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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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That is a citation needed moment. Source - I am from Europe. AC is quite popular and widespread. And treated as necessity during summer. We just don't try to achieve polar temperatures and usually put it to 20-22 C (don't ask me why AC units became such pussies lately)

My recommendation would be to read the article and view the source cited therein as a good starting point.

Honestly I'm surprised this is something someone wants to contest. Do you have a lot of iced beverages in your part of Europe too?

I read it and it doesn't match reality. I look at the façade of my building and out of 40 apartments there are 30+ air conditioners. People use them both to cool in the summer and to heat in the winter. AC are extremely versatile devices when temperatures swing from -20C in the winter to 40C in the summer.

And yes we have ice drinks - we just don't enjoy as much the starbucks travesties - so ice is usually in water, soft drinks or soda water and cocktails. Or you just open an ice cold can of beer and drink it on the go.

We haven't tuned AC to 11 like US because relatively more people in EU live in regions with bearable humidity. And up to 32-33C heat is no problem if humidity is low. You just drink more beer.

Counter anecdote: many parts of Switzerland have serious restrictions on residential AC. Some cities have outright banned them (Basel, Geneva), others require the AC to be powered by solar panels, others just don't allow the heat exchanger of a mini split to be attached to the facade of a building. Those two are de-facto bans on AC in apartments.

When you're talking about Europe, regulations like that will vary wildly between locations, and you'll always find anecdotes supporting whatever side you picked.

Have you ever heard the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data"?

I'm not trying to convince you that your particular eyes are lying to you. But Europe is a pretty big place. In most of it, AC is not very common even as heat waves increase.

There is objective data on this fact. In my essay, I linked to such information. This is not, to my knowledge, a contested set of facts. You could, with the language skills and internet access you have go forth and rapidly find out that either I am right in my characterization, or show data that would force me to reconsider my statements.

But you standing outside of a building and telling me I'm wrong will not cut it because 1) I've been to a bit of Europe and 2) I can read sources describing the overall situation in the U.S. vs. Europe.

In even backwater shithole countries like Romania/Serbia/Bulgaria the use of ACs is overwhelming. You'd be hard pressed to find a building without them, even wearhouses and factories are chock full of ACs. New developments are even required to either have central heating/air or ACs, complete with solar panels on the roof.

Citation, please.

Here's a neat game, open google maps street view and try NOT to see an external wall AC in a city.

I would posit that seeing window mount or other external AC units in a city is actually evidence of poor AC infrastructure. A residential structure with a bunch of window units sticking out means that there is no central AC available to the building. That means every window without a unit is a room without AC. For example, my high school was built before central air handling was common. It was absolutely covered with window AC units. Even still 0% of teacher offices had AC, maybe 20% of common areas, and only about 50% of class rooms had AC. Of those that had AC about 80% were inadiqute to cool the rooms to normal office temperatures. The office building next door, however, was built to modern North American mid-rise building standards. It had no external AC units, central air handling, and district supplied chilled water. Handling a bunch of IT and computer equipment the whole thing was kept at a chilly 72°F (22°C) all year round.

Besides that though @FtSoA is clearly right. It's trivially easy to find statistics showing less AC availability in Europe. From the International Energy Agency The Future of Cooling (emphasis mine):

Household ownership of ACs varies enormously across countries, from around 4% in India and less than 10% in Europe, to over 90% in the United States and Japan, and close to 100% in a few Middle Eastern countries.

Things are changing, as new homes in Europe are often heated with heat pumps that can be reversed for cooling in the summer. The pace of retrofits and new construction is slow though. In the mean time "Heat claims more than 175,000 lives annually in Europe."

If you insist on trading anecdotes though: "How is it that the most advanced research facility on Earth forgot to install air conditioning? " This is in a place that has reached 40°C (104°F). The "birthplace of the World Wide Web," but all the network switches overheat at 2PM every July.

I got in trouble the last time I curtly linked to a google search about the prevalence of AC units in Europe so I won't provoke the mods again.

But seriously why can't you simply google the relative prevalence of AC units in the U.S. vs. Europe and stop this pointless journey of "let's count the AC units one by one"?

This is not a hard problem. This is not a controversial issue with contested epistemic status. Data is available.

And it shows you are clearly wrong. By a lot.

Or, if it doesn't, be my guest and provide data counter to that I have already provided.

It's the old established areas of Europe that have an allergy (or ideological objection) to A/C, not the ex-communist countries.

(don't ask me why AC units became such pussies lately)

I have been assured by top conspiracist minds that the refrigerant chemical companies ensure their regulatorily captured lawmakers’ outlaw refrigerants as soon as they go out of patent, purely for environmental reasons of course.

Am HVAC tech. Modern refrigerants are generally ok mechanically. Your theory is widely believed in the field but R410 is a fine refrigerant- it’s high pressure so there’s more leaks but it works just fine when it isn’t leaking. Propane would be even better but neurotic safety regulations the manufacturers oppose means it’s a good while before it’s going to be legal to fill a whole unit with it.

The reason new A/C units suck is because of energy efficiency stuff thats sometimes government environmental regulations and sometimes the factories trying to make it more expensive. Lots of the time it’s bypassed in practice.

From a purely physical/technical perspective, modern refrigerants are fine.

Even refrigerants that completely satisfy our modem sensibilities (low global warming potential, zero ozone depletion potential) work as well as they always did. There's no magic sauce in those old fluorocarbons. Hell, even propane and CO2 are basically ideal refrigerants (but require a complete redesign of the cooling circuit, with much beefier parts to allow for much higher pressures).

If legacy AC systems seem to have more power, I'd assume they come with a more powerful compressor, and without pesky electronics that limit that power in any way.

Propane runs at normal Freon pressures. The government limits the amount that goes in a system for neurotic safety reasons(it’s flammable), which restricts its use to refrigerators and smaller air conditioners. But it works very well in those things.

Even refrigerants that completely satisfy our modem sensibilities (low global warming potential, zero ozone depletion potential) work as well as they always did. There's no magic sauce in those old fluorocarbons.

Part of the magic sauce is that they work at lower pressures. Other magic things include that they don't form HF if there's any water in the system, they're compatible with less expensive non-hygroscopic (remember that HF?) oils, they're single component so there's no need to replace all the refrigerant if there's a leak, and the very fact that the environmentalists hate them most makes them cool better. OK, maybe the last one is a myth.

Hell, even propane and CO2 are basically ideal refrigerants (but require a complete redesign of the cooling circuit, with much beefier parts to allow for much higher pressures).

Propane runs fine in a system designed for R-12. The issue with it is flammability.

Propane runs fine in a system designed for R-12. The issue with it is flammability.

While propane's flammability makes repairing systems using it more dangerous, it doesn't make much difference in running the system. It's a significantly better refrigerant than r-134a(the main thing it's replacing now) or r-410a(which, along with 404, it's likely to displace a lot of in the coming years) but a slightly worse one with similar drawbacks to r22(which has been banned/in phaseout for a while).

I don't know. But my first AC that I bought in 2004 went down to 16C, was stupid and made the room a walk in freezer. My current - lowest setting is 18C and has all kind of smart bullshit to prevent it going full blast. Up to the point that I think of tinkering with the thermistor to convince the bastard to play fairly.

That has nothing to do with the Freon, that’s energy saving stuff.

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