For sure.
I'm from Germany (but with an AC) as well and am always amazed when people tell me that AC makes you sick. Even young people sometimes replicate this "Oh you gotta be careful not to get sick" and would rather be in 30+°C indoors.
How come Germans get sick while the rest of the world seems to be doing fine and is even productive during summer (it feels like Germany grinds to a halt during heatwaves).
Exactly. It is like never turning the heater on once the temperature drops to -10°C (then catching a cold and getting sick).
So once it is too hot, just turn the AC on and you won't get sick or risk a heat stroke either.
We'll come back to this in several months for a winter freeze to see if Europe has basic heating to keep themselves warm (or will they not turn the heaters on for some reason) and in a year, to see if the rest of Europe have learned their lesson to just have basic AC installed for the next heatwave.
In Japan people often claim to be "allergic" to AC too for some reason, and there have been many stories I've heard from foreigners whose Japanese wives refuse to let them run the AC during the night either.
Personally I think their "allergy" is just because most AC units in Japan are disgustingly moldy and never cleaned regularly.
> Several countries require AC installation to be approved by the equivalent of a homeowners association or impose noise ordinances that increase compliance costs and paperwork.
This is not unique to ACs. Anything on the outside of a building requires your co-owners to agree.
Don't get me started on how it works in my country.
People who don't have a balcony are screwed and are entirely dependent on homeowners association which arbitrarily can agree or not, or they can stay indecisive about it and not let you do anything.
Well, if you have a balcony? you just put it there and make the necessary holes for it, problem solved.
The effect is exactly the same - you just have AC installed. In one case you have to go through totally unnecessary hoops, and in other case, you just do whatever you want.
It is not entirely that simple. Condensate water is potential problem if wrongly discharged. But adding sufficient drainage is not that expensive per balcony basis. So it is something that should be fixed.
In a typical mini-split, the water flows to the outside unit and exits the system there, so you either have a pump or a sufficiently sloped pipe from the inside unit to the outside unit.
edit: I guess you could route the drain pipe anywhere if you wanted, so I retract my previous statement.
Into drains in the parking garage in the case of my building. Though thinking more about it now, it's totally reasonable that other buildings might find it easiest to drain to the outside unit.
You can have drain pipes installed, but you can also just collect the water in a bucket and empty it periodically. That requires no extra investment of money, just a tiny bit of your willpower and manpower, depending on the size of the bucket.
There are also systems that spray the water back at the AC unit to cool it down, this is supposed to both improve efficiency and evaporate the water so you don't have to deal with it. I am sure those have some downsides, too.
I am all for solving these problems and making sure they don't cause problems for others. My problem is with the ability for arbitrary people to say "no" to your case, without even considering the options or facts.
Sure thing, you could go to court if they have any problem, but who is going to fight for AC worth $500 for a few years just to get it installed?
Some idiot figuring out that nice hole in cladding is right place to direct it... Or people under balconies when it is not raining not wanting to have water drop on them... In many cases balconies have less than ideal designs.
Exactly. While I personaly don't have a problem with AC condensate dripping down on the street, I can see how some people might not be used to that.
Best would probably be to use the existing rainwater pipes that lead down to the sewers - all building have those. But good luck getting that past your HOA-equivalent, as that will most probably involve some modifications to the building and we can't have that, no!
Multi-logement buildings are not really the issue here. In the US (and outside, but less commonly, but e.g. France has them in the Alps, for the same reason) there are communities with only freestanding houses that privately own the infrastructure serving a number of houses, if I may be blunt: to make things cheaper for local councils and get housing approved, everything from roads to sewer lines.
They force homeowners to decide together (and pay for) everything from road maintenance to what noise levels are allowed.
Another issue they cause is that, of course, the homeowners living there do not just use HOAs to override the wishes of individuals, but also feel disinclined to let the local authorities ... and the locals ... operate as normal there, given that they pay for everything, sometimes literally including the roads in the area around them. These communities may have banks, parks, even beaches, and there are conflicts about who gets to go there, given the local homeowners pay for maintenance. For example, given they clean up left-behind garbage, do people from the nearby town get to play there ... and leave behind more garbage?
The root of the problem is that more housing is no longer a net positive for many communities in a great many places. The increase in taxation income does not justify the extra infrastructure in many places. This means local authorities refuse building projects unless they pay for their own infrastructure. Hence, HOAs are being forced to take over the functions that public authorities used to have ... because local authorities are forcing the responsibilities that local authorities used to have on them. Of course, then the public nature of public space goes into question.
