop using space heaters during the summer, that can make a big difference. Gender is supposedly a huge factor in temperature preferences, and offices are set to men's cooler preferences. In some locations this is exacerbated by the fact that men wear suits and ties while the women wear skirts and weather-appropriate tops.
Personally, I want an air conditioner system that isn't set to a specific temperature, but instead reduces the extreme temperatures outside. So instead of keeping it set at 22 degrees, maybe it would be set to 22 degrees when it's 27 degrees out, but the AC goes to 25 degrees when it's 35 degrees out. I find this more comfortable, because there's less of a shock when going outside or coming inside.
The issue in cooling preferences is that if it is too cold, people can wear sweaters or even bring space heaters. If it is too hot, there is not much you can do. I think this problem is exacerbated by open office plans. If you have private/semi-private offices, you can probably do a much better job of controlling local temperature.
We have private offices, but central HVAC. Multi-zone cooling (independent of having lots of little, less efficient window/through-wall units) is relatively uncommon.
It's exacerbated (good word) by the fact that the large front office has mostly women sitting at low-power PCs, the offices are mostly men at powerful workstations (aka space heaters), and the HVAC ducts run though the office drop ceilings, meaning anyone doing physical projects in the central work space is the least cooled while our receptionist has been seen with a space heater.
Central HVAC can be zoned somewhat with thermocouple-adjustable or computer-controlled baffles. If you have a consistent over-cooling of one area and under-cooling of another there are magnetic strips made to partially cover the registers, or registers with adjustable baffles built in.
I'm not sure such a thing would work here, but Japan famously ran their "Cool Biz" campaign to encourage people to dress lighter in the summer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Biz_campaign
The first company I worked at had cool biz tightly tied to time with zero regard to the actual temperature outside. It usually came too late and ended too early. Thankfully the next place I worked at was a lot more lax in the policy.
This is something being explored in a small trial here at the University of Waterloo. A lab has distributed several small fan/heaters that sense your presence and learn your temperature preferences then heat/cool just your local area.
This is one case where the plural of anecdote is, indeed, data. But I am grateful to see a sibling comment cite a proper study confirming what we already knew.
"In this study gender differences in thermal comfort and use of thermostats were examined by a quantitative interview survey with a total of 3094 respondents, and by controlled experiments. The studies were carried out in Finland and considered everyday thermal environments: homes, offices and a university. The results show significant gender differences in thermal comfort, temperature preference, and use of thermostats. Females are less satisfied with room temperatures than males, prefer higher room temperatures than males, and feel both uncomfortably cold and uncomfortably hot more often than males."
"Gender differences in thermal comfort and use of thermostats in everyday thermal environments". Building and Environment, Volume 42, Issue 4, April 2007, Pages 1594-1603
The biological reasoning, as I understand it, is that men have a higher ratio of heat-generating muscle than women.
When I first moved to NYC, I was bewildered by all the women walking around with scarves and summer dresses; it was explained to me that this was a strategy to optimize being comfortable in the outdoor heat, and then having something to withstand the frigid offices.
(Personally, I'm of the opinion that one should acclimate to their climate, and folks who hate the heat wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't coddle themselves with AC all the time.)
> (Personally, I'm of the opinion that one should acclimate to their climate, and folks who hate the heat wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't coddle themselves with AC all the time.)
I agree, to an extent. I mean, bumping the temperature that you can be comfortable in by 10 or 15 degrees is reasonable (up or down). I lived in southern Arizona as a child, where 80 degree nights were heaven after 110 degree days. I'd argue that AC wasn't coddling there, though. "But it's a dry heat" has special meaning for me. AC was usually set around 80 or 85.
During some of those same years, we stayed with family in my Grandparents' house: 2 aging window ACs, 90 degree heat, 90% humidity. We spent most of our time outside and slept in an un-conditioned room with the fan blasting. It's doable, but not my preference. A few weeks certainly wasn't enough to acclimate, and I think after a few years I'd probably still prefer to be in a (somewhat) cooled room.
On the other hand, I lived somewhere cold during my early teens. The home was often around 50 degrees with all the radiators blasting, and we dealt with that too.
"Researchers found the women’s average metabolic rate was 20 to 32 percent lower than rates in the standard chart used to set building temperature. ... Dr. Kingma said a woman might prefer a 75-degree room, while a man might prefer about 70 degrees, which Dr. Kingma said is a common current office temperature."
In addition to the metabolic rate differences, there is also a difference in the ratio of surface area to volume, and many women would prefer not to wear pantsuits. This is one of those bizarre times when the stars all align to make the difference in comfortable temperature as wide as possible in practice.
All the more reason we need to find a way to make remote work work for positions and jobs that allow it. Most people are already heating and cooling their homes while away at the office. How much energy can we save and how much more comfortable can we be if we work from our homes? Additionally less energy is consumed and less pollution generated from not having to commute.
WFH = less traffic, less industrial building construction, less heating/cooling of empty spaces (offices at night, homes during day), less indoor lighting usage (homes are usually very well lit from outside light while most cubical jungles are lit by fluorescent lighting).
The next move I do is definitely going to include the requirement of some kind of workspace for me and my wife. Right now, working from home means sitting on my bed with a laptop.
Also, people who set their home heat pump to "auto" instead of "heat" in winter and "cool" in summer.
No-one should mind if they have it on 18 in winter and the sun heats the room to 20 in the afternoon, but a heat pump on auto will start cooling to maintain the room at 18.
While it's not the best thing to do, it doesn't matter much as the efficiency of the systems go way way up when the outside temp is near the same as the inside temp.
I've never understood why we even design most HVAC systems to maintain one temperature. I don't care that my home or car is exactly 18°C warm, I just want to keep it at a temperature between 18°C and 25°C year-round. It feels completely unnatural to be forced to set a single temperature and change it depending on the situation.
A less straightforward change for further automation would be to make that temperature depending on the humidity. On a dry day, 28°C is perfectly fine, on a humid day it's way too hot. I can't be bothered to adjust my desired temperature depending on humidity, but a computer could easily do that.
My system has separate "heat if below" and "cool if above" settings for its program, variable by user-defined portions of the day and by the (pre-set of course) days of the week.
Mine came with the house. I can take a look and find brand and model number. There appear to be a number of them on the market, though.
On the Lowes.com site they have a specification checkbox for "high/low temperature setting" or something similar on each model's details but it doesn't seem searchable there. I don't see such a feature designation at HomeDepot.com as of right now. Amazon's are mixed depending on the seller and model it seems.
I know Nest lets you set separate heating and cooling points if you do the manual programming instead of letting it autolearn. https://nest.com/support/article/What-is-Heat-Cool-mode EcoBee and Hive I'm sure have similar features.
Having separate heating and cooling setpoints only seems natural for something that automatically switches between heating and cooling.
I'm not in the US (I'm in New Zealand) so the market here is a bit different. Nest isn't available here for instance. Most homes install heat pump units like this kind of thing:
Ceiling fans reduce the need for AC, especially overnight - even gentle circulation makes a noticeable difference. Also, an attic fan that can blow cool overnight air through the building whenever the temperature and humidity outside are acceptably low might reduce the expenditure of AC on cooling down the structure. A small degree of automation would allow these measures to work together with the AC.
I spent much of last year traveling around Southeast Asia and I always opted for fan rooms over A/C whenever possible. Yes, they were warmer, but once you got used to it, it wasn't a problem. But the best part about it was the lack of the respiratory problems that went along with A/C. In humid environments like the tropics, going between wet air and dry air can be really rough on the sinuses.
I wonder how many people have respiratory problems that they chalk up to allergies and whatnot that are actually due to the breathing overly-dry A/C air.
In addition to men preferring cooler temperatures in general (probably for metabolic reasons), men in offices are usually required to wear warmer clothing than women (though anecdotally I suspect that because of the AC, pantsuits are becoming more popular).
In one office I worked at, the AC controls were not accessible, and because there was no dress code whatsoever, everyone complained about the temperatures being too low. There was a TI office in the same building, and because everyone was in business casual or higher, they didn't have the same problems.
Designing uniforms which look professional and composed but which also ventilate correctly could considerably raise optimal office temperatures.
"Looks professional" is all about what "successful people" wear. If everyone in the US who was successful took to wearing Moomoos... then we'd all be wearing moomoos and the schlubs would be wearing suits.
Just look at the hoodie pre and post zuckerberg.
If Mark had instead wore a tank-top and board shorts 50% of SF would be wearing that year round instead.
No, there really is something objectively attractive about handsome clothing. Well made and handsome clothing, especially that which obscures the aesthetic weaknesses of the wearer, is a global concept.
Hoodie and jeans is an okay uniform inside a business (though I would argue that if they're not well-kept, it lowers the standards of the people in the office), but in customer-facing roles I think it's inappropriate. It can be done well, but most hoodies and most pairs of jeans are an aesthetic disappointment, since they're built for casual warmth and gold panning respectively.
I would not trust a bank which faces its customers with hoodies, T-shirts, and jeans. The appropriate attire for a clerk usually involves a shirt (especially with a vest) or one/two tone blouse, and trousers or a skirt. Makes you look kempt, but dynamic. A unifying visual theme for staff also makes it simpler to identify them. If the clerks all have a consistent uniform, the custodial staff a different but thematically matched uniform, it makes it simpler to navigate a customer-facing office. I think Hooters does a good job of this, it is easy to locate and discern the staff from other guests, and contributes to the environment (a casual, consistent dining establishment which has attractive, well-trained, and helpful service staff).
Attractive clothing can be anything... Is a Sari attractive? A Burka? Timberland farmer's gear? A Police Uniform? It's about the craftmanship and the cut accentuating the human form and hiding the imperfections (or with true artistry showing them and pulling it off even better).
You say that "face customers with hoodies, t-shirts and jeans" except this is exactly hooter's uniforms. everyone wears uniform t-shirts. The non-wait staff wear jeans or shorts (depending on season/climate).
You're just showing off your innate biases based on current fashion. There's nothing innately better about a specific functional form of dress over another. A suit is not inherently more powerful than a Thawb or a Kimono. If we were going for pure power we'd all be in hockey or football pads or suits of armor.
Uniformness you have somthing on. But you can be uniform on just about any type of dress. Hell you can be uniform on color and totaly different on form and it'd still work.
This also might point out that you are basing things on appearance instead of form.
> A suit is not inherently more powerful than a Thawb or a Kimono.
I did not say that, I explicitly said that the quality and fit of the clothing is of primary importance. You could make the argument that the ceiling is much higher for Kimono, they seem to start around ¥200,000 JPY, and going up from there not for the faint of heart. Thawbs are sorta self-limiting, little can genuinely be done for their quality, about as limited as the range for white dress shirts; some have weird things like false lapels.
I am not fixated on price, I mentioned it once. But if you press me on the kimono (which is a very broad category, but I'll assume we're talking about the dressier types), I'd say that the fact that normal people are willing to pay these prices means that it means something to them.
I leave my pc on because if there is an issue I need to be able to remote into it and there's no "wake on lan" type enterprise thing setup (don't even know if that exists). I could drive in but the gas cost and time costs of that are higher (my guess) than leaving the pc in idle 24/7.
It's already available. In the USA there's a efficiency rating called SEER which the federal government mandates new ACs must be at least rated at SEER 13. But if you want to spend the money you can buy ACs with SEER ratings above 25.
Most home AC units in the US are single-stage, where they're all the way on, or all the way off. You can pay more for a two-stage unit, which has low & high operation. But in other countries, VRF systems are more popular (variable refrigerant flow) - they operate their fans & compressors at speeds which match the demand, and so use less electricity. And are quieter.
If you have a one stage furnace - your only option is a one stage AC (vs 2-stage or variable speed AC). You need to upgrade the furnace/blower to take advantage of the more efficient AC model
Mini-Splits are great but much more expensive to purchase (~4k USD per Unit which covers 400-500 sqft). They also don't heat as well as a traditional gas fired furnace.
Heat pumps are probably the way to go in moderate climates but I haven't looked into them in much detail.
Some of it can come from social engineering instead of HVAC technical breakthroughs -- automated thermostats like the Nest, hand-held body-coolers like
Better summer clothes will help too. I've been pretty impressed by advances in cooling undergarments that are designed to wick away moisture and encourage air flow.
Anyway, all of these seemingly unrelated things contribute to improved AC efficiency.
It's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but if you run your refrigerant loop through the ground instead of cooling it using the hot ambient air, you can absolutely achieve that improvement in efficiency. The concept is described here:
The amount of efficiency increase you get depends on the ground temp, which varies by latitude, but I've seen 70% reductions in electricity usage quoted for systems installed in North America.
A side benefit is you no longer have a big, loud heat exchanger running on the side or top of your house. The pump unit for a ground loop can sit inside your garage, it's about the size of two mini-fridges and only emits a quiet hum.
Sidenote: When I bring up ground loop air conditioning in conversation with people, no one has ever heard of it. The technology has a marketing problem. That makes sense in states where electricity is cheap, but in places like California I'm surprised the state hasn't mandated them for new installations and offered tax breaks to give it some momentum.
The challenge for these is the cost. First, you either have to drill wells that are ~500 feet deep or lay coils of tubing under your yard (if you have one) below the frost line. Doing either is expensive, though the wells are much more so. The downside of the cheaper option (the coils under yard) is that earth shifts, and the coils will too. I've had two separate friends install these (usually 4-6 separate coils) only to have the earth move and rip open a coil or kink it. Usually you have a valve for each one to shut it off so the unit can sill operate on the remaining working coils, however with each lost coil the efficiency goes down.
Also, the ground-source heat-pumps aren't cheap. They are in the $7-10k range - just for the unit - and not many people know how to repair them as they are a bit of a specialty item in the HVAC industry.
1. Drilling the wells is not actually that expensive depending where you are.
For me, 3 300 ft wells, bored, piped, and grouted, was about 5k.
2. The units can be gotten for that price with install.
You need to take into account the fact that they are significantly more efficient at both heating, and cooling, and hot water, over their lifetime.
