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We in EU also have AC, what’s the difference?
North vs South. AC is not very common in homes in countries like Netherlands and Germany. Mostly because it’s only really hot for one or two months and those are the months that Germans and Dutch people are on holiday. So it’s either go on holiday or stay at home for one summer and buy AC.
Most of my friends in Germany and UK do not have AC, or have such undersized units for their homes it barely makes a difference. Or they don’t want to run it because energy costs to utilize it during the day are ridiculous.
What I’ve learned at least about the houses in the UK is that the homes are old and drafty so it’s not about the size of the unit but the insulation being poor.
Shit insulation is actually more of a pro argument for AC. I mean, the houses in the USA are made out of cardboard and gipsum. They dont insulate a thing. My house has great insulation. In summer I just keep the windows closed and roll down the shutters during daytime and it’s freezing cold inside. At night we get cool wind from either the North or Baltic sea, we then open up the windows to freshen the air up a bit.
I wish we did in Sweden.
It’s fairly rare in family homes.
You can’t buy a window unit? I literally don’t get this…explain how you can’t go to a hardware store in your country and buy an air conditioner or order one online
The northern most states in the USA also have the same arrangement. It’s (historically) in a cooler climate, where a “heatwave” is anything above 80F, so just open your windows if it’s stuffy indoors. Combine that with fossil-fuel heating, and heat-pumps just aren’t a thing.
It’s pretty much the same here. Fossil-fuel heating is fairly rare though.
Heating is usually done with geothermal heat-pumps, district heating, direct electric heating, or with regular heat-pumps which are actually fairly popular.
They don’t exist in my country and our windows doesn’t work with one either. We don’t have sliding windows.
You can of course install real air conditioning but that’s expensive as fuck.
A lot of houses were built before window units were a thing, so you get windows that just won’t fit them, and you need slightly to moderately more complicated systems to make it work, like “air conditioner bolted to wall with a hose into the window or through a wall” style.
Their climate is also on average vaguely more forgiving in the heat, with temperature ranges that are comparable but lower sustained highs and generally lower humidity resulting in generally more tolerable conditions even during the warm season.
Remember that Europe is much further north than we typically think. Italy is as far north as new York, and Germany is about as far north as Canada. “Why aren’t air conditioners as popular in nova Scotia as they are in Florida” has a more obvious ring to it.Finally, if you’re used to it it’s not a problem you feel compelled to solve.
literally me now that summer’s getting real annoying here
I am at this point considered liberal, but I have to say that I do like guns. Range shooting is super fun. If I could I would take up competitive Three Gun as a hobby, but I don’t have a course in my area.
Also, I hike with either my 45-70 ammunition rifle or my .45acp pistol with high grain ammo. Why? I live in Wyoming where we are definitely not on the top of the food chain. Even my pistol is liable to just piss off a bear if it really means business.
.357 lever actions are neat.
I hate guns, but alas there’s just no practical alternative for fulfilling my daily quota of wanton destruction.
Get yourself a bat and a hollow core door.
Bombs aren’t that hard to make. Nor are molotov cocktails.
You’re just lazy.
I do some wonton destruction at the Chinese buffet.
Same, but with a gun.
I like the cut of your jib, good sir (or madam).
Wow, you’re describing use cases we can all agree are legitimate and you didn’t say anything about being careless or reckless, or trigger happy, nor express an impulse to “mag dump” someone. Yeah, that’ll piss off fellow liberals
Guns are amazing when they’re collector items made by Holland & Holland to your custom spec. When they’re mass produced crap, they’re not much different from air soft guns at the shooting range. At least air soft guns don’t kill people.
I love target shooting and do conceal carry, but it does get a bit ridiculous around here. After leaving the Army, it took a lot of training and rigid selfcontrol to call it a “clip” again, just to troll the gravy seals down at the range. I laugh as they correct me, and the owner, who knows me, just shakes his head and calls me an ass.