HOAs are companies, with the owners as shareholders, who own the shared infrastructure of the owners. Things like hallways, maybe elevators, gardens, this can even include the roads in a community.
The point of HOAs is to force homeowners to CO-decide (in houses: to make things cheaper for local councils) on what happens to the shared infrastructure. What and how to spend of maintenance and what to change.
> HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?
Home-owner associations in Europe are frequently set up for apartment buildings, in which case, yes, the roof, foundation, hallways, stairwells, main piping, electricity, etc are all legally co-owned.
Primary purpose of HOAs is to save for & plan long-term maintenance on the entire building.
HOAs for neighbourhoods, or blocks with single-family homes or terraced houses are pretty rare in Europe.
What will hit you before that here in Switzerland is the local authorities which have in front of their eyes a certain plan for your building, and anything not on the plan (in this case the AC unit) will need a permit. It's not an easy task, I would say impossible actually, to get such a permit, unless you find a way to redesign the whole facade in a acceptable way (units poking out doesn't count as acceptable).
https://www.headingtonshark.com/Home/About ("Hello. I'm Magnus Hanson-Heine, the home-owner of the Headington Shark House. The Shark House, formally titled Untitled 1986, consists of a 25ft-long fibreglass and steel shark crashing through the roof of an otherwise ordinary house on a quiet residential street in suburban Oxford...")
There are noise conditions and a few scenarios that will need planning permission (facing a public highway is one) but generally pretty liberal.
The shark scenario is more interesting, and was I'd say was largely allowed to stay because it was an art installation. They couldn't have built an extension of the same proportions without planning permission.
That's where the image of AC in general matters. It needs to be seen as a life saving tech just like heating, not a luxury item for rich people.
If it was just a matter of red tape it would be fine, but in France people would fight you on AC because it's ugly/noisy/warms up the street.
So you can get it rejected by people who live in a flat where heat is not as much of a problem as your (ground floor vs higher floor, window orientation) or by landlords who don't even live in the building.
We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building. I've heard stories of residents being scalded for putting flowers on their balcony railings that face outwards as it ruins the "look". Given almost all apartment buildings are built consistently between every floor they could ensure consistent placement of condensers across all floors and it wouldn't even look that bad.
What makes the situation much worse here is we have insanely good insulation on the buildings. They trap heat for the cold winters, but the walls just maintain all the heat during the summers. A new approach is needed to make it livable here.
In my own apartment I am not able to create a cross-breeze through strategic window opening to try and bring in cooler air from outside, so I've resorted to opening a window on one side of the apartment and using a Vornado fan to push air out the window on another side of the apartment - creating a pressurized system.
Sometimes it's not about the fence, it's about exerting power. Put people in charge of the decision that shouldn't be there, and you're in world of pain.
Doesn't matter what it looks like, problem is it changes the facade. For that you need to submit some paperwork and get it approved.
You can actually install a heat pump in most apartment buildings, as long as it's on the balcony and not visible from the street (=below waist-level). Main reason you wouldn't, is condensate output which has to be piped indoors or into a heated drain during the winter. Or you just pipe it into your balcony's rainwater drain and accept that you can't use the heatpump below 0C.
Obviously, people thought about this, and there are lots of fence designs that admit plenty of airflow and lots of products ready-made for this already.
Service technicians hate fences unless they are easy to remove during a service call. Honestly, esthetics is not as much concerning as the noise from compressor and condenser fan. I stayed in an AirBnb, where the outdoor unit next to the bed room, and I couldn't sleep.
> We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building.
Same for Germany, at least in many places. And if your building gets reclassified as being under Denkmalschutz (cultural heritage management) you've won in the Lottery of Pain.
While I hear you, I think AC is better centralized for the building, along with heat and water.
Yes, there are numerous reasons why this is harder to do than just doing it ad-hoc per apartment, but if we’re to see it as infrastructure, it should receive the same level of consideration as other utilities.
Agreed, new builds should be mandatory, but this is not easy to retrofit to existing apartment buildings in a country where labour and parts are notoriously expensive and have to be split with the residents.
