15 ms·

Air conditioning's original purpose was to enable factory processes

111 points by pross356 6y ago

blakesterz 6y ago
Funny, being from Buffalo I've always heard it was invented here, and I read this and it says... Brooklyn?! In 1902 the factory’s operators asked Willis Haviland Carrier (1876–1950)... I guess he's FROM Buffalo, but created it FOR the place in Brooklyn. Good to know the details of this little trivia piece now. https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/the_last_laugh/2011/07/buffalo-birthplace-of-air-conditioning.html https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/the_last_laugh/2011...
- elicash 6y ago
  Florida also claims credit because of John Gorrie. In fact, in Congress each state contributes two statues to the National Statuary Hall Collection. One of Florida's is of John Gorrie -- that's how much state pride is taken in it. https://www.floridainvents.org/john-gorrie/ https://www.floridainvents.org/john-gorrie/
MattGaiser 6y ago
Yet another misery conquered by technology.
- AceJohnny2 6y ago
  Evil, unholy technology!!!1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Air
  - AceJohnny2 6y ago
    > Characters: Doctor Muñoz: A Spanish physician of "striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding" I can't believe I glossed over how racist Lovecraft was when I read this in my teens.
    - malwarebytess 6y ago
      Is that racist? Why? Obsessions over bloodlines and breeding have existed even in homogeneous societies. Not to say Lovecraft wasn't a racist -- he was.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - AceJohnny2 6y ago
        racist/classist... at that level it's the same thing. And why is your handle a typo away from the respected MalwareBytes name? (Other than to sow confusion, of course)
    - cyberdrunk 6y ago
      By the same measure, The Wire or Django is racist for using the n word... It's a work of fiction, the characters and the narrator are fictionalized artistic devices and don't necessarily represent the author's views.
  - hetspookjee 6y ago
    What a splendid read! Thanks for the link. Here's the original short story: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ca.aspx https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ca.aspx
sand500 6y ago
99% invisible podcast about AC https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/
- AnotherGoodName 6y ago
  A much better article since it discusses home design. You really can live comfortably without AC in even harsh environments. In particular houses with basements that have airflow through to the rest of the house. Underground the earth is ~55F the world over and it's really not difficult to design houses to make use of this fact.
  - post_break 6y ago
    All of that is dependent on location. If I dig a basement I'm under water.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Designing and building are two separate things. It may be easy to design but it is likely harder or slower to build compared to just slapping together slatted house beams. Although I wonder how much room for economy of scale growth there would be if hobbit homes became fashionable.
thisisauserid 6y ago
I learned that from James Burke on Connections: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68uf3j https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68uf3j He says it was for treating malaria though.
hk__2 6y ago
> It’s original purpose was to Side note: as a non-native speaker I’m always shocked by these basic errors made by natives, even more when they’re so prominent: here it’s the very first word of the lead. Edit: as pointed in the comment the author is not a native. This was a general remark.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  The extraneous apostrophe is such a common error as to border on acceptable usage. The only people using datum in the singular and data in the plural are academics and Latin aficionados. The fact that the real cost driver was industrial is interesting. But improvement of the human condition has been ever about the follow-on uses of some new gadget, from fire for heat to whoever decided to cook food using the heat from fire.
  - chillacy 6y ago
    There are so many non-native speakers of english (owing to it being the current international language) I don't even bother correcting grammar anymore in code comments in pull requests anymore. Unless it's like, user facing or something. But anyways, all the better I suppose to focus on content.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      Grammar will be fine when browsers and other tools will implement good grammar checking. I don't understand why browser developers don't focus on it. There are some companies like Grammarly solving that issue, but that should be standard feature rather than paid opt-in. I can translate website in Chrome with a single click, but I can't check grammar. And translation is a really hard task, while grammar is pretty much formalized and could be coded without any AI breakthroughs. I'm not native speaker and my text likely contains a lot of errors. For example I fix spell errors, because browser underlines them instantly, I'd fix grammar errors and may be I would develop some kind of grammar literacy after some time with proper computer assistance.