(also, their specs and submittal data usually have real numbers, giving you mappings from incoming water temperature/etc to EER, not BS numbers like most outdoor air A/C units)
They would also be cheaper if they sold more of them :)
3. The units are much easier to keep working, and pretty much never die. They are made much better than the average heat pump. As for your coils, yeah, doing horizontal loops is not a good plan in most cases, though cheaper.
With the 30% federal tax credit that used to exist, a state tax credit, etc, i paid 10k all told.
I made that back in 2 years (the electric bill in the winter went from 600 a month to 100. Yes, the heat pump was functioning properly)
In areas of the country where well drilling is more common, it's a great option. I wouldn't do it in say, the bay area.
But note: none of the wells have to be that expensive to drill, and in fact, when done during new construction, they are often really cheap.
It's just a matter of, in various parts of the country, limited set of people have well drilling rigs because it's not that common. So part of the cost may be "having some guys drive a well drilling rig 5-6 hours to come handle it"
That's cheap for drilling from what I've been quoted. Most systems I looked at when I had a house before were in the $30k range installed.
I have three friends/co-workers that had the systems installed. None were particularly impressed with the average cost savings. They said bills went down, but not dramatically. One person had the whole system redone at the suggestion of another HVAC contractor (saying the first cut many corners) the re-done system wasn't much better.
While they may "pretty much never die" this is basically the "cheap on average, but expensive for the unlucky person" argument. This quickly turns into a prisoner's dilemma. No one buys because of potential repair costs, therefore everyone suffers (from higher bills, and eventually global warming).
Wells are not always an option depending on what your land is sitting on. If you are over a big granite deposit, good luck.
"That's cheap for drilling from what I've been quoted. Most systems I looked at when I had a house before were in the $30k range installed.
"
Yeah, i lived near a place where wells were incredibly common, so there were plenty of well drillers.
I can believe 30k installed.
With the 30% federal tax credit that used to exist, and Maryland's 30% state tax credit, it can be worth it.
Now, without the 30% federal tax credit, it's probably only worth it on new home construction.
"I have three friends/co-workers that had the systems installed. None were particularly impressed with the average cost savings. They said bills went down, but not dramatically. One person had the whole system redone at the suggestion of another HVAC contractor (saying the first cut many corners) the re-done system wasn't much better.
"
This depends a lot on where you live, the climate, etc. Also how much you are spending on heating/cooling. You know all this.
I was in a fairly large house in a climate that seems 90+ summers and ~25-30 winters. This kinda sucks for heat pumps.
It's also the case that, as it's become more popular (relatively), there are some crappy untrained contractors looking to make a buck. I definitely did a bunch of research, and talked to a bunch of contractors before doing the system. I think out of 5-6 contractors, 1 was clearly a snake, and 1 didn't really know what they were doing based on the questions i asked. 3 could tell me intricate technical details about the systems (IE one launched into a discussion of the merits of parallel vs series vertical piping and reynolds numbers), etc.
FWIW: I've also meant plenty of happy vertical closed loop people. I haven't met any happy horizontal open or closed loop people.
That said, unlike the air based units[1], all, for example, of the waterfurnace units have detailed submittal that tell you, for a given entering water temperature, what the EER/COP will be, what the pressure drop should be, the leaving air temperature, etc.
Most of these things are easily amenable to sensors.
I had an arduino and a bunch of sensors that told me whether the system was performing okay.
After they first flushed the lines, they weren't sure they got everything out of it and told me to try it. So I did, and the measurements told me something was off. System worked, when cooling, water temps were raising too quickly. They ended up digging the manifold back up, and there was a rock in it (terrain is fun!)
After redoing the manifold, everything was perfect.
So i can also believe that if you aren't watching the till, you may not know if the system is doing okay. But at least, unlike most random heat pumps, i feel like I could know and track that stuff pretty well.
Overall, my system actually overperformed (which means they probably didn't need to go as deep as they did, but such is life).
[1] This data exists, it's just not usually easy to get for air source heat pumps unless you are an installer/technician.
There are two types of systems:
closed loop and open loop.
Most systems are closed loop. The only place the pipe is open to is the inlet of the system, and the outlet of the system. They stick u shaped pipes in the holes
So they do something like:
outlet
|
|
manifold inlet in the ground
|
a bunch of pipes formed into U's, stuck in very deep vertical holes filled with thermal grout
|
|
manifold outlet in the ground
|
|
inlet
If it's done in series, each u-bend connects to a set of two outlets on that manifold.
If it's done in parallel, each u-bend connects to a single outlet on each of two manifolds, one in, one out.
If you can imagine a really huge refrigerant loop, that's what they are, with water+glycol as the refrigerant going through the pipes. But the water only moves in this loop, it's never going into the ground, etc.
Open loop systems exist, and those are the ones where they are sucking something in one pipe, and pushing it out the other.
Sometimes this is done in a pond, sometimes a well, etc.
What happens depends a lot of the design (horizontal, vertical, etc).
Thanks for the practical counterpoint. They are definitely pricier and the installation is more complex, but they do pay for themselves over time and should add to the value of the home.
I'm surprised about the earth movement ruining coils. The installations I've seen pictures of show coils with pretty large radii (maybe 18"), I'd think the earth would have to move a lot to do that, and if it's doing that I'd worry about the foundation. Were these small coils? Is the surface really close to the water table?
It's a regional thing; they seem to be common here in Michigan. It seems to be proportional to the degree of temperature swings? They're not great if the ground and air are always warm or always cold.
We have winter lows below 10F/-10C and summer highs above 85F/30C. But the ground temperature is a relatively uniform 50F - useful for both heating (less important, because natural gas is cheap and efficient) and cooling. It's not so useful when the average temp is above your desired room temp.
The reason most people don't use it is that it costs a fortune to install initially and is dependent on local geology. The payback is longer than most people own their houses for and anecdotally the advertised payoffs have been reduced due to efficiencies standard systems. This further reduces the incentives.
> if you run your refrigerant loop through the ground instead of cooling it using the hot ambient air
In the same vein, rejecting heat to the cooler night air is a lot more efficient than using hot day air.
You can operate a chiller at night and generate a bunch of ice efficiently. During the day, you can melt the ice for cooling at day -- without operating any sort of compressor.
Once the melted water gets higher than the desired chilled water temperature, you can turn on the chiller, but you use the water for heat rejection -- which is still colder than the hot outside air.
Though the NYTimes article points out that the improvement from AC efficiency is mostly related to peak demand shaving as well, so it serves a similar purpose.
If you're in the US, you can likely save much more than 30% today by replacing a central air system with a ductless mini-split style system. These are already dominant in the rest of the world, however.
I actually saw an installation in a new apartment. After seeing that, I much preferred central AC. One of the nice things about the US style central AC systems, is that the bathrooms are comfortable. In the split style system, a few rooms (bedrooms/living room) may be comfortable but other rooms (such as bathrooms) are miserably stuffy.
I spoke with an HVAC guy over the weekend about just this topic. He said about 4 yrs ago, the state of CA required all new construction to have ducting that goes to and from, each room in a house. So when Jr. goes off to college, you can close the door and not send cool air to his room. I think he said it's something like 30% more efficient? But don't quote me on that.
Well, the efficiency of a heat pump/refrigerator is limited by Carnot's theorem. Essentially it boils down to the difference of the outside temperature compared to inside temperature. With an indoor temp of ~72F and outdoor ~90F the maximum efficiency is a COP of about 30. Current AC units are in the 2 to 4 range. So a 30% increase doesn't seem impossible that low on the efficiency scale. There was a recent similar jump in efficiency when the US raised the minimum SEER standards for new systems from 10 to 13.
Trump's 2018 budget zeroes funding for Energy Star, which among other things, helps consumers pick the most efficient devices, save money in the long run.
What other ways can consumers compare the efficiency of A/C units? I would think some standardized testing and labels would be required.
There are standardized efficiency measurements that all A/C manufacturers must conduct and publish in the US. You'll see terms like COP, EER, and SEER. Those allow you to compare pretty easily.
Currently the minimum is a SEER of 13, but I've seen units as high as 22 advertised.
To elaborate on the "yes": SEER is a ratio of energy expended to energy moved. So SEER 13 means that the system spends one unit of energy to move 13. And you should expect a SEER 20 system to be twice as efficient as a SEER 10 system.
EDIT: I should mention that SEER uses different units for each part of the ratio -- BTUs of heat moved vs watt-hours expended. COP is dimensionless, and EER is just SEER but for a specific operating point. SEER extends the measurement through an entire "season", and so it theoretically gives a more realistic picture of overall efficiency.
A SEER 13-14 system can run $5-6K, while a SEER 22 system can cost upwards of $15K (as a guesstimate). In theory, a SEER 22 system can pay for itself over the long-term due to reduced electric/gas expenses. The issue is that higher SEER systems, above 16 I believe, rely on variable speed motors. My understanding is that they are inherently less reliable.
A SEER 13-16 system might last 15-20 years (if you're lucky), while a SEER 22 system could break down much earlier at about the 10 year mark. You can sometimes replace specific parts, but depending on what breaks, it may not be cost effective.
In short, the only way we're moving to more efficient AC systems is if costs come down significantly, we see some major innovation in the field, or the government provides significant financial incentives.
As an aside, I also think we could achieve energy efficiencies by increasing the insulation in houses. It's unbelievable how much hot/cool air is lost through windows, doors, crawl spaces, and attics.
I've had some major frustrations with poor reliability of the blower motor in a 14 SEER HVAC system (installed in 2006) with a brushless DC motor. I've replaced the motor 3 times in 10 years (conveniently failing shortly after the warranty expired each time). Had I not done the work myself that would have been between $600 and $800 per replacement.
The air handler is a Bryant. The motors have been a General Electric X13 (the original patent-holder for the X13 electronically commutated constant-torque PWM motor controller), a Regal Beloit "Evergreen" X13 OEM replacement, and now a Nidec X13 motor.
These motors are microcontroller-based. Apparently there was a rash of bad GE X13 motors in the early 2000's traced to bad thermistors. Unfortunately the board is potted in an insulating compound that makes board-level repair rather impractical.
My first motor's controller failed after about 8 years. It was cheaper to just buy a new motor vs. replacing only the controller. The second motor's rotor started grinding against the stator after about 13 months. I pulled the controller from that motor and installed it on the first motor (since it was near-perfect duplicate of the original motor). That ran for 14 months before the second controller failed.
I've been running the third (Nidec) motor for about 2 months. I'll be interested to see how to holds up long-term.
I've said elsewhere in the thread, but insulation does little to help in the summer months. Fiberglass insulation mostly protects from convective cooling/heating (i.e. airflow). Heat in the summer is mostly through conduction and even more-so radiative (near infrared). Windows treatments could definitely help there, but unless you want everyone's windows to be mirrors, it likely won't help that much.
We just replaced our AC system, and while SEER 22 would have saved on electricity, it would have required several thousand dollars more in new duct work. The high efficiency systems require not only variable speed air moving capability, but ducts that work with it as well.
We went from SEER 10 to SEER 15. With the rebalancing that the contractor did, our house is much more comfortable with the thermostat at 80 than it was under the old system at 73.
Unless it raises the resale value of the home reliably, long-term payback is of little motivational value without job security or significant money in reserve. That's one of the uncomfortable microeconomic truths driving short-term decision making in things like cooling, solar power, and battery systems. Why would someone take out a loan or tie up a large portion of their liquid capital to see a ten-year payback on a house they might be forced to sell next month?
With 2008 not being so long ago, neither job security nor resale value are that promising. We're still rebuilding consumer confidence after nine years. The economic recovery in the US is largely in a handful of major metropolitan areas pulling up the averages, with large swathes of the country still struggling. This needs to improve or some government incentive program like you mention must take it into account if we're going to sell capital-intensive home upgrades.
Hey, this is HN. I'd love to discuss how I'm wrong or have someone provide links to refute anything I've said rather than random downvotes for posting something with unpleasant ramifications.
Its good the be aware that one component of higher efficiency in an AC/Heat Pump is thinner tubing. Thinner tubing is more prone to develop leaks and costly coil replacements and refrigerant refills.
This seems to be primarily an issue with copper coils. I was bitten by this with a brand new system that I had installed about 9 or 10 years ago. It was pretty tough to eat the labor costs of having a new coil installed (that was covered under warranty) as well as a complete refrigerant fill (at the time ~$900 for the full R410A fill) on a system that was less than one year old. Its been good since then though!
I wish I could share in your confidence. Have there been a number of bi-partisan congresspeople who have express support for EnergyStar and other efficiency programs?
Generally, spending for every program goes up every year. "Cuts" as typically talked about in the press are reductions in the already planned increases. Very few things are ever cut in real terms, and usually only in reaction to some significant embarrassment (e.g. Alternative energy research funding with Solyndra).
Nobody cares enough about EnergyStar to cut it, so I doubt it will be cut. It made it through the last time Congress was under Republican control totally unmolested, so I really doubt anybody is going to bother with it now.
I think "don't worry; the Republican-controlled Congress will not cut funding on environmental initiatives" sounds like a bit of a pollyannaish proposition.
I'm not saying there's no reason to worry, but there's also no reason to pretend that having the Democrats move pollution overseas solves global problems.
>>The Democrats are basically Republicans-lite and have been for decades
Democrats don't want to abolish every regulation possible in order to maximize corporate profits.
Democrats don't want to cut healthcare and entitlement programs in order to give massive tax cuts to rich people.
Democrats don't want to defund Planned Parenthood and are not rabidly anti-abortion.
Democrats don't want to ban gay marriage.
Democrats don't work their asses off trying to suppress minority votes.
Democrats don't want to prevent refugees from war zones from seeking shelter in the United States.
I can go on.
Basically, the idea that Democrats and Republicans are nearly identical is popular only amongst people who don't pay attention to politics because they are wealthy and privileged enough to not be directly affected by any of it. But if you ask a low-income woman, for example, I guaran-fuckin-tee you that she will gladly educate you on the finer details of decades of Republican oppression of women.
Do you remember when Bill Clinton made dismantling welfare his signature policy proposal and Obama practically begged the Republicans to reach a deal with him to cut Social Security, or is it only privileged people who don't pay attention to politics who remember that?