I can run a broken toilet tank all day long without extra fees, hundreds of gallons. Can turn all faucets on without penalties, nobody is counting and the utility doesn't care. The maintenance fees for water cover it, spread across all residents (although they are not low, like $1,800 on top of mortgage, subsidizing things I don't use, like card rooms, ping pong hall, etc.). Some families live 4-5 in a 2 bedroom, in my case it's just the two of us and the dog. Pretty insane, no logical solutions in sight. Moving isn't inexpensive.
That seems unusual to me. I've never lived in a place where water was not metered and charged by the volume consumed. A necessity like water (and A/C) should be as you describe, but I've never seen it, at least not in the USA.
I live in a condo in Florida in a 3 building high-rise compound. There are no water meters per unit. Water is covered by maintenance fees. They are atrocious and rising, but water is "free". Retrofitting will increase maintenance fees, likely by a lot more than I would save paying for my own water usage.
I had a similar situation involving electricity when living in Los Angeles, in the Valley. Electricity costs were averaged across all units, there were no individual meters per unit. My family of 3 humans in a 2 bedroom apartment consumed a lot less than a 10 human family in a 3 bedroom, and that was a thing. I subsidized their electricity usage. This involved things like pool heating, grass maintenance which I never cared about or used. This was at Bella Vista near Warner Ridge. https://www.equityapartments.com/los-angeles/woodland-hills/...
In the US, utility companies don't bill you for actual usage, they have "predictions" on what you may use. IME. You can burn candles and eat canned food for a month and still get billed $300.
For most of the buildings from communism era - all the utilities run through the apartments anyway and there is absolutely no place or way to retrofit these utilities without extensively either re-doing it from scratch, or trying to somehow retrofit it on the outside.
All of these options are a non-starter considering basic AC starts from $500. Why should anyone invest more than that?
Many communist-era buildings had a service shaft the width of the back wall of the toilet closet (yes, bathroom and toilet are separate rooms). This was hidden from everyday view with large cabinet doors.
A national-scale project can likely package cooling for these shafts, possibly emanating from rooftop units.
Permissions and structural concerns aside, you only need one 65mm/2.5" hole in the wall to run the high/low pressure gas lines, a drain hose, and a power cable, plus couple more non-penetrating drill holes on the wall to mount the inside and outside units. You'll need a hole saw attachment on a drill, a vacuum pump to thoroughly dry out the system, and bits of plastic putty to fill the hole against intrusion. It's a less than 5 man-hour job.
you don't really need drain hose for outside multisplit unit, my AC drain hoses from all indoor units are connected to my WC tank, I used previously pumps to push the water to the roof, but they were not reliable and once after thunderstorm they died when I finally went for passive solution, should have done it from the beginning)
The problem with shared is the issue of shared cost. How do you determine how much a user consumes?
There is also the issue of upgrading the shared infrastructure. Because of the size it's a lot more expensive to replace, so that is postponed for much longer because now everybody needs to pitch in.
You can install one on the balcony below the railing level.
The housing company is responsible for the exterior surfaces and thus also responsible for whatever happens to fall on bystanders when it will inevitably happen.
AC installers are also notoriously bad at following placement guidelines.
I've had one placed like this in the balcony of a XVth century palazzo turned museum plus hotel, straight in the historical heart of Verona. If they can do it, everybody can do it as well.
You say stupid, but I actually would find it sad to see beautiful buildings that are in many cases hundreds of years old defaced with loads of small condensers bolted on to the face.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.
I'm not talking about historic buildings that are hundreds of years old. I live in Finland - we don't have many of these. Almost all apartments are built after the 60s outside the downtown and look like concrete boxes.
I think you misunderstand what isolation does. It will also keep the heat out. Having window awnings to block sunlight from directly warming up the room will go a long way.
Now here is exactly one place where the regulation can hit hard: awnings are maybe not allowed because the house wasn't designed with them. Possible to get the new design approved? For sure. Simple? Ha.
The problem is if you can't get the home cooled off, then heat that does build up can't escape.
In western Canada until recently we got away with very good insulation coupled with opening windows at night as daytime-vs-nighttime temperatures could swing as much as 15C.
But as both daytime and nighttime temperatures increase, or in more humid climates where the temperature doesn't drop enough, that's no longer effective.