  - gruez 6y ago
nimbius 6y ago
Anecdotal evidence but my ex boyfriend was an HVAC technician and frequently serviced suburban households. He was always stunned at how cold most customers wanted their homes in the summer. "theyre like chubby little eskimos in front of the TV" he used to chuckle, and most would ardently refuse energy saving ideas like acclimating to 75 degrees in the home, installing ceiling fans, or opening windows instead of running the HVAC system. Most people would just run the system constantly until the blower died or the compressor burned up every six or seven years. Summertime is supposed to get a little warm :).
- Grakel 6y ago
  I would like to politely disagree; I think the point of having control of the temperature in your house is to have it be exactly the way you want it all the time. Now, it may take a while for the technology to catch up to that, but I think people would happily install a new system every few years, rather than lose that control. I personally like it cool enough to wear layers, regardless of what month it is.
  - maerF0x0 6y ago
    The issue is that many people do not realize the range to which they can acclimatize. And the acclimatization has varying degrees of value depending on the temperature differential to outdoors. Eg: in Canada one can keep their home a few degrees cooler in the winter to save quite a bit of money. Same idea in hotter climates -- keeping it 75 instead of 70 is something one can acclimatize to, but has more value when the out door temperature is 100f vs 80f. Overall I think it's just momentum. When I had a nest I used the dynamic range that said only cool if my place is over 78 and only heat if it's 68. Everything else, just roll with the ambient.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      > The issue is that many people do not realize the range to which they can acclimatize. Said acclimatization normally comes with downsides... When its hot, one might be less productive, feel less motivated to get stuff done, etc. It's pretty hard to measure that cost on a personal basis.
bcatanzaro 6y ago
It's interesting that this article didn't talk about the CO2 emissions from heating the North. My understanding is that we would save emissions if people would move out of Boston and move to Houston because heating houses is more carbon intensive than cooling them. The temperature differential is a lot bigger when heating. There's something Puritan and not very well considered about viewing air conditioning as a new-fangled luxury while viewing heating as a necessity.
- lsllc 6y ago
  The north east US is the largest heating oil market in the world, we consume 85% of the heating oil in the US. Most of these oil boilers will be 80% efficient at best. It does get quite cold here in the winter! The answer is building codes that require energy efficient construction techniques, and 0% loans for retrofitting existing houses with better insulation, windows and heating (actually much of this exists via HEAT loans). Tax breaks would help here ... Previously, the only real choices were some sort of fossil fuels with natural gas being the most efficient and cheapest (although it's only available in urban and most suburban areas). These days, a heat pump is more than capable of both heating and cooling even in the depths of a New England winter (although you still need a heat source for hot water). However, you need the right sized ducting for this which can make it cost-prohibitive for a retrofit (but there's no reason why any _new_ house should NOT have a heat-pump).
  - baybal2 6y ago
    This is always stunned me how USA manages to spend so much more money on heating than Russia. Then, I learned that USA has near no cogeneration, and district heating + detached house living with mostly terrible insulation. Most North American apartments are no better, with most highrises looking like radiators.
    - saas_sam 6y ago
      The US generates $65k per capita vs. Russia's $11k. That we spend more on heating probably has more to do with having more money to spend on heating. I doubt very much that Russia's buildings' insulation is much better.
redis_mlc 6y ago
AC was first introduced to US subs in WW2 to make the fire control computers more reliable. Although more comfortable for crew, they lost bunk space for the AC equipment.
- stx 6y ago
  Its interesting to think that a submarine would require air conditioning with average ocean temp being pretty cool. I guess it was because of the extra heat produced by the engine and other machines?