Obama suggested making a slight change to the measure of inflation used to calculate Social Security cost-of-living adjustments from the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI) to the chained CPI. This would have modestly improved Social Security's finances while resulted in retirees getting slightly smaller increases to their Social Security checks. Obama suggested this as an olive branch to the obstructionist Republican Congress that worked hard from the moment he got in office to prevent him from doing anything. It was a move borne out of desperation rather than the cynical hatred for the poor.
I'm not going to defend Bill Clinton. He made a lot of mistakes, including, as you say, making drastic, misguided changes to welfare and being "tough on crime". Although, for what it's worth, he has recently apologized for some of those mistakes [1].
In any case, fast-forward 17 years to today. Democrats and the Republicans are very, very different parties. I stand by my original statement: the only people who believe the two parties are similar are those who aren't paying attention.
Today the Democratic Party is almost entirely positioning itself on "not being as bad as the Republicans" without any sort of positive vision. That's the reason all they can talk about is Russia and Trump; it keeps them from even having to articulate a position other than being against these enemies.
There are a handful of figures to whom this does not apply, but the greater party apparatus fights tooth and nail against any substantive change (on the grounds that the current strategy is the only way to win elections, even as they lost all three branches of the national government and are irrelevant in more and more states) so I'm not holding my breath.
>Democrats don't want to cut healthcare and entitlement programs in order to give massive tax cuts to rich people.
Bill Clinton had an agreement with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security that was only stopped because the Lewinsky scandal broke.
>Democrats don't want to ban gay marriage.
Who passed DOMA? Obama was against gay marriage until it became clear that it was going to get passed.
>Democrats don't work their asses off trying to suppress minority votes.
No, they just work their asses off to keep minorities poor and beholden to the state because that makes them good Democrat voters.
>Democrats don't want to prevent refugees from war zones from seeking shelter in the United States.
We wouldn't have refugees in Syria seeking shelter if Obama hadn't bombed Syria so much we literally ran out of bombs.
>But if you ask a low-income woman, for example
If that woman became a high income woman, she'd be much less likely to vote Democratic. The Democrats have no incentive to actually help her, only to make her more beholden to the state.
Democrats have controlled both Congress and the Presidency for only two two-year sessions out of the past three decades. You might be expecting a bit much for them to have put a stop to the rise in carbon emissions with such brief windows of control.
Our carbon emissions have been relatively flat for the past 30 years, with a very slight trend downward for the last 10. India and China still have billions of people just trying to get up to the level of wealth where they can expect to regularly eat 1 or 2 meals per day. They're just getting started.
Well, they didn't cut this particular program during the Bush years when the Congress was under Republican control also.
That, and generally Republicans tend to do far less cutting than they say they are going to. They talk about it to get votes, but they rarely actually follow through. Again, see the last time they had control of Congress, when spending was considered to be through the roof when the deficit was only $187 billion. And, that was when they could actually manage to pass legislation, unlike the current mess they're in right now.
So, no, it's not actually me being Pollyannaish at all. I'm being extremely cynical. I think they're basically lying about wanting to and they're too incompetent to manage it even if they did want to.
I'd say there's a difference between reducing spending overall, which I would agree they don't do (even Trump's budget in large part is about significant increases to military spending, for example), and reducing spending on particular causes, which I don't think is so far-fetched.
"GAO's investigation shows that Energy Star is for the most part a self-certification program vulnerable to fraud and abuse. GAO obtained Energy Star certifications for 15 bogus products, including a gas-powered alarm clock."
We need a corresponding article telling us how many power plants we can avoid building by not mining Bitcoin. I love the general idea of cyber currency / bitcoin / block chain, but I hate that the implementation requires so much energy.
People in the US consume way too much air conditioning. It's pretty common where I work for people to have sweaters to put on inside due to the AC. Outside it's in the 80ies, with something like 10% humidity in the summer - absolutely perfect unless you're doing hard labor in direct sunlight.
While I agree that running the AC to to point of wearing a hoodie is ridiculous, there are some pretty enormous chunks of the US where an 80 degree summer day is relatively chilly, winds coming off of mountains or oceans are basically nonexistent, and the humidity is super high.
Yeah (see my response to the guy from Munich) - but instead of cooling to 60F or whatever, use the AC to dehumidify and cool off to, say, 80 or 78 or something comfortable.
Meanwhile in Houston, we're having a nicely cool and dry day for July ... After a high of 93, at just before 6 PM it's 89 degrees and 57% humidity. By 4 AM, it'll be 78 F and 90% humidity, with a high tomorrow of 90 at 2 PM with 58%.
I'm pretty disappointed in the numbers they chose for a vegetarian diet. It feels to me as if they actively went ahead and picked to lowest values they could find in their source. (Btw the source itself is a good read imo: http://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/plant-rich-diet)
You could argue that people are not willing to go vegetarian or even vegan - but at least level the numbers when comparing it with other solutions: If everyone would go vegetarian, their source states 132 gigatons of CO2 reductions.
I also liked this quote from the report:
> As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change.
Better, balanced diets also create positive feedback loops in the healthcare equation too -- especially for low income homes. Like many things, it is a human psychology and behavioral challenge...
> Better, balanced diets also create positive feedback loops in the healthcare equation too
You can still eat your way to obesity on a vegan diet - oreos are vegan, after all. Considering that the obesity epidemic is currently the number one driver for health care costs in USA, and it's only expected to get worse (http://dailybruin.com/2011/10/26/obesity_has_become_an_overs...), we could probably vastly reduce costs (and therefore emissions) by just eating a little less, vegan or no.
All due respect to the Zen master, but taking fewer flights, driving less, and living in a smaller and better insulated house, or having fewer kids, will all be more effective than vegetarianism for the average American. A single transatlantic trip emits more CO2 than eating meat for a year.
I speak without bias on the subject, since I am actually a vegetarian myself. Going by the numbers, it's moderately effective, but not the most effective.
Note: the more potential uses of a resources, the more vulnerable it is to Jevons effects, where people use a resource more in response to being able to use it more efficiently.
The real benefit of energy efficiency is not that it reduces energy use by itself, but that it reduces the utility loss from implementing the caps and taxes necessary to actually reduce total usage.
American air conditioners running at full power, chilling the interior and dripping on the sidewalk below on a hot day always deeply trouble me. Maybe it's my european view on things, but for contrast here in Munich we aren't just building out a city-wide heat network, but we also have a cold network! Cold river water flows through the pipe network that traverses the city and large office building can get connected to it. This way they can save massively on electricity for air conditioning by having the water do the cooling instead. And then once the water has traversed all pipes, it simply gets released back into its stream on the other end of town, just as clean as when it entered, and only slightly warmer.
See elsewhere regarding Americans using way too much air conditioning, but to be fair, Munich is a pretty cold place compared to much of the US in the summer. And not nearly as humid as much of the southern/eastern US.
Berlin doesn't nearly get as hot as the United States. Try sitting inside a house in Mobile, AL in July without air conditioner and see how long you last. Using your water example, what about the deserts in the US that don't have a nearby water source to cool everything. Europe is much cooler in comparison to the US.
I agree with most of what you've said, but I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability.
Is that established? I believe that there are major giant cities that operate with a lower CO2 footprint than suburban and rural areas might, per capita. But there is the cost of all the CO2 that allowed that urbanization; NYC didn't get the subway without a carbon cost, all that steel in the buildings released a lot of carbon, etc..
Technically, it's still not; it's a dry-summer Mediterranean climate; in the Köppen system, it's a Csb, arid climates are B, Desert is BW with h/k/n in the third position depending on temperature.
I would actually put Vegas as one of the most sustainable cities in the US out of necessity. Vegas's per capita water use is about 1/4 of the US average including all of those crazy fountains on the strip. They don't irrigate anything compared to places like Phoenix and almost all municipal water hookups use reclaimed water unlike most other cities where people have an aversion to drinking filtered piss. Vegas also gets almost all of its energy from renewable sources (hydro and a tiny amount of solar) compared to the US as a whole which is only about 10%. Colorado by comparison gets about 60% of it's electricity from coal.
That may be true but desert cities are still a reality. It might be possible somehow "close" these cities but that seems like something that is not going to happen anytime soon unless they simply become uninhabitable. So given people are going to be living here it makes sense to make things more efficient.
You may find this hard to believe, but moving heat around (i.e. air conditioning) is more energy efficient than straight up heating. It is more environmentally friendly when you consider that in many cold locales in the US, heat is provided not by electricity, but by a shitload of on-site oil-fired devices.
I googled this, because I did find it hard to believe, and I think you're correct. According to the below source, for example, heating a home in Atlanta, Georgia throughout the winter months costs about twice as much as air conditioning it in the summer months.
> but I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability
They didn't give a damn when those cities were first founded. The issue wasn't probably even on the mind of anyone on the planet. Same is true about cities in seismically-active regions.
It's too late to fix that. You'd have to convince millions to abandon their homes and go... somewhere else.
The unique problem of desert cities seems to be inappropriate landscaping. Even San Francisco ships its water in from over 100 miles away - not having enough water locally is just a problem of cities in general. The AC story is much worse in a desert city, but the heating story is much worse in cities in cold climates. There's also the benefit that I tend to need my AC when the sun is high in the sky, which aligns perfectly with solar. I live in SoCal and almost never use any heating, even in winter.
> I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability.
It's easier to irrigate a flat desert with fertile soil than to move the flat terrain and fertile soil closer to a water source.
Food production is a fairly important component of sustainable human societies, and a major reason for the US (California particularly) having inhabited deserts and semi-arid regions.
Most desert cities were founded before electricity, let alone air conditioning. Phoenix, Arizona was apparently founded as a farming town, and was quite sustainable at its early population.
You can't stop people from moving and aggregating. Relocating hundreds of millions of people into freshly-built temperate cities is obviously impractical, not to mention more resource-intensive in the short and medium term than air conditioning their current residences. We have to develop techniques that work with the world as it is, not just pine for utopias that might have been.
> My bedroom in Tampa, FL reaches 90F at night without air conditioning. There is no way I could live without AC here.
You obviously could live there... it would just be unpleasant.
I lived a year in Singapore where temperatures were in the 80-90 range. I stayed on-campus at NUS and was lucky to have a room with A/C, but it wasn't common. The majority of students make do with big fans and windows. I remember working next to a campus Starbucks outside, marveling at how well designed it was to make students moderately comfortable without A/C. There was an enormous fan, and the area was covered and designed to facilitate air flow.
After my time there I came back to the U.S. and can much more readily handle persistently hot temperatures. It's fairly unusual to expect it to be cool all the time.
I also just got back from a trip to Oman where it was routinely above 90 or 100 all day long, and people there make do without A/C as well.
Turns out that the GP could adapt to sleeping in 90F temperatures as the human body is adaptable. After a few weeks you'd be used to it and it wouldn't matter. The Creek/Seminole did it in the southeast.
I went 5 years without A/C in my car in southeastern Louisiana. I was fine in the daytime heat and humidity, even in the summer, but I would never want to sleep in it. I suppose if everyone got hammocks it'd be fine, but beds are insulators. Your body heat works against you.
That's because your house is designed with active cooling as a presumption. If your house was designed to utilize passive cooling effects (thermal mass, green roof, evaporative cooling, overhangs, shades, airflow compression, etc) your bedroom wouldn't get that hot.
Early Florida homes (19th and early 20th century) were built by people who understood passive cooling techniques.
But, the invention of AC and the development of super-strong residential building codes in response to destructive hurricanes has steered the last ~70 years of home construction towards sealed concrete boxes with air conditioning infrastructure built in.
Many of the classic passive cooling techniques of the old Florida homes are not even legal now. The benefit is your house doesn't collapse in a hurricane.
True. It's the same thing in some cases. For example, you can no longer leave openings between the walls and roof, which used to let hot air out the top of your house. Talk about poorly insulated!
evaporative cooling? thermal mass? Did you not read the parent? How is a thermal mass going to help a place that has a low temperature of 90? And how will evaporative cooling work in a place with 80% humidity?
> That's because your house is designed with active cooling as a presumption.
No, it isn't. I have an enormous oak tree that overhangs the southern roof. My windows have a very low level of solar radiation they allow through. The ambient air temp at night is almost 80F. The house is built of concrete block, and stores heat during the day, releasing it at night. We're routinely at 60-80% humidity.
Just waiting for some solar shingles to be available (hurry up Elon!). Don't much care how long I run the AC every day as long as I net out 0 with solar generation.
As good as those features might be, you're still dependent on active cooling to make it liveable. There are other measures that have been used for millenia in desert and jungle environments where the house itself encourages particular paths of air flow that bring in cooler, fresh air and vent hot, stale air.
We've got the technology now to evolve this even further by doing computer simulations to come up with better designs, and by techniques like 3D house printing with concrete to make intricate ventilation systems that can circulate air through the floors and up through walls with zero energy cost.
At high humidity, you're still going to be hot and drenched in sweat. The only solution is energy efficient thermal transfer (AC, heat pump, etc) and dehumidification.
There are ways of doing this that don't involve expending energy, but it requires re-thinking the very concept of the modern house.
A thousand years ago you had to build things this way, you had no alternative, but now it's taken for granted that air-conditioning will solve all problems.
For sure, but I can't get insurance (hurricane or otherwise) on a home built to 1000 year previous standards. Do I care if the house can't cool itself naturally? I don't; I can't get a mortgage on it because I can't get insurance on it if its not built to current code. Hence why we run into this problem (which will be solved with more efficient AC and renewable energy).
Not the OP and while I don't want to denigrate the way you live, I want to react the suggestion that other ways of living are impossible. Today, where I live it the high is going to be 32C (90F) with humidity of 87%. Pretty normal for this time of year. Usually in the summer (a little bit later on) we'll have a couple of weeks where the temperature never gets below 27-28C (80F). Been living here for about 10 years without AC. I'm not a spring chicken, either.
Construction makes a huge difference -- especially airflow. Whoever made my current apartment was a genius because in the winter, the south side gets sun through the windows for about 6 hours, while in the summer there is no direct sunlight in any window. My previous apartment was an oven.