The net result is the home just gets hot and stays hot.
if you have balcony you could hide multisplit unit under railing
if you don't want permanent installation there are not basically mobile split units like Midea Portasplit, it's basically same thing you would install on the wall, but mobile on the wheels (personally I have regular AC (Toshiba) and my multisplit unit is on the flat roof invisible from the street, this year neighbor floor below me installed his unit on the roof as well, we are the only 2 apartments in two units with 40 apartments in total with AC, so much for Prague AC statistics, though honestly even under the roof in 35C+ temperatures it was not that bad prior turning on the AC)
I don't necessarily disagree, but I am wondering what luxury will next become a necessity if we keep increasing our energy usage in order to get both more luxuries and necessities?
On the bright side, I suppose one mitigating factor is that renewable energy makes it less harmful to use energy to power A/C usage.
>Yet as heat waves kill tens of thousands of Europeans each year
...Each year? Was it the case every year twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago? What has changed, miss Follett?
Last words from the article:
>But forgoing air conditioning is a refusal to move on from a lethally hot past.
Gee, I wonder if this global warming thing wasn't a mistake to let happen...
If that author is right, then we can and should punish the people responsible for global warming? Because that includes a lot of her colleagues at Cato and WaPo. The same who were against the same carbon taxes that would be useful to reduce and mitigate the global warming that kills...
We can start with people who got paid to make sure no action was taken against global warming - such as everyone working at CATO, like the author of this article...
It is called a rhetorical question. You already know the answer.
And if you don't already know it, just wonder why AC isn't widespread in Europe, why nuclear plants built decades ago have to stop due to the lack of water and why every single article talks about an "exceptional" heat wave. Do you really need me to hold you hand there?
Cooling technologies are a necessity and air conditioning is one of many possible options.
Europe north of France is substantially cooler than much of the US, even on the hottest days. Many homes could get by on ceiling fans, but they are very uncommon here.
I live in Sweden. You are incorrect. Having your home basically unlivable a few weeks every year is not ok, and ground heat exchange pumps that provide cooling are energetically basically free, so just do it.
Run on solar (sun usually shines when it's hot) and use geothermic energy. The ground below your house is significantly cooler than the surrounding air.
I'd still favour the fan, I've lived in India for longer periods with consistently around 32-36 C and a fan is perfectly enough after a little while of adapting.
They have very good thermal coeffiency: ground source heat pumps will typically generate 3-6kWh of thermal energy from 1kWh of electricity. By reversing the flow you can also use ground source heat pumps for cooling as well.
Doesn't sound like "basically free" to me... It still uses electricity, which doesn't help with climate change (even if it mostly comes from renewables).
Hard to see how you can read what GP said as anything other than "basically free", and failing to quantify, like you are doing here, and just categorically calling all electricity use bad is not coherent or helpful either.
More or less the only people who can do that in Europe are rich people with detached homes in the suburbs, which is a vanishingly small minority. European governments could do a lot more to invest in photovoltaics, but it's a bit complicated with how cramped the continent is.
You can replace farmland, but that seems like a really bad idea with Globalism's decline. Who knows what's going to happen to the food supply chain over the next 30 years. The only other option is attaching them to the exterior of historic buildings, and heaven forbid! Think about the character of the neighborhood!
Plenty of semis and terraces have solar. Including the semis I can see out the window right now.
In the UK Semi, Terrace and Detached is about 75% of households and 80% of people.
If you look only at owners it's about 90% of households (and even higher for population)
And anyone who owns a home is rich. If you can afford 300k for a house you can afford 15k on reducing your electric bill.
Now rental of course is a separate matter, and the real problem.
As housing is so constrained landlords can extract all the money from tenants regardless of the quality, but even if it isn't, renters tend not to value things like solar or aircon. You can spend £10k adding solar to a house, but you probably aren't going to get enough from extra rent to offset the cost of installing it.
In the US a property owner has to provide AC because renters will expect it, same as you have to provide a washing machine connection in a rented place. This is a mindset thing which can't be changed.
In other European countries, but its not changing. Among owner-occupiers its France 80% houses, Germany and Austria 70%.
However the rental issue is far more in those countries, where nearly half the country live in rental. Things like balcony solar work well there, and they can power a portable AC.
Normally with ground heat exchange you cool down the hole so the system becomes less efficient over time. With cooling of your house that extra heat goes down the hole again. That ends up being almost free over the lifetime of the entire system.