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Yes, heat, humidity and odors (basically air pollution) are a problem in subs. Subs are so awful to live in that the crew always gets the best food and amenities possible, but before AC I think they worked shirtless. They have layers of insulation for both thermal and acoustic reasons. Subs and torpedos are interesting to study since navies and inventors really struggled to make viable models, and probably a higher percentage of sub pioneers died than in aviation, which is saying something.
1996 6y ago
It's funny (and sad too) how in some parts of the world, AC is frowned upon: I visited France and Spain, the two sides of the border by the Mediterranean had about the same temperatures, but AC was a rare oddity in France, while it was very common in Spain. It seemed to be due to beliefs, as the locals said they were afraid of getting sick due to AC -- while I don't disagree improper maintenance can provide breeding grounds for a bunch of microbes, just do the scheduled maintenance and everything will be fine!
- f6v 6y ago
  It's also that "it's hot only several days in Summer, why do we need Acs?" and then year over year Western and Central Europe is suffering from "unexpected" heat waves. What makes it worse is that residential buildings haven't been built for this kind of climate.
  - altoidaltoid 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave 14000+ dead in France that year...
- aeyes 6y ago
  It's the dry air that makes people sick who aren't used to living with an AC, I see it in the office every year. I'd say Barcelona is right around the area where an AC makes sense, you have 2 months per year being a little annoying but nothing unbearable. Also, it still rains in summer.
nslav 6y ago
I spent a couple summers working at a printer in Massachusetts around 2005-2006 and the first year the shop did not have air conditioning. The paper came off a large roll at the back of the press which was pulled through from the front. Part of the process involved sending it through an oven presumably to set the ink, then it would go over a chilled roller to cool it off again. On particularly hot and humid days it would be difficult to restart the press after stopping it as the condensation on the chilled rollers would saturate the paper and it would immediately rip (referred to as a "tear out") and would then have to be manually spliced back together with tape. One night we spent something like 10 hours trying to get the press started up again after stopping it to change the plates. Anyway, that's just my story about humidity and printing. The second summer I worked there they had installed air conditioning and those problems went away. I'm sure they did it for business reasons and not because they thought it was cruel to force people to regularly work in 100+ fahrenheit temperatures.
- dan_quixote 6y ago
  In a previous life I worked for a company that made extremely precise tooling for airplane manufacturing. These things were often upwards of 200ft long and 60ft tall. And they are so precise, that a difference of 5F could make the steel structures grow enough to be out of spec. Most aerospace factories have tightly controlled HVAC for this reason. Well, anyway, we installed a set of tooling in a factory in Japan where the summers can be quite hot. They didn't have HVAC in the factory and this resulted in a 30F gradient from bottom to top. This meant that we had to redesign some connections between parts to progressively account for thermal expansion. This crazy problem would not have existed had they just had HVAC!
  - Hello71 6y ago
    wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a few dozen box fans from the local electronics store?
    - closeparen 6y ago
      Circulation is not cooling.
csours 6y ago
I wonder if octovalve/superbottle is coming to home hvac. I spend energy to make my water hot for showers and washing. I spend energy to make my air cold so I can work without sweating. I spend energy to chill my groceries. I can't help but feel that coordinating those better would lead to reduced energy usage (thus reduced cost). I don't know if I can feasibly do that right now with residential/consumer tech.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Sounds very interesting! I'd love to learn more if others could chime in
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    A version of it is a heat pump water heater: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating/heat-pump-water-heaters https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating/heat-pump-w... In my home, we leave the garage door open when it’s warm so the cold air that the heat pump water heater expels can come into the house. It’s basically an air conditioner that dumps heat into the water, instead of the outside air.
- thebluehawk 6y ago
