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Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 5:02 PM
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Air conditioning raising controversy

I'm not aware of the tech to design air conditioners.
All I know is the market is booming here in France, for personal use, because heatwaves occur more often than ever during the summer.

So far, air conditioning was mostly in use in office buildings, data centers and places of that kind over here.
It's been unavoidable for long to maintain the productivity of employees, to make sure expensive servers/computers don't literally burn out and so on when it's really hot.

But now, old people in particular must rely on it in their homes too, to simply not die from heat.
I think that's an acceptable and even necessary solution for elderly people, being skeptical otherwise.
Here is some reason why.

Quote:
Originally Posted by independent.co.uk
Wednesday 4 July 2018 00:23

Air conditioning to tackle summer heatwaves causes surge in deadly pollution

'If our nation continues to rely on coal-fired power plants for some of our electricity, each time we turn on the air conditioning we'll be fouling the air, causing more sickness and even deaths'


Air conditioners are essential in some of the hottest parts of the world, especially as global temperatures increase, but they are responsible for harmful emissions ( Getty )

While air conditioning can quite literally be a lifesaver in a rapidly warming climate, scientists have warned that it comes with major health problems of its own.

If climate change continues at its current pace, heatwaves are expected to increase in intensity around the world, from France to India.

Experts estimate that in the past decade alone, the number of lives lost due to heatwaves has increased by more than 2,000 per cent.

One way of tackling this problem is to roll out more air conditioning systems, but according to Professor Jonathan Patz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this means trading one problem for another.

“Heatwaves are increasing and increasing in intensity. We will have more cooling demand requiring more electricity,” he said.

“If our nation continues to rely on coal-fired power plants for some of our electricity, each time we turn on the air conditioning we’ll be fouling the air, causing more sickness and even deaths.”

In a new study published in the journal PLOS Medicine, Professor Patz and his colleagues predicted that the boost in air pollution from the fossil fuels powering these systems will cause up to 1,000 additional deaths annually in the eastern US alone.

[...]

Buildings are the biggest energy sinks in the US, responsible for 60 per cent of power demand in the densely populated eastern region. Air conditioning is responsible for a significant portion of that demand.

In their study, which simulated future energy consumption and pollution levels, the researchers found between 5 and 9 per cent of future air pollution-related deaths could be linked to air conditioning.

Air pollution is thought to be responsible for millions of deaths every year, with toxic gases and particulates implicated in everything from cardiovascular disease to dementia.

[...]
I'm not going to quote the whole thing. Just read the short article.

https://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...-a8428936.html

I also hear air conditioners just work pretty much like refrigerators and freezers. To cool the inside, they obviously release heat on the outside.
So it actually appears to be some very poor (and cheap, by the way) solution, not sustainable.

Experts say the only reliable thing to do today is to design buildings and cities differently.
For example, large windows with no brise soleil (from French, "sun breaker") would not be recommended.
It is also necessary to grow many more green spaces within cities, to let them breathe, and to design urban density more like they used to in old Mediterranean towns where heatwaves are nothing much new.
You'll notice there's no large windows to old Mediterranean homes, in their ancient villages. It's often a little dark, but you still can breathe without air conditioning in there, even when temperatures hit 90°F or more.

On the other hand, urban sprawl remains far too greedy. So building cities in a dense fashion is the right thing to do.
And that's where skyscrapers can be really useful.

Your thoughts, if any. This could certainly be an interesting discussion.
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Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 5:36 PM
sbarn sbarn is offline
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In places like the eastern US there is also really high humidity and dew points in the summer which ACs play a critical role reducing indoors. Unfortunately they may be a necessary evil. I think the goal should be make them more efficient / cleaner rather reducing their prevalence.
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  #3  
Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 6:02 PM
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While air conditioning is certainly nice, I don't understand why people set the temperatures so low. It doesn't need to be fucking freezing to be comfortable.
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Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 6:30 PM
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Don't touch my AC, bro!

Really though, try living in Austin or pretty much anywhere in the South without it. If the government cares so much they should give us cleaner alternatives, which is happening quite quick in the US, as I believe we had the biggest decrease in emissions in 2017.
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Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 6:36 PM
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The compromise is using AC but not cooling the inside to a ridiculous level. I was just in Chicago and when it was maybe 28C and humid they cool bars to like, 17C. That's ridiculous - it could be 22 or 23 and still feel fine. New Orleans was even worse - 37C outside and they manage to cool bars with open windows! Energy costs in Ontario are just too much to do that.