I think you underestimate how powerful ceiling fans can be. The highest temperature in Sweden this year was only 36, you would be absolutely fine with a ceiling fan unless you wanted to exercise.
That said, if you are able to get a ground source heat pump, that's awesome, but it's something like 10x to 20x the price of even a really good ceiling fan.
Ceiling (or for that matter any) fans work on your own evaporation. So unless you accept unacceptable levels of humidity or acclimatized to much hotter climate than Sweden and are there for a short time they are not a solution.
Ground source is overhyped and overpriced. District heating and air-exchange AC is still the winning solution.
Well if there's no convection you must be in a vacuum!
But if you mean no forced convection, that's just not the case. You can survive at wetbulb temperatures in excess of 30 C, which means 30 C + 100% RH. Hell, my house right now is at about 25 C drybulb and 18 C wetbulb, which from the perspective of evaporative heat transfer is identical to 18 C with 100% RH, so I should be dying any minute. See you on the other side!
you still have convection even in a sealed room. its walls also do not have zero thermal conductivity so if you don't move, you only have to reject about 100W and that is survivable
Ceiling fans are extremely efficient, and they also improve enormously the efficiency of AC - by reducing by several degrees the amount of cooling to reach a comfortable level.
Ceiling fans should be installed before any AC.
If you are not convinced, there is a one-hour video by Technology Connections on YouTube that will argue the point more in-depth that anything I could write here.
A couple of years ago that would have been correct, but circumstances have changed.
We've had a series of heat waves this summer, and temperatures have gotten very high inside. Much depends on the location of course, and the type of building, and stuff like that, but the fact is that in Belgium alone thousands of people have died because of the heat. Thousands of people that would still be with us if they would have had adequate cooling.
When it's close to 40 °C in your home, a ceiling fan is not going to make a meaningful difference.
And we need to keep in mind that summers are in all likelihood going to get hotter and hotter.
I live in the Netherlands. My apartment has two floors. The upper floor is basically a greenhouse, so 40C is absolutely normal if I close the windows. During the summer I always keep at least one window open, which cools down the house to around 30-35C. This sucks during summer but during winter it's a blessing because I can have 30C on a sunny day even if it's 0C outside. The only drawback is that the windows are very old so in winter that heat escapes immediately once the sun is gone. HOA has been planning window replacement for years already.
The lower floor has windows facing north so it's always much cooler there. I've never seen it reach more than 30C, which was in the middle of a heatwave, usually it keeps 25C during summer.
> During the summer I always keep at least one window open, which cools down the house to around 30-35C.
Yeah this is exactly my point. If your house is so poorly insulated that your internal temperatures go above the ambient temperature, you can open a window.
Chances are that ambient are doesn't provide enough cooling. Maybe you can open only window, or all windows on the same side of your home, meaning there's no draft. Maybe you're in an urban environment, with a micro climate even hotter than outside the city. Maybe both. Heat will enter from sunlight and from people inside, and will exit only very slowly.
There's a world of difference between a house in the countryside, with maybe even some trees providing shade, and an apartment in a densely populated area with very low opportunities for thermal control.
Forced air cooling require air to be colder than the heatsink surface and evaporative cooling require relative humidity to be less than 100%.
I don't know how bad the situation in Europe is, but we're already at point where there are times and places on Earth where one can construct a primal instinctive understanding of that by simply walking out of an air conditioned room(to which you SHOULD return within half an hour and MUST within an hour). "Just get fans bro" is tone deaf.
I mean, those places didn't have air conditioning 50-100 years ago and did fine, now air conditioning is life saving devices there. Global warming/climate change is real.
The WHO guide others are posting says fans only work under 40C, but that's the absolute maximum. There's no other option than resorting to devices based on refrigeration cycle when people are already dying("estimated through excess mortality" or however you dress it up), beyond being useless(human cognitive performance significantly degrade at above 28C).
The upper bound of 40C quoted in other comments is also just absolute maximum temperature - it's just saying that there's no way fans do anything if temperature of air and body are actually equal. The practical upper bound is lower than that(humidity and metabolism dependent, I guess).
This was an half usefull joke. I can still make it with the exterior unit off for an extra 1 or 2 degrees with just the interior unit blowing during the day and the use the AC to cool during the night when it is more efficient.
In any case where I live fans are not a meaningfull stopgap measure.
Nothing unique about Germans in this case, sorry. ;)
So once it is too hot, just turn the AC on and you won't get sick or risk a heat stroke either.