North American attitudes to seasonal temperatures are different than where I live now. In the winter here, the lows here are near freezing (1-2C), and we always have a few days in the summer well over 40C (105F) (luckily once it gets over 35, the humidity drops quite a bit). It's quite normal here not to heat in the winter, nor cool in the summer. Experiencing the seasons is considered to be "culturally enlightening" ;-) And joking aside, I've found that I like this way of living. Like you, I would never have thought it possible before I tried it, though.
Having said that, you can't always do it. I need some heat in the winter these days, due to health conditions. I worry about my mother in law who, at 80, usually refuses to run her AC in the summer. You do need to be careful of your health. You also need to be sensitive to the fact that architects build for the prevailing culture. Where I live, they work very hard to deal with this kind of thing. Where you live, they will probably optimise for something else.
Like I said, it's a very cultural thing -- and that's the beauty of the world. There are different cultures and values, each with their own charms. It's totally fair to say that you like the way you live now (and more power to you!) But it's not impossible (nor bad) to live differently.
A large part of this could be mitigated by building with passive thermal efficiency in mind. Features like extra insulation on roofs and south facing walls, large thermal masses, strategic eaves that block sunlight in the summer but let it through in the winter, whole building energy recovery ventilation systems, green roofs, underground living spaces, etc.
Simply using a white coating on the roof can reduce the A/C bill by about 3%.
It's so simple, I do not know why this isn't part of the building code in hot places. People may not like it for their homes, but for commercial buildings with flat roofs, it's a no-brainer.
In colder climates where heating is as much an expense as cooling, no. Most just put black tar up there because it is cheap. That said, when you need to pay to heat in summer and pay to cool in winter, the 3% savings in cooling doesn't help you when you also increase your heating bill in the winter by 3%.
No. The vast majority of the heat is removed from the water by a processing plant before it gets reinjected into the stream. The temperature difference is negligible.
Yes and it can be very big and very efficient and replacing it for a more efficient one doesn't require convincing every citizen to replace their unit. Also, less plastic would be used.
Just FYI, the symbol you're using is an "ordinal indicator" (it has a tiny line below it), e.g. 1º means "first" according to Wikipedia (I copied the symbol and put it in duckduckgo). TIL. For me, on Linux with US-international keyboard (with dead keys), the degrees symbol is on AltGr+Shift+0 (and then either a letter, like å, or space to just make the degrees symbol).
As someone who has lived in Florida for 30+ years and worked two summers at theme parks: Heat exhaustion is very easy to ignore until it becomes heat stroke, at which point you typically need help to seek treatment. Especially if you are not well versed in the symptoms.
Yep. The architecture is fundamentally not capable of dealing with the heat. I moved from Sydney to Germany a few years ago and 30°C has gone from being perfectly fine to abject misery, long before air conditioning comes in to the equation.
In Australia we have houses built with sizeable gaps to allow the frames to warp with the heat, while also allowing air to easily flow in and out of the building. Windows are single-glazed. Exactly what you don't want in a German house, in other words.
In Germany the houses are heat traps and the focus has largely been to conserve energy in winter time (and rightfully so). I've had doors here which stop closing smoothly in the summer because of the slightest warping, the gaps are so tiny. Houses are often air-tight, and the external walls are half a meter thick due to the hefty insulation. All windows are at least double-glazed, one place I've stayed was triple.
New German builds using the Passivhaus specification are generally pretty good as they have constant machine-generated airflow at a set temperature, but as far as I am aware, this specification can only be built new - it's not possible (within reasonable cost) to retrofit an older house to the new specifications. For those, air conditioning seems the only reasonable option moving forward.
Houston already has large pipes running out into the ocean for other purposes. Radiators installed in deep ocean would just need to be more resilient to corrosion.
The dripping is from condensation. Right now in Atlanta, the dew point is 24°C. That means if I cool my house to reach that temperature, the humidity inside will be 100%… perfect for mold and terrible for everything else.
Using an open water cooling mechanism would work in hot and dry climates, but then again those are the areas where water is a lot more precious and you don't want to waste it through evaporation. (In a highly humid environment, evaporative cooling does not work because the water has nowhere to go.)
A heat pump is the only mechanism that works for this kind of climate. The exchange could be improved by using water or the ground to absorb the heat, but those solutions are way more expensive to install and can have environmental concerns of their own.
I'm generally impressed with the energy initiatives in Germany and have been following the Passive House movement for a while, but some technologies only work for specific climates or only in one direction.
I might be wrong but I was under the impression that heat pollution is super bad for ecosystems and is one of the ways factories tend to legally damage the environment.
it's scary walking on 5th ave and being hit with freezing air every time i walk by these huge shops that are mostly empty all day. I doubt any of them turn a profit, probably there for brand awareness. why don't we turn them into
street facing displays only
Good insulation is pretty standard here in the US for everything built in the last two decades or so.
That said, fiberglass insulation mostly only helps against convection cooling/heating. I.e. through the movement of air. Summertime heat is mostly conductive and radiative i.e. near infrared. Insulation doesn't do much to stop that.
Shade trees however help this big time. A large tree placed in the right spot to shade a house in the afternoon can replace as many as seven window air conditioner units.
Maybe it's getting a little better but in the apartment buildings I have seen the wind pretty much blows straight through the windows and the walls are paper thin. Even on the East Coast where they have real winters.
If anything they're over-insulated which can create other problems like a lack of fresh air, mold and fungus problems, and poor air quality in general.
The more you insulate the more you need to ensure you have proper ventilation, which is a sort of paradox.
+1 to this statement. Just had extra insulation sprayed into the walls of our 1973 house, and replaced the windows with triple layer thermo glass. The difference it made during summer is remarkable, since the added insulation keeps the house from heating up excessively, while retaining heat during nighttime.
One thing missing from this article is demand response:
"It matters, researchers say, because cooling has a direct relationship with the building of coal-fired power plants to meet peak demand. If more air-conditioners are humming in more homes and offices, then more capacity will be required to meet the demand. So 1.6 billion new air-conditioners by 2050 means thousands of new power plants will have to come on line to support them."
We https://flair.co offer demand response tech for minisplit control that can help prevent having to build all the 'peaker plants'. This gets extra interesting when you add intermittent supply (solar/wind) and grid tied storage (Tesla has been making big pushes here among others). Hopefully, we are able to scale these up in parallel to prevent a bunch of coal fired plants from being built for the 1-3% of the year with the hottest days.
> "So 1.6 billion new air-conditioners by 2050 means thousands of new power plants will have to come on line to support them."
Or not, where California has brought enough solar power online to the point that during peak times it has to pay to offload power to other states because some natural gas operators can't (won't?) shutdown...
A big part is also demand response in California, for instance, why PG&E was subsidizing smart thermostats. They can adjust all the setpoints and in aggregate reduce the compressor cycling. to 'chop' the peak down on really hot days.
I hate to say it but AC always felt like thoughtless engineering and consumerism, especially the electric varieties.
It's ironic that in a sunny, energy rich environment, you spend extra energy on a heat pump. In a lot of environments some better architecture will take care of the problem via passive methods, additionally evaporative methods work pretty well in dry environments and polute considerably less ?
Failing that, hell atleast use some solar energy to run the heat pumps locally, atleast stop burning stuff to power them.
Failing all of the above, stoicism isn't that bad, honest, neither are life style changes that shift high activity periods to later in the day, they are widely practised in Mediterranean countries.
Currently live in Colorado where the highs are regularly in the 90s. Turn the house fan on at night for a couple hours, cool everything off, then close all the doors and windows during the day and everything is perfectly comfortable. When I lived in Philly however... 90% humidity and 80 degrees AT NIGHT is no joke.
So to respond, yes I generally suggested the above for dry climates, I have also lived in humid climates and agree to all the comments regarding them.
However I am willing to bet we use electrical heat pumps out of sheer convenience even in climates that offer alternatives.
That having been said, even for humid environments, the ground often offers us solutions that are more efficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-coupled_heat_exchanger
They do however ofcourse require engineering and support from society to adopt.
Speaking as someone who lives just outside Philadelphia, if you can wave a magic wand and give us a Mediterranean climate I will happily give up my air conditioner.
Right now according to my phone we're at a high of 89 F (31.6 C) and 83% humidity, low of 80 degrees tonight with that same or possibly greater humidity. If I open my windows tonight I get to experience my sheets sticking to my body like sweaty clothing every time I move and a thin layer of moisture on all of my possessions (including electronics) tomorrow morning. And this is not atypical of summer on the mid-Atlantic.
In Toronto (Canada! land of snow and the North Pole) we've been having 90% humidity at night. I have AC but it's barely making a difference. Opening a window would be insanity.
I just flew out to Calgary and we have a nice hot day with 40% humidity and it feels great.
If you've only ever lived in dry areas I can understand not being aware, but even with AC, in places with high humidity it's just disgusting in the heat, and chilling to the bone in the cold in a way that dry areas just never get.
Toronto has a deep lake water cooling system that pumps cold water from the bottom of Lake Ontario and circulates it around the downtown core. It is capable of cooling 100 high-rise buildings. I believe when it was constructed it was the largest system in North America.
I'd never heard of these systems until reading this thread. I am frankly amazed that China isn't using them. Here in Shenzhen (literally "deep bay") alone I am certain this would save a lot of electricity.
So we curb emissions by building a bunch of new A/C units? Sorry, that's silly.
CO2 is just one of many many forms of pollution. Think you're doing your part by purchasing a hybrid or electric vehicle? There are barrels of oil that go into those tiers, the plastics, not to mention all the pollution that goes into battery production. If your car is fuel efficient, the best thing you can do for the environment is drive it until the wheels fall off. When you do need to purchase a replacement, get a used hybrid or electric.
Climate change/CO2 is not the problem. It's the symptom of rampant consumerism. We can't buy and purchase our way out of destroying the planet. We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years. Companies need to be praised for smaller factories and lower sales for products that cost more and last longer.
That is a very very huge shift in the way we think. I'm not sure if it's even remotely feasible or what it would take to convince people, industry, the world to simply consume less.
I think your thinking is a little short sighted. Yes, on a 20 year horizon replacing our existing inefficient stuff is wasteful. But on a 100 year time horizon, population will rise to 10 billion, and we'll turn over almost all of our climate systems.
What I would propose is we start now thinking about what sustainable architecture looks like, and start trying to imagine more permanent cultural edifices. I.e. permaculture. I don't think we need to worry too much about the ecological cost of replacing our current physical plant with a permaculture one--the ecological costs of transition are dwarfed by the ecological savings we will reap over 100 years.
That said, we should either go big (final stage permaculture) or not try at all. There's no sense in half measures at this point, we either build communities 100x more efficient, or we do as you say: make do with the stuff we have.
I think you and the GP are on the same page, just coming from different angles. You say we need to change communities; how do you do that without first changing the culture? Why do people want to live in suburbs? I don't know how to do it, but if there is enough demand for more efficient lifestyles I believe the market will meet it.
Because most large cities (at least in America) are loud, cramped, polluted, with horrible traffic and hit-and-miss public transportation, the schools are usually worse, and if you want space for even minor luxuries like a small workshop for personal projects, home office, rec-room, or other standard features of a typical middle-class American house, you better be willing to pay through the nose for it. Paying through the nose goes for just about everything else in the city as well. Plus you won't get to use your personal property as an investment, because you likely won't have any living in a city.
Add in a lot of NIMBY residents who don't want any new residents moving into their neighborhoods, good luck making the city appealing to anyone who doesn't REALLY want to live there, or else has some business opportunity that makes living in the city worth their while.
Here in the states IMO we'd do better by making suburban lifestyles more efficient. Between electric cars, renewables and more efficient tech of all stripes coming around there's no reason we shouldn't be able to get suburban houses down to carbon-neutral. The amount of transformation major cities would have to undergo to appeal to suburban populations is just unrealistic by comparison.
> Here in the states IMO we'd do better by making suburban lifestyles more efficient.
That makes me sad, because when I envision suburbia, it involves all the NIMBYism (especially in the form of HOAs) you mentioned above, combined with distances that make using a bicycle for transportation unrealistic. I actually enjoy riding my bicycle to and from work (and the grocery store). I would dread a commute in a vehicle of even 30 minutes.
Depends on the suburb. Some are indeed the HOA-from-hell fiefdoms that'll slap you with fines for your lawn being an inch above regulation, or boot/tow cars that park on the street without a pass. Those suck. And if you're not near a major population center you run the risk of there just being nothing to do/no real career prospects in town. But as someone who grew up in a suburb and has lived in several, in my experience people tend to keep to themselves so long as no one's being a bother.
A bike to work isn't necessarily out of the question either if you live just outside a major city. Some areas have bike trails that can take you quite a distance. But yeah in most cases you'll need a car for virtually everything, that is a downside. My personal commute is only 10 minutes, but I know people who commute up to 1 hour if they work downtown (morning rushour is a bitch).
Culture is everything that outlasts us: buildings, language, tools, social calendars, contracts, habits, etc.
Changing the buildings is changing the culture. You identify a complete resource cycle, like a weekly grocery habit, and design a replacement. Drop it in, look for another one.
Demand is a trailing indicator. Significant demand for integrated permaculture living won't happen until long after the concept is proven and started scaling.
Reducing the number of humans could be one approach. The idea causes rancorous response from religious people who believe God told us to be fruitful and multiply. To reduce births might require coercion, it's true, but it would not require killing people or making them suffer. I don't see how else we can continue to enjoy the benefits and power of technology while keeping the planet habitable and enjoyable.
>To reduce births might require coercion, it's true, but it would not require killing or people or making them suffer.
The demographic shift of increasing the number of retirees per healthy adult will definitively cause suffering. There's a reason why Millennials are putting off having children - they can't afford to.
Every time I see this suggested I am reminded of Idocracy. Only some people will choose not to reproduce. The genes of those who disagree with this idea will be the genes passed on to later generations. One could also assume that the opposing ideas regarding reproduction are also more likely to be passed on. I don't really see this as a viable voluntary solution.
If not voluntary, how could a place do this without instituting something like a 'one child' policy?
Wealthy nations already seem to have topped out on population growth, and now grow only through immigration. It could be that when societies reach a certain level of development they naturally produce fewer than two children per family.