Lol yeah I’m a Southern progressive, and I love guns just to do range practice. But absolutely understand why they’re hard to get/going away. People suck and it’s why we can’t have nice things.
Guns are hard to get and going away? Clearly there’ve been some changes in the South since I was last there.
I was pretty sure every breakfast in Texas came with a side of biscuits and gravy and a revolver.
Yeah, I would definitely carry a .44 magnum in grizzly country.
Man, if you think target shooting is fun, wait until you go skeet or trap shooting! That’s the most fun shooting there is IMO. Give it a try if you haven’t already. I just bought a really nice Franchi over-under 20 gauge specifically for trap and skeet. It would make a great upland game bird gun too, but I don’t really have any interest in that.
Bear spray is usually a better choice, on account of a whole lot of factors. At the very least you should bring both and issue a warning with bear spray.
This is sound theoretical advice but I don’t think most people consider the practical implications of it. Bear spray is only effective out to about 20 feet. A bear can run 30 mph. This means that in order to use that bear spray you need to be close enough for that bear to have its paws on you in less than two seconds. I’m not deluded enough to think I have the balls to stand my ground while a 1200 pound grizzly bear is charging me. I’m reaching for the gun before I reach for the spray which makes it largely useless in practice. I still carry it but it’s not particularly reassuring when you put it in context.
The way bear spray works, you create a big cloud of spicy air in between you and the bear and the bear runs into that cloud. The bear very quickly decides to go do something else with it’s life the second it gets a breath of that air. You don’t wait until the bear is close enough to hit directly with with spray, you spray as soon as the bear starts charging or gets too close. It’s manual or operations is very different from pepper spray for people.
Just like you should be well-trained when carrying your gun, you should have had the training on how to properly use bear spray. This concern you’ve voiced suggests you bought a can and assumed you knew how to use it.
Here’s a fairly decent video to start with.
I carry bear spray in black bear country. Thankfully I don’t live anywhere near grizzly bears (although they’re talking about reintroducing them here). I thought I remembered reading somewhere that bear spray isn’t very effective against grizzlies.
sn’t very effective against grizzlies
To be fair, neither is a single round fired center of mass unless it’s like a 12.7×99 mm.
Are you familiar with the .45-70 round?
Got to shoot an assault rifle in the army. Would definitely buy one if I could.
You seem to live in Finland. Owning an AK or AR is highly achievable.
Assault rifles are cool and all, but SMGs are just fun. The ugliest but most fun gun I’ve ever shot was a 9mm Colt SMG. A factory made kludge to fit 9mm into an AR-15 derivative. The weight and overall design being originally for 5.56mm in mind meant that full auto with 9mm had basically zero felt recoil.
Most fun assault rifle was the Vz. 58. Less controllable than an any kind of full auto 5.56mm AR-15 derivative, but so fun I didn’t care. And it reloaded with clips.
The M16 is definitely the best, most fun rifle I’ve ever shot. Hitting a pop-up target 300 feet out in less than 2 seconds is pretty rewarding.
till
American checks out.
Middle English til, tille “(going) onward to and into; (extending) as far as; (in time) continuing up to;” from Old English til (Northumbrian) “to,” and from Old Norse til “to, until,” both from Proto-Germanic *tilan (source also of Danish til, Old Frisian til “to, till,” Gothic tils “convenient,” German Ziel “limit, end, goal”).
A common preposition in Scandinavian, serving in the place of English to, probably originally the accusative case of a noun otherwise lost but preserved in Icelandic tili “scope,” the noun used to express aim, direction, purpose (as in aldrtili “death,” literally “end of life”). Also compare German Ziel “end, limit, point aimed at, goal,” and till (v.).
As a conjunction, “until, to the time that or when,” from late Old English.
AC is great, but have you ever had DC?
Put them together and you’ve been, thunderstruck.
You understood! Hahahaha!!