We'll come back to this in several months for a winter freeze to see if Europe has basic heating to keep themselves warm (or will they not turn the heaters on for some reason) and in a year, to see if the rest of Europe have learned their lesson to just have basic AC installed for the next heatwave.
Personally I think their "allergy" is just because most AC units in Japan are disgustingly moldy and never cleaned regularly.
This is not unique to ACs. Anything on the outside of a building requires your co-owners to agree.
People who don't have a balcony are screwed and are entirely dependent on homeowners association which arbitrarily can agree or not, or they can stay indecisive about it and not let you do anything.
Well, if you have a balcony? you just put it there and make the necessary holes for it, problem solved.
The effect is exactly the same - you just have AC installed. In one case you have to go through totally unnecessary hoops, and in other case, you just do whatever you want.
What's even the point of it?
edit: I guess you could route the drain pipe anywhere if you wanted, so I retract my previous statement.
There are also systems that spray the water back at the AC unit to cool it down, this is supposed to both improve efficiency and evaporate the water so you don't have to deal with it. I am sure those have some downsides, too.
And with spraying it on ac you want complete evaporation or you are back to same problem.
As said it is not too hard problem but still something that most likely requires consideration.
Sure thing, you could go to court if they have any problem, but who is going to fight for AC worth $500 for a few years just to get it installed?
Best would probably be to use the existing rainwater pipes that lead down to the sewers - all building have those. But good luck getting that past your HOA-equivalent, as that will most probably involve some modifications to the building and we can't have that, no!
HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?
Anyway HOA is something that shouldn't even exist. Or at least not with power to prevent people from having air conditioning in their home.
Not everything is a HOA
They force homeowners to decide together (and pay for) everything from road maintenance to what noise levels are allowed.
Another issue they cause is that, of course, the homeowners living there do not just use HOAs to override the wishes of individuals, but also feel disinclined to let the local authorities ... and the locals ... operate as normal there, given that they pay for everything, sometimes literally including the roads in the area around them. These communities may have banks, parks, even beaches, and there are conflicts about who gets to go there, given the local homeowners pay for maintenance. For example, given they clean up left-behind garbage, do people from the nearby town get to play there ... and leave behind more garbage?
The root of the problem is that more housing is no longer a net positive for many communities in a great many places. The increase in taxation income does not justify the extra infrastructure in many places. This means local authorities refuse building projects unless they pay for their own infrastructure. Hence, HOAs are being forced to take over the functions that public authorities used to have ... because local authorities are forcing the responsibilities that local authorities used to have on them. Of course, then the public nature of public space goes into question.
The point of HOAs is to force homeowners to CO-decide (in houses: to make things cheaper for local councils) on what happens to the shared infrastructure. What and how to spend of maintenance and what to change.
Home-owner associations in Europe are frequently set up for apartment buildings, in which case, yes, the roof, foundation, hallways, stairwells, main piping, electricity, etc are all legally co-owned. Primary purpose of HOAs is to save for & plan long-term maintenance on the entire building.
HOAs for neighbourhoods, or blocks with single-family homes or terraced houses are pretty rare in Europe.
https://www.headingtonshark.com/Home/About ("Hello. I'm Magnus Hanson-Heine, the home-owner of the Headington Shark House. The Shark House, formally titled Untitled 1986, consists of a 25ft-long fibreglass and steel shark crashing through the roof of an otherwise ordinary house on a quiet residential street in suburban Oxford...")
The shark scenario is more interesting, and was I'd say was largely allowed to stay because it was an art installation. They couldn't have built an extension of the same proportions without planning permission.
If it was just a matter of red tape it would be fine, but in France people would fight you on AC because it's ugly/noisy/warms up the street.
So you can get it rejected by people who live in a flat where heat is not as much of a problem as your (ground floor vs higher floor, window orientation) or by landlords who don't even live in the building.
What makes the situation much worse here is we have insanely good insulation on the buildings. They trap heat for the cold winters, but the walls just maintain all the heat during the summers. A new approach is needed to make it livable here.
In my own apartment I am not able to create a cross-breeze through strategic window opening to try and bring in cooler air from outside, so I've resorted to opening a window on one side of the apartment and using a Vornado fan to push air out the window on another side of the apartment - creating a pressurized system.