As other nations continue to grow and industrialize, the issue then doesn't really go away. It seems that the problem would just move around the globe until we hit critical mass. The only solutions I see to this issue are to be more efficient with the resources we do have and/or move to another planet and start the process over again. Since moving to another planet is not something we will likely be able to do with billions of people in the short term, conserving resources and reducing consumption seem to be a more reachable goal.
If it is true that industrialization reduces bithrate below 2 per family, the issue would go away as other nations industrialize. If the whole world industrialized and reduced birthrate below 2, we'd reduce population and hence consumption. I'm not understanding your "critical mass" argument.
I can see why you'd think that. However, industrialization does not occur overnight.
> You really haven't thought this through.
I don't know why you would say this. Do you think that Earth will never reach a point where its population exceeds the planet's capacity to support it?
The United States has basically already solved this problem. Just make housing, healthcare, and college tuition incredibly expensive so no one can afford to have more than a small number of children.
You realize the world's birth rate has already been on the decline for decades, correct? And in general, the bulk of this occurred not because of coercion, but because of economic development and the ensuing shifts in optimum family strategy.
When you say "birth rate is falling" its effectively the second derivative on "number of people" right? As in, if we have go from 2 children born per person to 1.5 children born per person, we are still growing the number of people.
Even if "children per person" falls slow enough you could even indefinitely increase the rate that new people are added right?
That's right, but note that the replacement rate depends on mortality rates and any gender-bias for either birth or mortality. Generally birth rates below 2.1 are consider "sub-replacement", but it can be much higher in some locales (due to disease, war, etc). Here are some per-continent population projections:
I don't really understand the distinction: fewer children per family is the same thing as fewer per person right? Like if you have 1.4 children per person on average that means exactly 2.8 children per adult man + woman?
All I meant to point out is that "birth rate falling" doesn't map to "population falling", if the average number of children per couple drops 2.5 to 2.1 then each generation is still larger (and the population still grows exponentially).
In fact, the world already hit "peak child" some years ago. The number of children in the world has stopped increasing. That means that the world's population is now only growing because of life expectancy increases and not because of increased numbers of people being born.
The population will continue to grow for a while because of developing countries' life expectancy catching up with developed countries, but unless there are drastic technological breakthroughs to improve life expectancy beyond where developed countries are now, the world population will stop growing fairly soon.
Rampant consumerism is the exploitative pyramid scheme that's made the U.S. (and really the entire west and the part of the world that mimicks its economics in some form or other) wealthy.
There's no possible way U.S. or global plutocracy is going to be kind and look the other way at attempts to shrink their economy. They'd sooner see the world burn.
I think what it would take, is a genome change. We'd need to be a different species. Perhaps inheritable memory so each generation isn't always forgetting the violence of their ancestors.
You're getting downvoted but you're basically correct. Notice how human civilization is dictated by a four-generation cycle like Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. We're in the Summer/Fall transition and we will soon be entering the Winter right now. But if the baby boomers, Gen X and Millenials could have some genetic memory of WW1, the Great Depression and WW2, then we might not be in this situation.
It sounds like a milder version of the situation in Childhood's End (in the sense of humanity essentially birthing an alien race that will live in utopia, but dying off itself).
It's a creative re-framing of the problem, though. From "how do we force humans to behave better" to "what do humans need to be, in order to behave better".
The current situation is largely caused by artificially low prices of fossil fuels. We are borrowing from the future to fuel our consumption.
If we agreed to increase those prices by, say, 5 to 10 times and used the money to fund research towards removing carbon from the atmosphere, the world would become a much better place. Problem is, everybody is afraid of the shock this would cause and everybody thinks only about his little square of the woods.
In Poland, the government recently announced they want to add +0.25 PLN ($0.07, or ~6% of current gasoline prices) of tax for gasoline. The stated reason is increasing the budgets for maintenance of local roads.
Regardless of the issues of stated vs. real reasons, the reaction of people in the country was totally predictable: people are enraged. How dares the government raise the fuel price? You get a similar reaction if you try to suggest an emission tax to any driver.
Why? Because they allow governments to set policy empirically. You can raise the tax a little, bit-by-bit, until you start seeing negative effects. Carbon taxes allow a legislature of non-economists to procedurally find the maximum reduction that the economy can bear, which is good, because obviously you don't want more than that, and given the nature of the situation you probably don't want less.
The difference between this and a cap-and-trade model is that with cap-and-trade, there's a lot of money tied up in the carbon shares allocated, so lowering the cap is politically impossible. Big corporations like it because they have an easier time acquiring carbon credits than small companies, because they have political influence.
Cap-and-trade worked with other kinds of emissions because those emissions are less common and come only from certain industries, whereas carbon comes from everywhere. As such, it wasn't possible for the acid rain producers to lobby Congress to raise the cap on NOx. Or to not lower it. Furthermore, the market is small enough that it was possible for charitable organizations to make a dent by buying emissions allowances and "retiring" them -- which is extremely unlikely to matter for carbon given the size of the carbon market.
Carbon taxes are fairer and simpler, and it's harder for a company to weasel out. Some observers have suggested that an industry could lobby to be exempt, but this seems unlikely: how many industries have successfully exempted themselves from income tax? From VAT? By contrast, this happened:
> a diplomatic cable published last month by the WikiLeaks website reveals that most of the CDM projects in India should not have been certified because they did not reduce emissions beyond those that would have been achieved without foreign investment. Indian officials have apparently known about the problem for at least two years.
>[...] Today, more than 720 Indian projects have been approved and have gained some 120 million tonnes' worth of carbon credits, a large fraction of the 750 million tonnes issued since 2005 (see 'Cleaning up').
> Yet on the evidence of discussions at the meeting, most of the carbon-offset projects in India fail to meet the CDM requirements set by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The irony is that consuming less actually leads to increased levels of happiness. If this was more widely appreciated the shift away from consumerism would be easier. I could imagine, for example, some kind of enlightened country/culture that actually intentionally contracts their economy because they've wised up to what really matters.
CO2, and its interchangeably-used measure of CO2e (which is a sum of all greenhouse gases weighted based on how much they contribute to global warming) is the only pollutant that matters in this context.
Our disposable-good society is a small fraction of our overall impact on the climate. It is 100% possible to power our world with solar, wind, and batteries while keeping the rest of our lives largely unchanged. The only climate-hostile things we can't easily solve for right now are a) beef and b) air travel. Every single HN reader can go all-electric today, and most can sign up for a renewable-energy program through their utility.
If you think our society should build fewer, higher-quality goods then I agree. But doing that won't come close to stopping climate change.
Air travel? Sure, that ones hard to fix, but we have had a solution for years which would drastically reduce the environmental harm done by cattle farming - eating plant-based foods instead of beef.
The problem is though, that many vegetarian options are soy-based, which are pretty much all grown abroad, and have an large environmental impact there. It also requires a LOT more land to grow the same amount of plant-based proteins than meat, which for example results in local farmers in South America burning rain-forest, only to farm 'environmently friendly' soy.
So no, plant-based foods alone is not the holy grail, and also not realistic to force this upon people in the first place. In my opinion, what should happen is that the relatively new plant-based hamburgers which are very very similar to meat would gradually replace the 'mass market' meat for things like fastfood restaurants. But that on it's own isn't enough, we need better production methods for these plants too, so we don't have huge transportation pollution.
And airtravel is not the only big issue, large container-ships are a much bigger problem. Once in international waters, many switch to burning very dirty oil, instead of 'clean' diesel which they only use in local waters to comply with emission norms. Not only that, ships are built to last for decades, and companies won't convert them to full electric without economic incentives.
I feel like the focus on global warming and the fact that it's 'controversial' or there's a 'debate' distracts from concrete, proven issues with fossil fuel consumption: toxic air, water and soil pollution related to both extraction and use.
> When you do need to purchase a replacement, get a used hybrid or electric.
Now all we need is someone to manufacture used cars, since nobody buys new in this utopia.
Edit: to the downvoters: I guess I have to spell it out for you, but my point was that building efficient A/C units makes sense because eventually someone somewhere has to buy new.
Even if we curbed consumerism our current appliances, infrastructure, agriculture and transportation still gobble up large amount of energy / emit carbon. They will need to be replaced one way or another.
Nobody is proposing we magically manufacture billions of new units of everything tomorrow and kick out all the stuff we purchased yesterday.
Turnover takes years or decades anyway. Just like the EU did not make possession of incandescent light bulbs illegal, they just mandated that all new ones sold beyond a certain date must meet energy efficiency standards that can't be met by incandescent ones.
> We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years.
Cars already last more than a decade. As long as moore's law is not entirely dead cell phones will be obsolete simply by advances in the underlying hardware and software exploiting those hardware advances, you don't even need planned obsolescence for that.
And ultimately it depends on the individual product whether it requires more energy to build or during its lifetime. Without checking I bet a space heater will burn significantly more energy during its operation than manufacture, and replacing it with a heat pump would be a net gain at almost any point in its lifecycle.
I've got a 1996 Toyota 4Runner; it's paid off and I do put it's 4WD capabilities to use, but normally I pay for gas to carpool with someone else with a more fuel efficient vehicle to drive to trailheads for hiking and climbing. Otherwise I try to bicycle commute to and from work, including hitting the grocery store (which is on the way home from work). It's a pleasant commute, in part because I have a shower available at work, but more importantly because I picked a residence as close as possible to work, using this:
It is a big shift in thinking, but consider this: most work schedules see people driving between the same two places twice a day, five times a week. Reducing that distance can give you back considerable time, not to mention reducing costs (even if you drive) and reducing stress. And before someone counters with the inevitable "I don't get paid enough", you should be getting paid enough to live as close to work as possible, or they should let you telecommute. It's also arguable you can afford to live closer to work:
This is a cultural problem that goes beyond just consumerism (although that's the elephant in the room) to things like corporate culture. I'm also still using a Nokia N900, but every year I more and more feel the pull to jump to an Android phone. Having a hardware keyboard for Emacs+org-mode is quite handy, though.
This is complete bogus because it frames 'rampant consumerism' in the frame of '20th century rampant consumerism' without giving thought to consuming sustainable products. It is possible to produce every single product that does not burn hydrocarbons in a completely carbon and waste neutral manner. So why don't we focus on producing enormous quanities of goods in a sustainable way? That's the real task. The way OP thinks is the same way of thinking that leads to 'overpopuplation is a problem' conclusions; We can fit enormous numbers of humans on the planet, we just need to engineer our living environments to be completely neutral to the environment. And that's not impossible. So what is the big idea with trying to get people to stop using products?
I'm a little confused why solar isn't mentioned. Peak temperature and peak solar flux are highly correlated so this isn't some weird grid storage problem. Tighten standards for new systems and construction to be a little more efficient and let economics go to work.
Passive solar and vernacular architecture makes vastly more sense. I get so tired of these schemes to make our broken lifestyles "more efficient." Just adopt a better method entirely and quit quibbling about tiny efficiency gains.
You're saying that as though passively cooled architecture has no drawbacks in terms of cost, structural integrity, versatility, or suitability for building dense living spaces. I doubt we can develop large cities in the future without a serious focus on improved HVAC. Sure, passive methods, geothermal heating/cooling, etc will have a place, but they certainly aren't the only path forward.
For example, how would you passively control humidity. It's 89F and 55% humidity where I'm sitting right now, outside airflow feels like wet hot death.
I don't know what country you are from, but I am saying that as an American who has lived in Germany and has studied this problem space some at the college level. Most American homes are terrible cardboard boxes. German apartments routinely have thicker walls, fewer windows and other interruptions in the wall space and the windows are more useful than American ones. It was common when I was there for windows to have two ways to be opened, one just for airflow that was not a security risk and one to allow it to open completely, like a door. They typically had no screens.
There is zero reason why American housing cannot incorporate, as a minimum, more thermal mass -- like German apartments routinely do.
Furthermore, many American cities are simply not that dense. There are few places in the U.S. that are really densely urban with lots of skyscrapers. So most passive solar methods would be applicable for most structures here.
I grew up in the Deep South, where 98F was quite common in the summer, with much higher humidity than 55%, and I have lived in the High Desert, where I did my long walks for exercise (up to 6 miles) after the sun set so temps would drop to a cool 99F. The temperature and humidity you list does not qualify in my book as "wet, hot death" and I see zero reason that a building could not be made reasonably comfortable in such conditions using mostly passive techniques.
Slightly offtopic but I just had a new HVAC system put in my house and one of the things the tech pointed out to me is that effective AC has a lot to do with effective dehumidifying.
I don't know why it never crossed my mind before but now when I transition from indoors to outdoors (and back) I notice the humidity delta as much as the temperature delta.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadCan we change the post title to match the article?
"If You Fix This, You Fix a Big Piece of the Climate Puzzle"
"New research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California indicates that adding improved efficiency in refrigeration and phasing out fluorinated gases used for cooling, as mandated by international agreement, could eliminate a full degree Celsius of warming by 2100. Given that the “business as usual” trajectory leads to 4 to 5 degrees Celsius of warming, that is shaving off a pretty big slice.
Hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, account for about 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but they can be thousands of times as potent than carbon dioxide "
Plus, even though the best BLDC are maybe 93% (after inverter losses) compared to a 90%, that's on the wrong side of the optimization problem, analogous to Amdahl's Law: Doubling insulation means you need half the energy in the first place, while doubling motor efficiency from 90% to 95% only saves 5%.
Is there really an HFC replacement - what is it? I wasnt aware.
This is not the same as actually replacing the refrigerant with propane (or a propane/isobutane blend). Still seems less risky then a gas dryer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
> It was agreed on 16 September 1987, and entered into force on 1 January 1989... As a result of the international agreement, the ozone hole in Antarctica is slowly recovering.[3] Climate projections indicate that the ozone layer will return to 1980 levels between 2050 and 2070.[4][5] Due to its widespread adoption and implementation it has been hailed as an example of exceptional international co-operation, with Kofi Annan quoted as saying that "perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal Protocol".
There are new refrigerants called HFOs that are chemically-similar to HFCs, but do not exhibit the greenhouse effect. Ammonia and propane also work, and are commonly used in commercial refrigeration today.