  That's a compelling idea. I've seen systems that use essentially solar panels on the roof that heats up a liquid in a loop then goes to a heat exchanger which heats up your water before it goes to the water heater, thus making it so the water heater doesn't have to work as hard. Could we use the exhaust from your fridge, A/C, furnace, etc. to also heat coolant in a similar system that circulates to your pre-water heater, thus boosting efficiency. Especially if you can dump the exhaust of your fridge outside rather than paying to heat up that air, then cool in down again with your A/C. The question is if the cost savings would be worth the cost of the system.
  - csours 6y ago
    > The question is if the cost savings would be worth the cost of the system. I think it might be, if it was built into the home from the beginning, and the engineering cost was spread out over a large number of units. In other words, I don't expect it to make sense for one homeowner to retrofit their house. It would make more sense in a condo/apartment/multi-unit/commercial situation.
chaz 6y ago
I toured the main FedEx hub in Memphis several years ago. They have many buildings that sort packages on high-speed machinery. In one building, there was a long line of parcel trays, each carrying a single item. The trays would move fast down the line and, at just the right moment, tip the parcel out and into a bin below, each for a different flight. Because of the tray's speed (and the trays don't stop), the tipping needed to start well before it was over the bin, at a precisely calibrated time. A video of these machines is here, at 1m 45s: https://youtu.be/xytmh6t3Grk?t=105 https://youtu.be/xytmh6t3Grk?t=105 It was one of the few sorting buildings that was air conditioned in the hot Memphis summers, and not for the humans. The humidity affected how quickly the parcels slipped off of the tray, and they might end up in the wrong bin.
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  Was wondering why the video quality looked like shit until I realized that it's a "virtual reality video"
  - knodi123 6y ago
    I was wondering why a simple youtube video was making my CPU fans kick into overdrive, then I realized the same thing.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      It's just mapping a rectangle to a sphere. I wonder what's wasting the CPU.
causality0 6y ago
The headline is not strictly accurate. Putting aside non-mechanical indoor climate conditioning that dates back thousands of years, in 1842 John Gorrie used an evaporative cooling machine to create cold air for hospital patients. Carrier was just the first to use an electrically-driven compressor.
- kortilla 6y ago
  IMO evap isn’t even worthy of consideration when discussed in the context of the south where you’re dealing with 90+% humidity.
  - causality0 6y ago
    By evaporative cooling I mean using controlled phase-change of a cooling medium in closed-loop condensation/evaporation coils, not something analogous to a swamp cooler. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
hinkley 6y ago
It's odd to me how both this history and the one on Wikipedia seem to keep industrial refrigeration and industrial air conditioning at arm's length, as if air conditioning isn't a walk-in cooler scaled up to building size. 30 years before Carrier, Carl von Linde was refrigerating beer for Spaten Breweries and within 10 years everybody was doing it. It seems like the key difference is that his chiller was indirect, freezing water instead of chilling air. I think I first heard of this on Connections 3, which of course makes these connections because that's what they do.
p1mrx 6y ago
It'd be nice if someone could properly design a dual-hose portable A/C with attention to soundproofing and efficiency. Lots of people will be needing these over the next few decades. I recently bought one, and found the low-hanging fruit to be pretty pathetic: https://pmarks.net/ac https://pmarks.net/ac (The ability to wirelessly integrate with a standard thermostat would also be nice; I'm currently hacking that together using ESP32 modules.)
akeck 6y ago
I thought it was first for watching movies. https://wfpl.org/air-conditioning/ https://wfpl.org/air-conditioning/
clintonb 6y ago
The podcast "50 Things That Made the Modern Economy" has an episode about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0504qtn https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0504qtn.
im3w1l 6y ago
It depends on how you define air conditioning. The story from the article describes different technologies from the modern AC unit: cold water and evaporative cooling. But already the ancient egyptians used evaporative cooling for their homes. And with an even looser definition, we might include root cellars. They are also rooms with controlled temperature and humidity, dating even further back than ancient egypt.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"In 2018 the International Energy Agency predicted a coming “cold crunch” driven by a combination of three key factors: Incomes will continue to rise in the emerging economies, where one of the first spending choices is for a window A/C unit."
unixhero 6y ago
Fahrenheit, what is that? A fruit?