You can actually install a heat pump in most apartment buildings, as long as it's on the balcony and not visible from the street (=below waist-level). Main reason you wouldn't, is condensate output which has to be piped indoors or into a heated drain during the winter. Or you just pipe it into your balcony's rainwater drain and accept that you can't use the heatpump below 0C.
Same for Germany, at least in many places. And if your building gets reclassified as being under Denkmalschutz (cultural heritage management) you've won in the Lottery of Pain.
Yes, there are numerous reasons why this is harder to do than just doing it ad-hoc per apartment, but if we’re to see it as infrastructure, it should receive the same level of consideration as other utilities.
I had a similar situation involving electricity when living in Los Angeles, in the Valley. Electricity costs were averaged across all units, there were no individual meters per unit. My family of 3 humans in a 2 bedroom apartment consumed a lot less than a 10 human family in a 3 bedroom, and that was a thing. I subsidized their electricity usage. This involved things like pool heating, grass maintenance which I never cared about or used. This was at Bella Vista near Warner Ridge. https://www.equityapartments.com/los-angeles/woodland-hills/...
In the US, utility companies don't bill you for actual usage, they have "predictions" on what you may use. IME. You can burn candles and eat canned food for a month and still get billed $300.
All of these options are a non-starter considering basic AC starts from $500. Why should anyone invest more than that?
A national-scale project can likely package cooling for these shafts, possibly emanating from rooftop units.
There is also the issue of upgrading the shared infrastructure. Because of the size it's a lot more expensive to replace, so that is postponed for much longer because now everybody needs to pitch in.
You can install one on the balcony below the railing level.
The housing company is responsible for the exterior surfaces and thus also responsible for whatever happens to fall on bystanders when it will inevitably happen.
AC installers are also notoriously bad at following placement guidelines.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/bMYANpDU2AGDKVQN7
The problem is if you can't get the home cooled off, then heat that does build up can't escape.
In western Canada until recently we got away with very good insulation coupled with opening windows at night as daytime-vs-nighttime temperatures could swing as much as 15C.
But as both daytime and nighttime temperatures increase, or in more humid climates where the temperature doesn't drop enough, that's no longer effective.
The net result is the home just gets hot and stays hot.
In medieval times, not after, I hope.
if you don't want permanent installation there are not basically mobile split units like Midea Portasplit, it's basically same thing you would install on the wall, but mobile on the wheels (personally I have regular AC (Toshiba) and my multisplit unit is on the flat roof invisible from the street, this year neighbor floor below me installed his unit on the roof as well, we are the only 2 apartments in two units with 40 apartments in total with AC, so much for Prague AC statistics, though honestly even under the roof in 35C+ temperatures it was not that bad prior turning on the AC)
We're up to more than 15,000: https://www.rki.de/DE/Themen/Gesundheit-und-Gesellschaft/Ges...
On the bright side, I suppose one mitigating factor is that renewable energy makes it less harmful to use energy to power A/C usage.
>Yet as heat waves kill tens of thousands of Europeans each year
...Each year? Was it the case every year twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago? What has changed, miss Follett?
Last words from the article:
>But forgoing air conditioning is a refusal to move on from a lethally hot past.
Gee, I wonder if this global warming thing wasn't a mistake to let happen...
If that author is right, then we can and should punish the people responsible for global warming? Because that includes a lot of her colleagues at Cato and WaPo. The same who were against the same carbon taxes that would be useful to reduce and mitigate the global warming that kills...
So every adult human and corporation?
Are you considering answering this question? Was it the case fifty years ago? Did anything change?
And if you don't already know it, just wonder why AC isn't widespread in Europe, why nuclear plants built decades ago have to stop due to the lack of water and why every single article talks about an "exceptional" heat wave. Do you really need me to hold you hand there?
Europe north of France is substantially cooler than much of the US, even on the hottest days. Many homes could get by on ceiling fans, but they are very uncommon here.
I'd still favour the fan, I've lived in India for longer periods with consistently around 32-36 C and a fan is perfectly enough after a little while of adapting.
Charge the battery from the solar and it powers the AC in the evening.
You'll generate more than enough during the day to run AC and fill the battery to run it overnight.
Still using grid sources in winter, but you aren't using the AC. Although you might find air-air AC in heat mode is better than your gas boiler.