In parallel with refrigerants and efficiency, though, I wonder if the article misses on mentioning geothermal cooling. Those systems are expensive, but if you can bring down the install cost and power them with cleaner energy, you solve some other problems. In developing nations, maybe you try and build larger systems designed to cool multiple residential units - and start to require it for mid/high-rise residential construction?
Thanks to that effort made by many, "A 2005 IPCC review of ozone observations and model calculations concluded that the global amount of ozone has now approximately stabilized. Although considerable variability is expected from year to year, including in polar regions where depletion is largest, the ozone layer is expected to begin to recover in coming decades due to declining ozone-depleting substance concentrations, assuming full compliance with the Montreal Protocol." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
Of the top of my head, a normal family house (150m2, 1-1/2 stories) is allowed to consume between 5000-6500 kWh per year (low number in southern Sweden, same as Denmark. High number northern Sweden above the polar circle).
This generally means >220mm insulation in walls and roof and >300mm insulation in the foundation. In northern Sweden you need a geothermal pump to hit those numbers.
Incidentally, he's about to put the place up for sale, if anyone's interested in a nice home in the "not Chicago" part of Illinois...
There are climates where evaporative cooling is not effective, but perhaps they would be useful in the majority of climate regions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler
http://atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/swamp-c...
Authority: I live in Colorado.
Not only does insulation have dramatic effects on how temperature is regulated in your building, it only really benefits you when it is installed properly. On top of this, the direction the building faces, placement of windows, proper airflow, and even tile vs carpeted floors all add up to a much more energy efficient home.
How efficient? A building built in Pennsylvania in 1865 can stay cool most of the year (we're talking tops 70F on the bottom floor) by trapping cold air at night and sealing it in during the day. Fans assist air circulation and cooling, and cold air pools in slightly recessed first floor common areas. (It helps to have a stone foundation, too)
Of course you have to mix modern materials and practices with the old-school building constuction to get the most bang for your buck, but it's clear that we do not need to be blasting our A/C half the year. You can also look at models like the Passivhaus[1] for more modern, apartment-oriented designs. (Their underground heat exchanger is another alternative cooling system)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
The Earth radiates a fixed amount of energy into space every year. But when we produce electricity etc. no matter how we do it, more than half of the energy escapes as heat - a byproduct of boiling the water or whatever!
This isn't sustainable in the long run either! We are basically raising the temperature of the atmosphere even without greenhouse gases.
Tell me where I'm going wrong:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/
As long as we still have cold seasons, it is safe to assume that solar inputs are dominating our own.
The waste heat from solar panels is just the energy from the sun, less whatever gets turned into electricity. No new energy was created - if there was, you could just create a perpetual motion machine to solve the problem.
The only effective ways we have to store solar power are batteries, supercapacitors (once they're viable), large heat masses (such as stone or water), growing plants, or putting energy into chemicals for later storage (electrolysis and storing the hydrogen, forming artificial hydrocarbons, recycling aluminum for aluminum/air power cells, pumping water uphill to power a turbine later, pressurizing gases to later drive a turbine, stuff like that).
Not all of the things I mentioned work at every scale. Some of them are more efficient than others. They may all have advantages and drawbacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
Imagine sitting in the sun on a warm but not hot day. Now imagine you are sitting in a car in the same spot in the same conditions with the windows rolled up. There is no extra energy being released, just the plain old sun, but the temperature you experience is going to be much higher. Indeed, the temperature increase doesn't grow without bound, but it is meaningfully higher.
Do I still have to go through the imagination exercise?
The Earth radiates a finite but not fixed amount of energy into space every year. Radiated power goes up with the 4th power of absolute temperature (modulated by greenhouse effect). The effects of increasing the greenhouse effect from fossil combustion are much greater than the direct waste heat from fossil combustion, because the greenhouse effect slightly amplifies the warming effects of the ~10^17 watts of sunlight reaching Earth's surface. Fossil combustion directly accounts for ~10^13 watts of terrestrial heating. Note the 4 orders of magnitude difference.
Okay, but where is this 30% jump in efficiency going to come from? That seems like a pretty big leap!
* A lot of home conditioners are fighting the weather in conditions with poor insulation, running when nobody is home, or running in rooms when people are in different parts of the house.
* Office air conditioners are often set too cold, subjectively speaking, sometimes resulting in workers bringing sweaters or even space heaters to their desks. This is shockingly common. Multi-zone cooling can make things more uniform, and if you can get people to stop using space heaters during the summer, that can make a big difference. Gender is supposedly a huge factor in temperature preferences, and offices are set to men's cooler preferences. In some locations this is exacerbated by the fact that men wear suits and ties while the women wear skirts and weather-appropriate tops.
Personally, I want an air conditioner system that isn't set to a specific temperature, but instead reduces the extreme temperatures outside. So instead of keeping it set at 22 degrees, maybe it would be set to 22 degrees when it's 27 degrees out, but the AC goes to 25 degrees when it's 35 degrees out. I find this more comfortable, because there's less of a shock when going outside or coming inside.
It's exacerbated (good word) by the fact that the large front office has mostly women sitting at low-power PCs, the offices are mostly men at powerful workstations (aka space heaters), and the HVAC ducts run though the office drop ceilings, meaning anyone doing physical projects in the central work space is the least cooled while our receptionist has been seen with a space heater.
https://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/spotstar
Source?
"Gender differences in thermal comfort and use of thermostats in everyday thermal environments". Building and Environment, Volume 42, Issue 4, April 2007, Pages 1594-1603
The biological reasoning, as I understand it, is that men have a higher ratio of heat-generating muscle than women.
When I first moved to NYC, I was bewildered by all the women walking around with scarves and summer dresses; it was explained to me that this was a strategy to optimize being comfortable in the outdoor heat, and then having something to withstand the frigid offices.
(Personally, I'm of the opinion that one should acclimate to their climate, and folks who hate the heat wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't coddle themselves with AC all the time.)
I agree, to an extent. I mean, bumping the temperature that you can be comfortable in by 10 or 15 degrees is reasonable (up or down). I lived in southern Arizona as a child, where 80 degree nights were heaven after 110 degree days. I'd argue that AC wasn't coddling there, though. "But it's a dry heat" has special meaning for me. AC was usually set around 80 or 85.
During some of those same years, we stayed with family in my Grandparents' house: 2 aging window ACs, 90 degree heat, 90% humidity. We spent most of our time outside and slept in an un-conditioned room with the fan blasting. It's doable, but not my preference. A few weeks certainly wasn't enough to acclimate, and I think after a few years I'd probably still prefer to be in a (somewhat) cooled room.
On the other hand, I lived somewhere cold during my early teens. The home was often around 50 degrees with all the radiators blasting, and we dealt with that too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/chilly-at-work-a-...
WFH = less traffic, less industrial building construction, less heating/cooling of empty spaces (offices at night, homes during day), less indoor lighting usage (homes are usually very well lit from outside light while most cubical jungles are lit by fluorescent lighting).
Wanna save the environment? WFH!
No-one should mind if they have it on 18 in winter and the sun heats the room to 20 in the afternoon, but a heat pump on auto will start cooling to maintain the room at 18.
A less straightforward change for further automation would be to make that temperature depending on the humidity. On a dry day, 28°C is perfectly fine, on a humid day it's way too hot. I can't be bothered to adjust my desired temperature depending on humidity, but a computer could easily do that.
Although to be honest where I live, we wouldn't need it. We never really need to heat and cool on the same day.
On the Lowes.com site they have a specification checkbox for "high/low temperature setting" or something similar on each model's details but it doesn't seem searchable there. I don't see such a feature designation at HomeDepot.com as of right now. Amazon's are mixed depending on the seller and model it seems.
I know Nest lets you set separate heating and cooling points if you do the manual programming instead of letting it autolearn. https://nest.com/support/article/What-is-Heat-Cool-mode EcoBee and Hive I'm sure have similar features.
Having separate heating and cooling setpoints only seems natural for something that automatically switches between heating and cooling.
- http://www.fujitsugeneral.co.nz/heat-pumps
- http://www.mitsubishi-electric.co.nz/heatpump/c/7656/high-wa...
I wonder how many people have respiratory problems that they chalk up to allergies and whatnot that are actually due to the breathing overly-dry A/C air.
In one office I worked at, the AC controls were not accessible, and because there was no dress code whatsoever, everyone complained about the temperatures being too low. There was a TI office in the same building, and because everyone was in business casual or higher, they didn't have the same problems.
Designing uniforms which look professional and composed but which also ventilate correctly could considerably raise optimal office temperatures.
Just look at the hoodie pre and post zuckerberg.
If Mark had instead wore a tank-top and board shorts 50% of SF would be wearing that year round instead.
Hoodie and jeans is an okay uniform inside a business (though I would argue that if they're not well-kept, it lowers the standards of the people in the office), but in customer-facing roles I think it's inappropriate. It can be done well, but most hoodies and most pairs of jeans are an aesthetic disappointment, since they're built for casual warmth and gold panning respectively.
I would not trust a bank which faces its customers with hoodies, T-shirts, and jeans. The appropriate attire for a clerk usually involves a shirt (especially with a vest) or one/two tone blouse, and trousers or a skirt. Makes you look kempt, but dynamic. A unifying visual theme for staff also makes it simpler to identify them. If the clerks all have a consistent uniform, the custodial staff a different but thematically matched uniform, it makes it simpler to navigate a customer-facing office. I think Hooters does a good job of this, it is easy to locate and discern the staff from other guests, and contributes to the environment (a casual, consistent dining establishment which has attractive, well-trained, and helpful service staff).
You say that "face customers with hoodies, t-shirts and jeans" except this is exactly hooter's uniforms. everyone wears uniform t-shirts. The non-wait staff wear jeans or shorts (depending on season/climate).
You're just showing off your innate biases based on current fashion. There's nothing innately better about a specific functional form of dress over another. A suit is not inherently more powerful than a Thawb or a Kimono. If we were going for pure power we'd all be in hockey or football pads or suits of armor.
Uniformness you have somthing on. But you can be uniform on just about any type of dress. Hell you can be uniform on color and totaly different on form and it'd still work.
This also might point out that you are basing things on appearance instead of form.
I did not say that, I explicitly said that the quality and fit of the clothing is of primary importance. You could make the argument that the ceiling is much higher for Kimono, they seem to start around ¥200,000 JPY, and going up from there not for the faint of heart. Thawbs are sorta self-limiting, little can genuinely be done for their quality, about as limited as the range for white dress shirts; some have weird things like false lapels.
A lot of people just leave their computers on (with sleep disabled), just because they don't want to wait 30 sec for the boot or to start their apps.
If you have a one stage furnace - your only option is a one stage AC (vs 2-stage or variable speed AC). You need to upgrade the furnace/blower to take advantage of the more efficient AC model
Mini-Splits are great but much more expensive to purchase (~4k USD per Unit which covers 400-500 sqft). They also don't heat as well as a traditional gas fired furnace.
Heat pumps are probably the way to go in moderate climates but I haven't looked into them in much detail.
http://news.mit.edu/2013/madmec-design-competition-1017
Better summer clothes will help too. I've been pretty impressed by advances in cooling undergarments that are designed to wick away moisture and encourage air flow.
Anyway, all of these seemingly unrelated things contribute to improved AC efficiency.
https://energy.gov/energysaver/geothermal-heat-pumps
The amount of efficiency increase you get depends on the ground temp, which varies by latitude, but I've seen 70% reductions in electricity usage quoted for systems installed in North America.
A side benefit is you no longer have a big, loud heat exchanger running on the side or top of your house. The pump unit for a ground loop can sit inside your garage, it's about the size of two mini-fridges and only emits a quiet hum.
Sidenote: When I bring up ground loop air conditioning in conversation with people, no one has ever heard of it. The technology has a marketing problem. That makes sense in states where electricity is cheap, but in places like California I'm surprised the state hasn't mandated them for new installations and offered tax breaks to give it some momentum.
Also, the ground-source heat-pumps aren't cheap. They are in the $7-10k range - just for the unit - and not many people know how to repair them as they are a bit of a specialty item in the HVAC industry.
1. Drilling the wells is not actually that expensive depending where you are.
For me, 3 300 ft wells, bored, piped, and grouted, was about 5k.
2. The units can be gotten for that price with install.
You need to take into account the fact that they are significantly more efficient at both heating, and cooling, and hot water, over their lifetime.
(also, their specs and submittal data usually have real numbers, giving you mappings from incoming water temperature/etc to EER, not BS numbers like most outdoor air A/C units)
They would also be cheaper if they sold more of them :)
3. The units are much easier to keep working, and pretty much never die. They are made much better than the average heat pump. As for your coils, yeah, doing horizontal loops is not a good plan in most cases, though cheaper.
With the 30% federal tax credit that used to exist, a state tax credit, etc, i paid 10k all told.
I made that back in 2 years (the electric bill in the winter went from 600 a month to 100. Yes, the heat pump was functioning properly)
In areas of the country where well drilling is more common, it's a great option. I wouldn't do it in say, the bay area.
But note: none of the wells have to be that expensive to drill, and in fact, when done during new construction, they are often really cheap.
It's just a matter of, in various parts of the country, limited set of people have well drilling rigs because it's not that common. So part of the cost may be "having some guys drive a well drilling rig 5-6 hours to come handle it"
I have three friends/co-workers that had the systems installed. None were particularly impressed with the average cost savings. They said bills went down, but not dramatically. One person had the whole system redone at the suggestion of another HVAC contractor (saying the first cut many corners) the re-done system wasn't much better.
While they may "pretty much never die" this is basically the "cheap on average, but expensive for the unlucky person" argument. This quickly turns into a prisoner's dilemma. No one buys because of potential repair costs, therefore everyone suffers (from higher bills, and eventually global warming).
Wells are not always an option depending on what your land is sitting on. If you are over a big granite deposit, good luck.
Yeah, i lived near a place where wells were incredibly common, so there were plenty of well drillers. I can believe 30k installed. With the 30% federal tax credit that used to exist, and Maryland's 30% state tax credit, it can be worth it. Now, without the 30% federal tax credit, it's probably only worth it on new home construction.