I've heard Hong Kong takes this to an even worse level. The density of air conditioning has raised the already oppressive temperatures.
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  #6  
Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 6:37 PM
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Quote:
While air conditioning is certainly nice, I don't understand why people set the temperatures so low. It doesn't need to be fucking freezing to be comfortable.
Yup! Like you have to put a sweater on to get in their homes, so you don't catch a cold in July/August in Virginia...
I agree, it's really silly.

I also believe the tech behind A/C can grow better, more efficient, just as any tech.
However, it would be wrong to rely on it exclusively.

I'm sure here in Europe, it won't be necessary in any kind of situations.
It might also depend on individuals. Some of us don't suffer so much from heat, and humidity rates are not so bad over here.

However, again, I find it great to reassure elderly people. So they know they will wake up the next morning when they go to bed at night.
It's been scary to lose many of them just because of a few days of heatwave.
Remember we're all likely to grow badly old someday. So taking care of our elders is taking care of ourselves, somehow.
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Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 6:38 PM
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I think that this is a fascinating and very important topic because as the earth gets hotter we will use more AC and then that makes it hotter so then we need more AC, viscous cycle.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sbarn View Post
In places like the eastern US there is also really high humidity and dew points in the summer which ACs play a critical role reducing indoors. Unfortunately they may be a necessary evil. I think the goal should be make them more efficient / cleaner rather reducing their prevalence.
My feelings also and we need to explore this for sure.

Quote:
Originally Posted by SIGSEGV View Post
While air conditioning is certainly nice, I don't understand why people set the temperatures so low. It doesn't need to be fucking freezing to be comfortable.
Very true. The body adjusts and people get so used to the colder air. I can take a lot of extremes either way and adjust but after one of my highest electric bills ever due to AC (and I am very mindful of it also so I could only imagine how bad it would have been if I wasn't) I bumped my thermostat up two more degrees and soon I didn't even notice...using a fan helps a lot also.

We have always had to deal with brutal heat and humidity in the summer in my part of the country but this is something else, and the heat waves last for so long now too. When I was a kid you would get a few days and then it would break, now it can last for a week+. Also, seeing 90F+ over and over then was a big deal and now it is very common and heat indexes well into the 100s is regular.
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  #8  
Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 10:21 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mousquet View Post
I'm not aware of the tech to design air conditioners . . . .

I also hear air conditioners just work pretty much like refrigerators and freezers. To cool the inside, they obviously release heat on the outside.
So it actually appears to be some very poor (and cheap, by the way) solution, not sustainable.

Experts say the only reliable thing to do today is to design buildings and cities differently . . . .

You'll notice there's no large windows to old Mediterranean homes, in their ancient villages. It's often a little dark, but you still can breathe without air conditioning in there, even when temperatures hit 90°F or more.

Your thoughts, if any. This could certainly be an interesting discussion.
First of all, how air conditioners work. The article isn't clear on how the authors think A/C is "polluting" but there are 3 ways it can.

All air conditioners do--and refrigerators too for that matter--is pump heat from one place to another. In the case of refirgerators, they pump it from inside an insulated box to outside. In the case of air conditioners, they pump it from inside a room or a building to outside. This doesn' create heat, just move it around and you can say it increases the heat outside but I believe, other than possibly in the most dense urban environments, the additional heat burden outside is minimal.

The second way it "pollutes" is because doing what they do, air conditioners and refrigerators use electricity and generation of that electricity can pollute although not necessarily if done by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal or nuclear methods.

Finally, the third way it pollutes is because the chemical that used to be used to absorb heat on one side (the evaporator coil) and release it on the other (the compressor) was Freon, a halocarbon that could deplete then ozone layer of the atmosphere. In the US, and I assume in Europe, this has now been replaced, by law, by less damaging chemicals.

As far as home and building design, we are already doing very well at that, at least where it matters most. In the US desert Southwest, where temperatures can reach 125F/52C, people aren't going to comfortable in any building that isn't artifically cooled no matter how well designed. The goal is to build them so as to minimize the burden on the air condtioning by insulating them well and by minimizing the absorbtion of heat into the living spaces.