You can replace farmland, but that seems like a really bad idea with Globalism's decline. Who knows what's going to happen to the food supply chain over the next 30 years. The only other option is attaching them to the exterior of historic buildings, and heaven forbid! Think about the character of the neighborhood!
In the UK Semi, Terrace and Detached is about 75% of households and 80% of people.
If you look only at owners it's about 90% of households (and even higher for population)
And anyone who owns a home is rich. If you can afford 300k for a house you can afford 15k on reducing your electric bill.
Now rental of course is a separate matter, and the real problem.
As housing is so constrained landlords can extract all the money from tenants regardless of the quality, but even if it isn't, renters tend not to value things like solar or aircon. You can spend £10k adding solar to a house, but you probably aren't going to get enough from extra rent to offset the cost of installing it.
In the US a property owner has to provide AC because renters will expect it, same as you have to provide a washing machine connection in a rented place. This is a mindset thing which can't be changed.
In other European countries, but its not changing. Among owner-occupiers its France 80% houses, Germany and Austria 70%.
However the rental issue is far more in those countries, where nearly half the country live in rental. Things like balcony solar work well there, and they can power a portable AC.
That said, if you are able to get a ground source heat pump, that's awesome, but it's something like 10x to 20x the price of even a really good ceiling fan.
Ground source is overhyped and overpriced. District heating and air-exchange AC is still the winning solution.
try opening your window in +15C high humidity and then sleep.
I assure you, sleeping in a 0-5C sleeping bag on the nearby sea shore would be a more acceptable experience.
You just never lived there, yes?
But if you mean no forced convection, that's just not the case. You can survive at wetbulb temperatures in excess of 30 C, which means 30 C + 100% RH. Hell, my house right now is at about 25 C drybulb and 18 C wetbulb, which from the perspective of evaporative heat transfer is identical to 18 C with 100% RH, so I should be dying any minute. See you on the other side!
but I would not want to live in that bath house.
Tell me you're German without telling me you're German
Most Germans don't own ceiling fans, which is the problem.
Ceiling fans should be installed before any AC.
If you are not convinced, there is a one-hour video by Technology Connections on YouTube that will argue the point more in-depth that anything I could write here.
We've had a series of heat waves this summer, and temperatures have gotten very high inside. Much depends on the location of course, and the type of building, and stuff like that, but the fact is that in Belgium alone thousands of people have died because of the heat. Thousands of people that would still be with us if they would have had adequate cooling.
When it's close to 40 °C in your home, a ceiling fan is not going to make a meaningful difference.
And we need to keep in mind that summers are in all likelihood going to get hotter and hotter.
There were many excess deaths, but there was also a shortage of fans here. Good fans could have also saved their lives.
IR blocking film/tint on outside works great if you can't get windows shaded.
The lower floor has windows facing north so it's always much cooler there. I've never seen it reach more than 30C, which was in the middle of a heatwave, usually it keeps 25C during summer.
Yeah this is exactly my point. If your house is so poorly insulated that your internal temperatures go above the ambient temperature, you can open a window.
There's a world of difference between a house in the countryside, with maybe even some trees providing shade, and an apartment in a densely populated area with very low opportunities for thermal control.
Hottest the hottest south facing room in my house got in the UK this year was 31.8C on the 13th August.
The loft got upto 43C, but that's what insulation is for.
That said, you're right, things are changing. I'm looking at getting AC installed this winter (no way I was paying summer prices).
> Use electric fans only when temperatures are below 40˚C / 104˚F. In temperatures above 40˚C / 104˚F, fans will heat the body.
- https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...
I don't know how bad the situation in Europe is, but we're already at point where there are times and places on Earth where one can construct a primal instinctive understanding of that by simply walking out of an air conditioned room(to which you SHOULD return within half an hour and MUST within an hour). "Just get fans bro" is tone deaf.
Yeah there are those places, and northern Europe is not one of them!
The WHO guide others are posting says fans only work under 40C, but that's the absolute maximum. There's no other option than resorting to devices based on refrigeration cycle when people are already dying("estimated through excess mortality" or however you dress it up), beyond being useless(human cognitive performance significantly degrade at above 28C).
The upper bound of 40C quoted in other comments is also just absolute maximum temperature - it's just saying that there's no way fans do anything if temperature of air and body are actually equal. The practical upper bound is lower than that(humidity and metabolism dependent, I guess).
In any case where I live fans are not a meaningfull stopgap measure.