"I have three friends/co-workers that had the systems installed. None were particularly impressed with the average cost savings. They said bills went down, but not dramatically. One person had the whole system redone at the suggestion of another HVAC contractor (saying the first cut many corners) the re-done system wasn't much better. "
This depends a lot on where you live, the climate, etc. Also how much you are spending on heating/cooling. You know all this. I was in a fairly large house in a climate that seems 90+ summers and ~25-30 winters. This kinda sucks for heat pumps. It's also the case that, as it's become more popular (relatively), there are some crappy untrained contractors looking to make a buck. I definitely did a bunch of research, and talked to a bunch of contractors before doing the system. I think out of 5-6 contractors, 1 was clearly a snake, and 1 didn't really know what they were doing based on the questions i asked. 3 could tell me intricate technical details about the systems (IE one launched into a discussion of the merits of parallel vs series vertical piping and reynolds numbers), etc.
FWIW: I've also meant plenty of happy vertical closed loop people. I haven't met any happy horizontal open or closed loop people.
That said, unlike the air based units[1], all, for example, of the waterfurnace units have detailed submittal that tell you, for a given entering water temperature, what the EER/COP will be, what the pressure drop should be, the leaving air temperature, etc.
http://www.waterfurnace.com/literature/7series/SD2700AN.pdf
Most of these things are easily amenable to sensors. I had an arduino and a bunch of sensors that told me whether the system was performing okay.
After they first flushed the lines, they weren't sure they got everything out of it and told me to try it. So I did, and the measurements told me something was off. System worked, when cooling, water temps were raising too quickly. They ended up digging the manifold back up, and there was a rock in it (terrain is fun!) After redoing the manifold, everything was perfect.
So i can also believe that if you aren't watching the till, you may not know if the system is doing okay. But at least, unlike most random heat pumps, i feel like I could know and track that stuff pretty well. Overall, my system actually overperformed (which means they probably didn't need to go as deep as they did, but such is life).
[1] This data exists, it's just not usually easy to get for air source heat pumps unless you are an installer/technician.
So they do something like:
outlet | | manifold inlet in the ground | a bunch of pipes formed into U's, stuck in very deep vertical holes filled with thermal grout | | manifold outlet in the ground | | inlet
The manifolds look like this: https://www.geohydrosupply.com/index.php/fittings/socket-fus...
If it's done in series, each u-bend connects to a set of two outlets on that manifold. If it's done in parallel, each u-bend connects to a single outlet on each of two manifolds, one in, one out.
Here's a drawing: https://blog.heatspring.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/paral...
If you can imagine a really huge refrigerant loop, that's what they are, with water+glycol as the refrigerant going through the pipes. But the water only moves in this loop, it's never going into the ground, etc.
Open loop systems exist, and those are the ones where they are sucking something in one pipe, and pushing it out the other.
Sometimes this is done in a pond, sometimes a well, etc. What happens depends a lot of the design (horizontal, vertical, etc).
Open loops are pretty uncommon.
I'm surprised about the earth movement ruining coils. The installations I've seen pictures of show coils with pretty large radii (maybe 18"), I'd think the earth would have to move a lot to do that, and if it's doing that I'd worry about the foundation. Were these small coils? Is the surface really close to the water table?
We have winter lows below 10F/-10C and summer highs above 85F/30C. But the ground temperature is a relatively uniform 50F - useful for both heating (less important, because natural gas is cheap and efficient) and cooling. It's not so useful when the average temp is above your desired room temp.
http://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_152.shtml
In the same vein, rejecting heat to the cooler night air is a lot more efficient than using hot day air.
You can operate a chiller at night and generate a bunch of ice efficiently. During the day, you can melt the ice for cooling at day -- without operating any sort of compressor.
Once the melted water gets higher than the desired chilled water temperature, you can turn on the chiller, but you use the water for heat rejection -- which is still colder than the hot outside air.
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/ice-energy-will-provide-1-mw...
Though the NYTimes article points out that the improvement from AC efficiency is mostly related to peak demand shaving as well, so it serves a similar purpose.
Their commercial page is here:
https://www.ice-energy.com/residential/
What other ways can consumers compare the efficiency of A/C units? I would think some standardized testing and labels would be required.
Currently the minimum is a SEER of 13, but I've seen units as high as 22 advertised.
EDIT: I should mention that SEER uses different units for each part of the ratio -- BTUs of heat moved vs watt-hours expended. COP is dimensionless, and EER is just SEER but for a specific operating point. SEER extends the measurement through an entire "season", and so it theoretically gives a more realistic picture of overall efficiency.
You can get ground source heat pumps that are 50 SEER, 5.3 COP (and they'll provide all your hot water, too)
There used to be a federal tax incentive of 30% of the cost, no max, but it expired at the end of 2016.
Everyone knows GS heat pumps are more efficient.
A SEER 13-16 system might last 15-20 years (if you're lucky), while a SEER 22 system could break down much earlier at about the 10 year mark. You can sometimes replace specific parts, but depending on what breaks, it may not be cost effective.
In short, the only way we're moving to more efficient AC systems is if costs come down significantly, we see some major innovation in the field, or the government provides significant financial incentives.
As an aside, I also think we could achieve energy efficiencies by increasing the insulation in houses. It's unbelievable how much hot/cool air is lost through windows, doors, crawl spaces, and attics.
Brushless / electronically commutated DC motors are pretty interesting, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushless_DC_electric_motor
These motors are microcontroller-based. Apparently there was a rash of bad GE X13 motors in the early 2000's traced to bad thermistors. Unfortunately the board is potted in an insulating compound that makes board-level repair rather impractical.
My first motor's controller failed after about 8 years. It was cheaper to just buy a new motor vs. replacing only the controller. The second motor's rotor started grinding against the stator after about 13 months. I pulled the controller from that motor and installed it on the first motor (since it was near-perfect duplicate of the original motor). That ran for 14 months before the second controller failed.
I've been running the third (Nidec) motor for about 2 months. I'll be interested to see how to holds up long-term.
We went from SEER 10 to SEER 15. With the rebalancing that the contractor did, our house is much more comfortable with the thermostat at 80 than it was under the old system at 73.
With 2008 not being so long ago, neither job security nor resale value are that promising. We're still rebuilding consumer confidence after nine years. The economic recovery in the US is largely in a handful of major metropolitan areas pulling up the averages, with large swathes of the country still struggling. This needs to improve or some government incentive program like you mention must take it into account if we're going to sell capital-intensive home upgrades.
Anytime there are multiple standards for manufacturers to choose from, customer confusion is guaranteed.
This seems to be primarily an issue with copper coils. I was bitten by this with a brand new system that I had installed about 9 or 10 years ago. It was pretty tough to eat the labor costs of having a new coil installed (that was covered under warranty) as well as a complete refrigerant fill (at the time ~$900 for the full R410A fill) on a system that was less than one year old. Its been good since then though!
Nobody cares enough about EnergyStar to cut it, so I doubt it will be cut. It made it through the last time Congress was under Republican control totally unmolested, so I really doubt anybody is going to bother with it now.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
I'm not saying there's no reason to worry, but there's also no reason to pretend that having the Democrats move pollution overseas solves global problems.
Democrats don't want to abolish every regulation possible in order to maximize corporate profits.
Democrats don't want to cut healthcare and entitlement programs in order to give massive tax cuts to rich people.
Democrats don't want to defund Planned Parenthood and are not rabidly anti-abortion.
Democrats don't want to ban gay marriage.
Democrats don't work their asses off trying to suppress minority votes.
Democrats don't want to prevent refugees from war zones from seeking shelter in the United States.
I can go on.
Basically, the idea that Democrats and Republicans are nearly identical is popular only amongst people who don't pay attention to politics because they are wealthy and privileged enough to not be directly affected by any of it. But if you ask a low-income woman, for example, I guaran-fuckin-tee you that she will gladly educate you on the finer details of decades of Republican oppression of women.
I'm not going to defend Bill Clinton. He made a lot of mistakes, including, as you say, making drastic, misguided changes to welfare and being "tough on crime". Although, for what it's worth, he has recently apologized for some of those mistakes [1].
In any case, fast-forward 17 years to today. Democrats and the Republicans are very, very different parties. I stand by my original statement: the only people who believe the two parties are similar are those who aren't paying attention.
--
[1]http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/15/politics/bill-clinton-1994-cri...
There are a handful of figures to whom this does not apply, but the greater party apparatus fights tooth and nail against any substantive change (on the grounds that the current strategy is the only way to win elections, even as they lost all three branches of the national government and are irrelevant in more and more states) so I'm not holding my breath.
Bill Clinton had an agreement with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security that was only stopped because the Lewinsky scandal broke.
>Democrats don't want to ban gay marriage.
Who passed DOMA? Obama was against gay marriage until it became clear that it was going to get passed.
>Democrats don't work their asses off trying to suppress minority votes.
No, they just work their asses off to keep minorities poor and beholden to the state because that makes them good Democrat voters.
>Democrats don't want to prevent refugees from war zones from seeking shelter in the United States.
We wouldn't have refugees in Syria seeking shelter if Obama hadn't bombed Syria so much we literally ran out of bombs.
>But if you ask a low-income woman, for example
If that woman became a high income woman, she'd be much less likely to vote Democratic. The Democrats have no incentive to actually help her, only to make her more beholden to the state.
That, and generally Republicans tend to do far less cutting than they say they are going to. They talk about it to get votes, but they rarely actually follow through. Again, see the last time they had control of Congress, when spending was considered to be through the roof when the deficit was only $187 billion. And, that was when they could actually manage to pass legislation, unlike the current mess they're in right now.
So, no, it's not actually me being Pollyannaish at all. I'm being extremely cynical. I think they're basically lying about wanting to and they're too incompetent to manage it even if they did want to.
[0] http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-470
"GAO's investigation shows that Energy Star is for the most part a self-certification program vulnerable to fraud and abuse. GAO obtained Energy Star certifications for 15 bogus products, including a gas-powered alarm clock."
You could argue that people are not willing to go vegetarian or even vegan - but at least level the numbers when comparing it with other solutions: If everyone would go vegetarian, their source states 132 gigatons of CO2 reductions.
I also liked this quote from the report:
> As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change.
You can still eat your way to obesity on a vegan diet - oreos are vegan, after all. Considering that the obesity epidemic is currently the number one driver for health care costs in USA, and it's only expected to get worse (http://dailybruin.com/2011/10/26/obesity_has_become_an_overs...), we could probably vastly reduce costs (and therefore emissions) by just eating a little less, vegan or no.
Edit: why the downvotes?
See this paper on effective CO2 reductions: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
I speak without bias on the subject, since I am actually a vegetarian myself. Going by the numbers, it's moderately effective, but not the most effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Note: the more potential uses of a resources, the more vulnerable it is to Jevons effects, where people use a resource more in response to being able to use it more efficiently.
The real benefit of energy efficiency is not that it reduces energy use by itself, but that it reduces the utility loss from implementing the caps and taxes necessary to actually reduce total usage.
That's a pretty apt general description of Las Vegas.
[0]: http://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/30576/Heating-or-Cooling-...
They didn't give a damn when those cities were first founded. The issue wasn't probably even on the mind of anyone on the planet. Same is true about cities in seismically-active regions.
It's too late to fix that. You'd have to convince millions to abandon their homes and go... somewhere else.
It's easier to irrigate a flat desert with fertile soil than to move the flat terrain and fertile soil closer to a water source.
Food production is a fairly important component of sustainable human societies, and a major reason for the US (California particularly) having inhabited deserts and semi-arid regions.
You can't stop people from moving and aggregating. Relocating hundreds of millions of people into freshly-built temperate cities is obviously impractical, not to mention more resource-intensive in the short and medium term than air conditioning their current residences. We have to develop techniques that work with the world as it is, not just pine for utopias that might have been.
You obviously could live there... it would just be unpleasant.
I lived a year in Singapore where temperatures were in the 80-90 range. I stayed on-campus at NUS and was lucky to have a room with A/C, but it wasn't common. The majority of students make do with big fans and windows. I remember working next to a campus Starbucks outside, marveling at how well designed it was to make students moderately comfortable without A/C. There was an enormous fan, and the area was covered and designed to facilitate air flow.
After my time there I came back to the U.S. and can much more readily handle persistently hot temperatures. It's fairly unusual to expect it to be cool all the time.
I also just got back from a trip to Oman where it was routinely above 90 or 100 all day long, and people there make do without A/C as well.
But, the invention of AC and the development of super-strong residential building codes in response to destructive hurricanes has steered the last ~70 years of home construction towards sealed concrete boxes with air conditioning infrastructure built in.
Many of the classic passive cooling techniques of the old Florida homes are not even legal now. The benefit is your house doesn't collapse in a hurricane.
Evap at 80% humidity is about half the rate at 50%. Still functional.
No, it isn't. I have an enormous oak tree that overhangs the southern roof. My windows have a very low level of solar radiation they allow through. The ambient air temp at night is almost 80F. The house is built of concrete block, and stores heat during the day, releasing it at night. We're routinely at 60-80% humidity.
Just waiting for some solar shingles to be available (hurry up Elon!). Don't much care how long I run the AC every day as long as I net out 0 with solar generation.
We've got the technology now to evolve this even further by doing computer simulations to come up with better designs, and by techniques like 3D house printing with concrete to make intricate ventilation systems that can circulate air through the floors and up through walls with zero energy cost.
A thousand years ago you had to build things this way, you had no alternative, but now it's taken for granted that air-conditioning will solve all problems.
Construction makes a huge difference -- especially airflow. Whoever made my current apartment was a genius because in the winter, the south side gets sun through the windows for about 6 hours, while in the summer there is no direct sunlight in any window. My previous apartment was an oven.
North American attitudes to seasonal temperatures are different than where I live now. In the winter here, the lows here are near freezing (1-2C), and we always have a few days in the summer well over 40C (105F) (luckily once it gets over 35, the humidity drops quite a bit). It's quite normal here not to heat in the winter, nor cool in the summer. Experiencing the seasons is considered to be "culturally enlightening" ;-) And joking aside, I've found that I like this way of living. Like you, I would never have thought it possible before I tried it, though.