111 points by pross356 6y ago

Funny, being from Buffalo I've always heard it was invented here, and I read this and it says... Brooklyn?! In 1902 the factory’s operators asked Willis Haviland Carrier (1876–1950)... I guess he's FROM Buffalo, but created it FOR the place in Brooklyn. Good to know the details of this little trivia piece now. https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/the_last_laugh/2011/07/buffalo-birthplace-of-air-conditioning.html https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/the_last_laugh/2011...

elicash 6y ago
Florida also claims credit because of John Gorrie. In fact, in Congress each state contributes two statues to the National Statuary Hall Collection. One of Florida's is of John Gorrie -- that's how much state pride is taken in it. https://www.floridainvents.org/john-gorrie/ https://www.floridainvents.org/john-gorrie/

MattGaiser 6y ago

Yet another misery conquered by technology.

AceJohnny2 6y ago
Evil, unholy technology!!!1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Air
- AceJohnny2 6y ago
  > Characters: Doctor Muñoz: A Spanish physician of "striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding" I can't believe I glossed over how racist Lovecraft was when I read this in my teens.
  - malwarebytess 6y ago
    Is that racist? Why? Obsessions over bloodlines and breeding have existed even in homogeneous societies. Not to say Lovecraft wasn't a racist -- he was.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - AceJohnny2 6y ago
      racist/classist... at that level it's the same thing. And why is your handle a typo away from the respected MalwareBytes name? (Other than to sow confusion, of course)
  - cyberdrunk 6y ago
    By the same measure, The Wire or Django is racist for using the n word... It's a work of fiction, the characters and the narrator are fictionalized artistic devices and don't necessarily represent the author's views.
- hetspookjee 6y ago
  What a splendid read! Thanks for the link. Here's the original short story: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ca.aspx https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ca.aspx

sand500 6y ago

99% invisible podcast about AC https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/

AnotherGoodName 6y ago
A much better article since it discusses home design. You really can live comfortably without AC in even harsh environments. In particular houses with basements that have airflow through to the rest of the house. Underground the earth is ~55F the world over and it's really not difficult to design houses to make use of this fact.
- post_break 6y ago
  All of that is dependent on location. If I dig a basement I'm under water.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Designing and building are two separate things. It may be easy to design but it is likely harder or slower to build compared to just slapping together slatted house beams. Although I wonder how much room for economy of scale growth there would be if hobbit homes became fashionable.

thisisauserid 6y ago

I learned that from James Burke on Connections: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68uf3j https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68uf3j He says it was for treating malaria though.

hk__2 6y ago

> It’s original purpose was to Side note: as a non-native speaker I’m always shocked by these basic errors made by natives, even more when they’re so prominent: here it’s the very first word of the lead. Edit: as pointed in the comment the author is not a native. This was a general remark.

smitty1e 6y ago
The extraneous apostrophe is such a common error as to border on acceptable usage. The only people using datum in the singular and data in the plural are academics and Latin aficionados. The fact that the real cost driver was industrial is interesting. But improvement of the human condition has been ever about the follow-on uses of some new gadget, from fire for heat to whoever decided to cook food using the heat from fire.
- chillacy 6y ago
  There are so many non-native speakers of english (owing to it being the current international language) I don't even bother correcting grammar anymore in code comments in pull requests anymore. Unless it's like, user facing or something. But anyways, all the better I suppose to focus on content.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    Grammar will be fine when browsers and other tools will implement good grammar checking. I don't understand why browser developers don't focus on it. There are some companies like Grammarly solving that issue, but that should be standard feature rather than paid opt-in. I can translate website in Chrome with a single click, but I can't check grammar. And translation is a really hard task, while grammar is pretty much formalized and could be coded without any AI breakthroughs. I'm not native speaker and my text likely contains a lot of errors. For example I fix spell errors, because browser underlines them instantly, I'd fix grammar errors and may be I would develop some kind of grammar literacy after some time with proper computer assistance.
- gruez 6y ago

nimbius 6y ago

Anecdotal evidence but my ex boyfriend was an HVAC technician and frequently serviced suburban households. He was always stunned at how cold most customers wanted their homes in the summer. "theyre like chubby little eskimos in front of the TV" he used to chuckle, and most would ardently refuse energy saving ideas like acclimating to 75 degrees in the home, installing ceiling fans, or opening windows instead of running the HVAC system. Most people would just run the system constantly until the blower died or the compressor burned up every six or seven years. Summertime is supposed to get a little warm :).