Doubly amazing due to these crazy heat waves.
Lived in Europe and US and building and landscape design play a big part on how much you really need AC, well at least they used to. Now I would say for the most part living in either place AC is an important quality of life option as it’s just getting gross everywhere with crazy high temps.
Europeans be like “I live in a 500 years old house! That’s freaking sweet!”
They also be like “Help, I’m dying in my house that has no insulation!”
If you really live in a 500 yo house, the walls are probably like 1 meter thick full stone/brick and the windows are tiny. They stay cold in summer, it’s like living in a cave.
The much more common 60-100 yo houses on the other hand…
ac is fine i guess
It’s like money: Having it isn’t everything, but not having it is.
Weird, AC is very popular in many parts of Europe.
Just like it’s not popular in Alaska…
It must get humid in those igloos tho. Do people who live in igloos have fires inside?
I think some of them
That would be an awesome night out!
We could use AC over here by now, it gets unbearably hot…but man those fuckers use a solid amount of energy and everything is already expensive as hell…so suffering through the heat it is.
We added solar to our house and it cancels out the cost of AC completely with our modern heat pump. And the state and federal government both gave us massive tax breaks and zero interest loans to install the panels and the heat pumps. Our loan payment total is smaller than our old electric bill
I don’t even care about the cost, it’s so hot and humid. We can deal with that once we live through this
I wonder why Euros always get these weird little AC units. Where the hell is the rest of it? I’d it some kind of centralized air refit for their ancient-ass brick houses? So they even make timber framed houses there for normal central ventilation, or ever use wall units? AC in Europe (and GB) is fucking weird.
These are actually pretty awesome units, we got them for a previous house that didn’t have central air / heat originally (baseboard heat / window units) and it was sooooo nice.
Upstairs we ran normal ducts, the basement we had these units.
What’s in the picture is pretty standard for where I live, this is the indoor unit, and there will be an outdoor unit that contains the actual compressor etc. An outdoor unit will sometimes run multiple indoor ones.
A unit for each room is also standard practice.
It’s a ductless mini split and it’s WAY more efficient than the old ducted centralized A/C. Newer homes in the US are getting these too. They’re incredible.
I’m just over here looking at that lineset cover wondering how in the hell whoever installed that is expecting the condensate drain to go up.
That’s the output of a split system, the part doing the actual condensing and fuckery with the air is outside, that’s just a box that can output the cool air. Some are extra fancy and do fan control to move it across the room better.
The only thing in that box is some wires, some fans, and a control board for everything to run off of
That’s only partially true. The evaporator is located on the indoor unit, and that’s the part that gets cold and generates all the condensation. There is a drain hose on the indoor unit that has to be directed outside, and the condensate water will only flow downhill. Up is not an option. This is what makes installing a mini split on an interior wall such a hassle.
So that’s why I’m wondering why the lineset cover goes up in that picture. I guess it’s possible there is another hole punched in the wall behind the unit for the condensate line, which is the normal way to do it. But I have absolutely no idea why, if there is exterior access like that, anyone would not also run the rest of the lineset through the same hole…
Idk how common it is but where I used to work had a split system where for some reason the evaporator unit was also outside like a standard AC unit and then cold air was ducted in and pumped out of one of those boxes
The squareness of the duct made me think of that
Up is not an option
Well, it is, but then you need a pump.
Not to mention I don’t see a way to check the drain pan from the inside. That set up makes me nervous. I’ve got three registers in my house and I check the pan every time I clean the filters. No way I want to deal with an indoor leak.
Maybe this is a through wall system and that’s covering the power cable?
You might be right, but it sure looks like a mini split to me.
Oh it’s possible they totally screwed it up too. I don’t want to say it’s not.
At 40 cents / kwh you learn to tolerate heat very quickly.
That’s fucking nuts; the only time my power bill gets anywhere close to being that high is for three hours a day in June and July (34¢/kwh). For most of the year it’s only 9¢/kwh.