Having said that, you can't always do it. I need some heat in the winter these days, due to health conditions. I worry about my mother in law who, at 80, usually refuses to run her AC in the summer. You do need to be careful of your health. You also need to be sensitive to the fact that architects build for the prevailing culture. Where I live, they work very hard to deal with this kind of thing. Where you live, they will probably optimise for something else.
Like I said, it's a very cultural thing -- and that's the beauty of the world. There are different cultures and values, each with their own charms. It's totally fair to say that you like the way you live now (and more power to you!) But it's not impossible (nor bad) to live differently.
It's so simple, I do not know why this isn't part of the building code in hot places. People may not like it for their homes, but for commercial buildings with flat roofs, it's a no-brainer.
Looks like good progress. Less penetration into the residential areas, but progress.
Maybe people shouldn't live in a desert if can't handle the heat.
Random Texas river temperature ranges from 55º (winter) to 85º (summer). The world is a big place with lots of climate variety. :-)
In Australia we have houses built with sizeable gaps to allow the frames to warp with the heat, while also allowing air to easily flow in and out of the building. Windows are single-glazed. Exactly what you don't want in a German house, in other words.
In Germany the houses are heat traps and the focus has largely been to conserve energy in winter time (and rightfully so). I've had doors here which stop closing smoothly in the summer because of the slightest warping, the gaps are so tiny. Houses are often air-tight, and the external walls are half a meter thick due to the hefty insulation. All windows are at least double-glazed, one place I've stayed was triple.
New German builds using the Passivhaus specification are generally pretty good as they have constant machine-generated airflow at a set temperature, but as far as I am aware, this specification can only be built new - it's not possible (within reasonable cost) to retrofit an older house to the new specifications. For those, air conditioning seems the only reasonable option moving forward.
what does that do to the river, fish, algae, waste processing, etc. If you ran say houston with river water how many degrees would it be?
Using an open water cooling mechanism would work in hot and dry climates, but then again those are the areas where water is a lot more precious and you don't want to waste it through evaporation. (In a highly humid environment, evaporative cooling does not work because the water has nowhere to go.)
A heat pump is the only mechanism that works for this kind of climate. The exchange could be improved by using water or the ground to absorb the heat, but those solutions are way more expensive to install and can have environmental concerns of their own.
I'm generally impressed with the energy initiatives in Germany and have been following the Passive House movement for a while, but some technologies only work for specific climates or only in one direction.
That said, fiberglass insulation mostly only helps against convection cooling/heating. I.e. through the movement of air. Summertime heat is mostly conductive and radiative i.e. near infrared. Insulation doesn't do much to stop that.
Shade trees however help this big time. A large tree placed in the right spot to shade a house in the afternoon can replace as many as seven window air conditioner units.
The more you insulate the more you need to ensure you have proper ventilation, which is a sort of paradox.
"It matters, researchers say, because cooling has a direct relationship with the building of coal-fired power plants to meet peak demand. If more air-conditioners are humming in more homes and offices, then more capacity will be required to meet the demand. So 1.6 billion new air-conditioners by 2050 means thousands of new power plants will have to come on line to support them."
We https://flair.co offer demand response tech for minisplit control that can help prevent having to build all the 'peaker plants'. This gets extra interesting when you add intermittent supply (solar/wind) and grid tied storage (Tesla has been making big pushes here among others). Hopefully, we are able to scale these up in parallel to prevent a bunch of coal fired plants from being built for the 1-3% of the year with the hottest days.
Or not, where California has brought enough solar power online to the point that during peak times it has to pay to offload power to other states because some natural gas operators can't (won't?) shutdown...
º = ordinal indicator
° = degree
1. How did you notice this?
2. Why does it matter, or when would I want to use one instead of the other for reasons other than being technically correct?
http://i.imgur.com/3YcxWIy.png
Failing all of the above, stoicism isn't that bad, honest, neither are life style changes that shift high activity periods to later in the day, they are widely practised in Mediterranean countries.
Right now according to my phone we're at a high of 89 F (31.6 C) and 83% humidity, low of 80 degrees tonight with that same or possibly greater humidity. If I open my windows tonight I get to experience my sheets sticking to my body like sweaty clothing every time I move and a thin layer of moisture on all of my possessions (including electronics) tomorrow morning. And this is not atypical of summer on the mid-Atlantic.
I just flew out to Calgary and we have a nice hot day with 40% humidity and it feels great.
If you've only ever lived in dry areas I can understand not being aware, but even with AC, in places with high humidity it's just disgusting in the heat, and chilling to the bone in the cold in a way that dry areas just never get.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enwave
CO2 is just one of many many forms of pollution. Think you're doing your part by purchasing a hybrid or electric vehicle? There are barrels of oil that go into those tiers, the plastics, not to mention all the pollution that goes into battery production. If your car is fuel efficient, the best thing you can do for the environment is drive it until the wheels fall off. When you do need to purchase a replacement, get a used hybrid or electric.
Climate change/CO2 is not the problem. It's the symptom of rampant consumerism. We can't buy and purchase our way out of destroying the planet. We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years. Companies need to be praised for smaller factories and lower sales for products that cost more and last longer.
That is a very very huge shift in the way we think. I'm not sure if it's even remotely feasible or what it would take to convince people, industry, the world to simply consume less.
What I would propose is we start now thinking about what sustainable architecture looks like, and start trying to imagine more permanent cultural edifices. I.e. permaculture. I don't think we need to worry too much about the ecological cost of replacing our current physical plant with a permaculture one--the ecological costs of transition are dwarfed by the ecological savings we will reap over 100 years.
That said, we should either go big (final stage permaculture) or not try at all. There's no sense in half measures at this point, we either build communities 100x more efficient, or we do as you say: make do with the stuff we have.
Add in a lot of NIMBY residents who don't want any new residents moving into their neighborhoods, good luck making the city appealing to anyone who doesn't REALLY want to live there, or else has some business opportunity that makes living in the city worth their while.
Here in the states IMO we'd do better by making suburban lifestyles more efficient. Between electric cars, renewables and more efficient tech of all stripes coming around there's no reason we shouldn't be able to get suburban houses down to carbon-neutral. The amount of transformation major cities would have to undergo to appeal to suburban populations is just unrealistic by comparison.
That makes me sad, because when I envision suburbia, it involves all the NIMBYism (especially in the form of HOAs) you mentioned above, combined with distances that make using a bicycle for transportation unrealistic. I actually enjoy riding my bicycle to and from work (and the grocery store). I would dread a commute in a vehicle of even 30 minutes.
A bike to work isn't necessarily out of the question either if you live just outside a major city. Some areas have bike trails that can take you quite a distance. But yeah in most cases you'll need a car for virtually everything, that is a downside. My personal commute is only 10 minutes, but I know people who commute up to 1 hour if they work downtown (morning rushour is a bitch).
Changing the buildings is changing the culture. You identify a complete resource cycle, like a weekly grocery habit, and design a replacement. Drop it in, look for another one.
Demand is a trailing indicator. Significant demand for integrated permaculture living won't happen until long after the concept is proven and started scaling.
The demographic shift of increasing the number of retirees per healthy adult will definitively cause suffering. There's a reason why Millennials are putting off having children - they can't afford to.
edit: bring it, millenial whiners...
/s
If not voluntary, how could a place do this without instituting something like a 'one child' policy?
Sure it does, as each national industrializes it solves part of the problem; when they all do it, problem gone.
> It seems that the problem would just move around the globe until we hit critical mass.
You really haven't thought this through.
Even if "children per person" falls slow enough you could even indefinitely increase the rate that new people are added right?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_(UN...
(Interestingly, the above chart was created about 10 years ago; I do wonder how accurate it's been.)
All I meant to point out is that "birth rate falling" doesn't map to "population falling", if the average number of children per couple drops 2.5 to 2.1 then each generation is still larger (and the population still grows exponentially).
The population will continue to grow for a while because of developing countries' life expectancy catching up with developed countries, but unless there are drastic technological breakthroughs to improve life expectancy beyond where developed countries are now, the world population will stop growing fairly soon.
There's no possible way U.S. or global plutocracy is going to be kind and look the other way at attempts to shrink their economy. They'd sooner see the world burn.
I think what it would take, is a genome change. We'd need to be a different species. Perhaps inheritable memory so each generation isn't always forgetting the violence of their ancestors.
It's a creative re-framing of the problem, though. From "how do we force humans to behave better" to "what do humans need to be, in order to behave better".
If we agreed to increase those prices by, say, 5 to 10 times and used the money to fund research towards removing carbon from the atmosphere, the world would become a much better place. Problem is, everybody is afraid of the shock this would cause and everybody thinks only about his little square of the woods.
Regardless of the issues of stated vs. real reasons, the reaction of people in the country was totally predictable: people are enraged. How dares the government raise the fuel price? You get a similar reaction if you try to suggest an emission tax to any driver.
With this mindset, sadly, we won't get anywhere.
Why? Because they allow governments to set policy empirically. You can raise the tax a little, bit-by-bit, until you start seeing negative effects. Carbon taxes allow a legislature of non-economists to procedurally find the maximum reduction that the economy can bear, which is good, because obviously you don't want more than that, and given the nature of the situation you probably don't want less.
The difference between this and a cap-and-trade model is that with cap-and-trade, there's a lot of money tied up in the carbon shares allocated, so lowering the cap is politically impossible. Big corporations like it because they have an easier time acquiring carbon credits than small companies, because they have political influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Incent...
Cap-and-trade worked with other kinds of emissions because those emissions are less common and come only from certain industries, whereas carbon comes from everywhere. As such, it wasn't possible for the acid rain producers to lobby Congress to raise the cap on NOx. Or to not lower it. Furthermore, the market is small enough that it was possible for charitable organizations to make a dent by buying emissions allowances and "retiring" them -- which is extremely unlikely to matter for carbon given the size of the carbon market.
Carbon taxes are fairer and simpler, and it's harder for a company to weasel out. Some observers have suggested that an industry could lobby to be exempt, but this seems unlikely: how many industries have successfully exempted themselves from income tax? From VAT? By contrast, this happened:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-credits-sy...
> a diplomatic cable published last month by the WikiLeaks website reveals that most of the CDM projects in India should not have been certified because they did not reduce emissions beyond those that would have been achieved without foreign investment. Indian officials have apparently known about the problem for at least two years.
>[...] Today, more than 720 Indian projects have been approved and have gained some 120 million tonnes' worth of carbon credits, a large fraction of the 750 million tonnes issued since 2005 (see 'Cleaning up').
> Yet on the evidence of discussions at the meeting, most of the carbon-offset projects in India fail to meet the CDM requirements set by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w&vl=en
Our disposable-good society is a small fraction of our overall impact on the climate. It is 100% possible to power our world with solar, wind, and batteries while keeping the rest of our lives largely unchanged. The only climate-hostile things we can't easily solve for right now are a) beef and b) air travel. Every single HN reader can go all-electric today, and most can sign up for a renewable-energy program through their utility.
If you think our society should build fewer, higher-quality goods then I agree. But doing that won't come close to stopping climate change.
So no, plant-based foods alone is not the holy grail, and also not realistic to force this upon people in the first place. In my opinion, what should happen is that the relatively new plant-based hamburgers which are very very similar to meat would gradually replace the 'mass market' meat for things like fastfood restaurants. But that on it's own isn't enough, we need better production methods for these plants too, so we don't have huge transportation pollution.
And airtravel is not the only big issue, large container-ships are a much bigger problem. Once in international waters, many switch to burning very dirty oil, instead of 'clean' diesel which they only use in local waters to comply with emission norms. Not only that, ships are built to last for decades, and companies won't convert them to full electric without economic incentives.
Now all we need is someone to manufacture used cars, since nobody buys new in this utopia.
Edit: to the downvoters: I guess I have to spell it out for you, but my point was that building efficient A/C units makes sense because eventually someone somewhere has to buy new.
Nobody is proposing we magically manufacture billions of new units of everything tomorrow and kick out all the stuff we purchased yesterday.
Turnover takes years or decades anyway. Just like the EU did not make possession of incandescent light bulbs illegal, they just mandated that all new ones sold beyond a certain date must meet energy efficiency standards that can't be met by incandescent ones.
> We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years.
Cars already last more than a decade. As long as moore's law is not entirely dead cell phones will be obsolete simply by advances in the underlying hardware and software exploiting those hardware advances, you don't even need planned obsolescence for that.
And ultimately it depends on the individual product whether it requires more energy to build or during its lifetime. Without checking I bet a space heater will burn significantly more energy during its operation than manufacture, and replacing it with a heat pump would be a net gain at almost any point in its lifecycle.
https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm
It is a big shift in thinking, but consider this: most work schedules see people driving between the same two places twice a day, five times a week. Reducing that distance can give you back considerable time, not to mention reducing costs (even if you drive) and reducing stress. And before someone counters with the inevitable "I don't get paid enough", you should be getting paid enough to live as close to work as possible, or they should let you telecommute. It's also arguable you can afford to live closer to work:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
This is a cultural problem that goes beyond just consumerism (although that's the elephant in the room) to things like corporate culture. I'm also still using a Nokia N900, but every year I more and more feel the pull to jump to an Android phone. Having a hardware keyboard for Emacs+org-mode is quite handy, though.
http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climat...
For example, how would you passively control humidity. It's 89F and 55% humidity where I'm sitting right now, outside airflow feels like wet hot death.
There is zero reason why American housing cannot incorporate, as a minimum, more thermal mass -- like German apartments routinely do.
Furthermore, many American cities are simply not that dense. There are few places in the U.S. that are really densely urban with lots of skyscrapers. So most passive solar methods would be applicable for most structures here.
I grew up in the Deep South, where 98F was quite common in the summer, with much higher humidity than 55%, and I have lived in the High Desert, where I did my long walks for exercise (up to 6 miles) after the sun set so temps would drop to a cool 99F. The temperature and humidity you list does not qualify in my book as "wet, hot death" and I see zero reason that a building could not be made reasonably comfortable in such conditions using mostly passive techniques.
I don't know why it never crossed my mind before but now when I transition from indoors to outdoors (and back) I notice the humidity delta as much as the temperature delta.