These things are done by thick or well-insulated walls, windows that are impenetrable to heat energy (it is possible now to make triple pane windows that keep heat out as well as the solid walls of those old Mediterranean houses), and reflective wall and roof coatings. The roof of my Arizona house reflects over 98% of solar energy that hits it. You can quickly get a bad sunburn from light reflected from it even if you have no direct sun exposure.

There is one other way to cool inside environments but it only works in the desert. These are known as evaporative coolers or, colloquially, "swamp coolers". They are just basically big fans that sit on the roof and blow air through a bunch of material that's kept wet with water and then into the house or building. They cool the air as the water evaporates and they can be quite effective but only where the humidity is very, very low.


http://www.kafbnucleus.com/news/educ...7d517989a.html

These use a lot less electricity than refrigerated air conditioners and so are a lot less expensive to operate.
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  #9  
Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 10:34 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mousquet View Post
Yup! Like you have to put a sweater on to get in their homes, so you don't catch a cold in July/August in Virginia...
I agree, it's really silly . . . .

I find it great to reassure elderly people. So they know they will wake up the next morning when they go to bed at night.

It's been scary to lose many of them just because of a few days of heatwave.
Remember we're all likely to grow badly old someday. So taking care of our elders is taking care of ourselves, somehow.
As the representative "old person" in this crowd, let me say that most "old people" prefer air temperatures warmer than their younger fellows. That's why so many of us move to Florida or Arizona. Personally, I find myself more frequently cold than I used to be and one of the coldest places I regularly go is the air condtioned grocery stores in Arizona. They are so cold I hate grocery shopping from late spring to early autumn when they have it on. Some other places like restaurants and so on can also be severely over-cooled but I always assume that's for the comfort of the folks working in the kitchen.
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  #10  
Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 10:42 PM
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You can take my AC from my cold, dead hands. Which are gonna be real cold because I am going to have it running.

I would think demand for electricity for air conditioning correlates closely with solar energy generation capacity. Both in terms of times of day, seasons of the year, and regions which use it the most. Rooftop installations in homes could assist, having ductless AC and solar panels almost sounds like a combo deal worth marketing in developing countries where people are starting to attain a middle class lifestyle.
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Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 10:47 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mousquet View Post
Experts say the only reliable thing to do today is to design buildings and cities differently.
Are you familiar with hay bale construction?




https://www.google.com/search?q=hay+...ih=836#imgrc=_

It turns out bales of hay or straw are very insulating and building homes of them, 3 little pigs aside, is becoming more popular.
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  #12  
Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 11:06 PM
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I'm not a fan of the heat so AC is the way. On the other hand, cold is nice.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sbarn View Post
In places like the eastern US there is also really high humidity and dew points in the summer which ACs play a critical role reducing indoors. Unfortunately they may be a necessary evil. I think the goal should be make them more efficient / cleaner rather reducing their prevalence.
Yeah efficiency in design and power consumption is the way. A combination of a house fan (built in) and central air if mixed can be a good way to not always have the central air on. At night or when it cools, turn the fan on. During the day, turn central air on.

Or just program central air to turn on an hour before you come from work.

No need to have it on all day if the house or unit is empty.
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Old Posted Jul 28, 2018, 11:11 PM
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Originally Posted by Pedestrian View Post
As the representative "old person" in this crowd, let me say that most "old people" prefer air temperatures warmer than their younger fellows.
Bah, you don't seem so old yet... You must hardly be older than my mom, and she's quite in a hell of a shape, still annoying me for my girlfriends.
Lol, you know, I'm her youngest son, and she still sees me as her little baby. You see?...
It's okay, I can deal with it. She's a cool mom, basically.

Then she still likes hot spots like you guys do, huh. But she's not old enough yet.

Of course, I was talking about 80+ years old people, not about you.
Some of these still want to live too.

I'll tell you what, I'm naive enough to believe in the Genesis.
Not like those shitheads and bigots who claim the world was created 6000 years ago for whatever stupid reason.
You know, those same retards who think gambling and casinos are ok, like they could make a living out of that retarded and backward crap.
Those same people who weren't educated enough to do the math / probability, sadly...