Don’t know how other countries do it, but in the US the home energy sector is highly regulated. Probably one of the only things we do right; but we soon as lawmakers try to propose similar regulations to healthcare and the internet, suddenly it’s “SoCiAlIsM”
At 40 cents/kWh I would buy a solar array.
Gotta buy a house first!
You can get solar panels for balconies in your local home supply store
Oh, yeah, I looked at that. I can get a couple hundred watts of panels that will realistically generate about 300 watt hours of power on my balcony on the sunniest days, given that they won’t be mounted at a very good angle. I can have it charge a battery pack that’ll last a few years. Then I get about 90% efficiency if I’m lucky with the inverter. Even at $0.50/kWh, that’s $0.15/day I’m saving or about $50/year if we just assume a cloudless year-round summer. That’ll save me just enough money to buy a new battery when the first one gets old.
Solar power will get there one day. Its great for many purposes but its still not practical for most apartment dwellers.
These won’t even power a small portable AC, if you have a balcony and it’s on the south side and you have enough m² to angle the panel halfway properly, you’ll be lucky to generate 500 W.
That’s only half the power draw of a small AC unit, and doesn’t even get into the fact that in most places you cannot hook up a solar to your house without an approved inverter with appropriate safety features (otherwise you’d endanger the linemen in case of an outage). Where I live if you still have an old installation with net metering, you also pay a tax based on the inverter capacity (which is good because net metering is bullshit subsidies from the poor to the landowners).
PV energy is good, but apartments are not a reasonable use-case for it. Residential PV is inherently a tool for privileged house owners, and if PV is to help apartment dwellers it’s through grid-scale renewables and dynamic pricing and/or smart grids that provide cheap power for A/C on sunny summer days.
Hello fellow countryman!
I think you grossly overestimate the power consumption of a heat pump (a split heat pump that is). On the hottest period of the year so far, ours used about 1,75kWh for a 40m² space.
One or 2 balcony mounted panels (given the right orientation, even with a suboptimal inclination) will easily deliver that much.
You are however right that most apartments can’t profit much from solar power… The dynamic pricing however can make the cooling really cheap in the summer months. Just switch to non-dynamic pricing before the winter months to get the best year round price.
You might not entirely cover the power consumption of an AC, but you can drastically lower the cost of using one by at least partially generating your own electricity. As for the technical aspects I cannot argue at all, as I have no knowledge whatsoever in that regard.
I can barely afford food. a solar array is super luxury. plus i don’t have place for it anyway.
Jesus, where is this?
California
Yikes. And my yikes is by Australian standards, where the cost of living compared to most parts of the world is pretty high.
Heat is quickly becoming deadly around the globe. Better figure out how to budget that cost, asap.
Keep yourself cool to worsen the problem? sounds like a great plan! /s
AC users anywhere in the world where temperatures / humidity are in a range that humans can adapt to are morons.
Passive cooling and designing buildings to not overheat during summer in the first place is the way. And phoenix or Las Vegas shouldn’t be much more than a gas station, they’re unlivable hellholes without permanently pumping enormous amounts of energy in.
I have AC and heating and live in a very human-fiendly climate. I don’t feel like a moron running it off my green power to heat and cool a very well insulated house beyond what the geothermal handles.
Exactly. You can use a kajillion megawatts to power your A/C, who cares if it’s all renewable. Especially if it’s onsite generated (solar).
Or, you know, buy a solar array. I hear it’s windy in the UK too. 🙄🙄🙄🙄
Or get solar on your roof. Usually when it’s hot enough outside to need AC, then that means the sun is shining
Wait, what? Guns can be used for cooling too?
/s
Yea when you shoot people with them they definitely get colder.
Yeah you just use it to add ventilation holes
We tried guns 90 years ago, and found the results not to our liking.
Yeah but guns have become so much more efficient since then!