But it says people could live up to 900+ years, until they get really really tired of this shitty world.
And I think that's actually possible, thanks to today's rising techs, such as nanotechnologies.
We can do anything for real...

I know it's nuts, but nothing is impossible in my experience, in what I have witnessed so far.
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Old Posted Jul 29, 2018, 1:00 AM
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Originally Posted by SIGSEGV View Post
While air conditioning is certainly nice, I don't understand why people set the temperatures so low. It doesn't need to be fucking freezing to be comfortable.
I think businesses are the worst offenders with the temp setting. Especially office buildings. I keep a sweater in my desk because of how cold it gets in my office during the summer.

In NYC, they now aggressively ticket stores that prop open their doors during the summer while blasting the a/c under a law that was passed a couple of years ago. A lot of bars, restaurants, and clothing retailers would leave the doors open with a/cs on full blast to lure in tourists.
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Old Posted Jul 29, 2018, 1:09 AM
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Originally Posted by mousquet View Post
Experts say the only reliable thing to do today is to design buildings and cities differently.
Yes, this is why New York subway platforms are hotter than Hell during the summer.


Quote:
Originally Posted by mousquet View Post
It is also necessary to grow many more green spaces within cities, to let them breathe, and to design urban density more like they used to in old Mediterranean towns where heatwaves are nothing much new.
You'll notice there's no large windows to old Mediterranean homes, in their ancient villages. It's often a little dark, but you still can breathe without air conditioning in there, even when temperatures hit 90°F or more.
When I was in the Greek islands I found it pretty amazing how the inside temperatures in the houses stayed in the low to mid 70s F while the temp outside was in the 90s F. But I don't think those places hold heat very well, which is still far more of a concern for those of us who live in places with extreme winter weather.
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Old Posted Jul 29, 2018, 1:43 AM
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Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
When I was in the Greek islands I found it pretty amazing how the inside temperatures in the houses stayed in the low to mid 70s F while the temp outside was in the 90s F. But I don't think those places hold heat very well, which is still far more of a concern for those of us who live in places with extreme winter weather.
People always sell the US short. My Arizona house, besides having a 98% reflective roof, has 15" thick masonry walls and roof overhangs that prevent any direct sunlight hitting the windows which are still fairly small and double-paned. Also, I have cieling fans in every major room.

Generally it stays in the 70s inside until the outside temp gets well into the 90s, but I still need A/C when the temp hits 105F, as it commonly does in Tucson and mainly at night because the masonry holds the heat in and radiates it and I like it cool for sleeping. Solid masonry construction, as in the Greek Isles, acts like a big heat sink, stabilizing the temperature more than cooling it. It moderates inside temps in both directions--warmer at night, cooler in the daytime. In the desert we can have 40F day/night temp swings because of the dry air (humidity reduces such variations) so the effect of the masonry walls makes a big difference.
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  #17  
Old Posted Jul 29, 2018, 2:08 AM
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Originally Posted by jtown,man View Post
Really though, try living in Austin or pretty much anywhere in the South without it.
It's doable. I lived in Amarillo for the entire summer of 2015 without A/C, then I lived in Cocoa FL for most of the summer of 2016 (July and August) again without A/C. You get used to the heat.

Now, yes, if you're currently addicted to A/C then try quitting it cold turkey in the middle of a heat wave, you're probably going to find it difficult. It's easier if you just don't have it as spring and summer progressively arrive.
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  #18  
Old Posted Jul 29, 2018, 2:15 AM
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Originally Posted by mousquet View Post
To cool the inside, they obviously release heat on the outside.
FYI, all possible means of cooling that are compliant with the laws of physics will share this characteristic with them. You can't just "eliminate" heat.

You're correct that it's a vicious cycle, though. If nearly everyone in a given warm city has A/C, it's contributing to making the places that don't (outdoors, and a few unlucky people's homes) hotter than they'd otherwise be if everyone decided to simply endure the heat.
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Old Posted Jul 29, 2018, 2:25 AM
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Florida would not be the 3rd. most populous state in the US if it weren't for A/C.
It's a necessity to live comfortably and in the summer my electric bill runs between $300-$400 USD a month.
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Old Posted Jul 29, 2018, 3:33 AM
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I have some coworkers who don't have AC... they tend to spend long days at the office on hot days though!
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