Grakel 6y ago
I would like to politely disagree; I think the point of having control of the temperature in your house is to have it be exactly the way you want it all the time. Now, it may take a while for the technology to catch up to that, but I think people would happily install a new system every few years, rather than lose that control. I personally like it cool enough to wear layers, regardless of what month it is.
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  The issue is that many people do not realize the range to which they can acclimatize. And the acclimatization has varying degrees of value depending on the temperature differential to outdoors. Eg: in Canada one can keep their home a few degrees cooler in the winter to save quite a bit of money. Same idea in hotter climates -- keeping it 75 instead of 70 is something one can acclimatize to, but has more value when the out door temperature is 100f vs 80f. Overall I think it's just momentum. When I had a nest I used the dynamic range that said only cool if my place is over 78 and only heat if it's 68. Everything else, just roll with the ambient.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    > The issue is that many people do not realize the range to which they can acclimatize. Said acclimatization normally comes with downsides... When its hot, one might be less productive, feel less motivated to get stuff done, etc. It's pretty hard to measure that cost on a personal basis.

bcatanzaro 6y ago

It's interesting that this article didn't talk about the CO2 emissions from heating the North. My understanding is that we would save emissions if people would move out of Boston and move to Houston because heating houses is more carbon intensive than cooling them. The temperature differential is a lot bigger when heating. There's something Puritan and not very well considered about viewing air conditioning as a new-fangled luxury while viewing heating as a necessity.

lsllc 6y ago
The north east US is the largest heating oil market in the world, we consume 85% of the heating oil in the US. Most of these oil boilers will be 80% efficient at best. It does get quite cold here in the winter! The answer is building codes that require energy efficient construction techniques, and 0% loans for retrofitting existing houses with better insulation, windows and heating (actually much of this exists via HEAT loans). Tax breaks would help here ... Previously, the only real choices were some sort of fossil fuels with natural gas being the most efficient and cheapest (although it's only available in urban and most suburban areas). These days, a heat pump is more than capable of both heating and cooling even in the depths of a New England winter (although you still need a heat source for hot water). However, you need the right sized ducting for this which can make it cost-prohibitive for a retrofit (but there's no reason why any _new_ house should NOT have a heat-pump).
- baybal2 6y ago
  This is always stunned me how USA manages to spend so much more money on heating than Russia. Then, I learned that USA has near no cogeneration, and district heating + detached house living with mostly terrible insulation. Most North American apartments are no better, with most highrises looking like radiators.
  - saas_sam 6y ago
    The US generates $65k per capita vs. Russia's $11k. That we spend more on heating probably has more to do with having more money to spend on heating. I doubt very much that Russia's buildings' insulation is much better.

redis_mlc 6y ago

AC was first introduced to US subs in WW2 to make the fire control computers more reliable. Although more comfortable for crew, they lost bunk space for the AC equipment.

stx 6y ago
Its interesting to think that a submarine would require air conditioning with average ocean temp being pretty cool. I guess it was because of the extra heat produced by the engine and other machines?
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Yes, heat, humidity and odors (basically air pollution) are a problem in subs. Subs are so awful to live in that the crew always gets the best food and amenities possible, but before AC I think they worked shirtless. They have layers of insulation for both thermal and acoustic reasons. Subs and torpedos are interesting to study since navies and inventors really struggled to make viable models, and probably a higher percentage of sub pioneers died than in aviation, which is saying something.

1996 6y ago

It's funny (and sad too) how in some parts of the world, AC is frowned upon: I visited France and Spain, the two sides of the border by the Mediterranean had about the same temperatures, but AC was a rare oddity in France, while it was very common in Spain. It seemed to be due to beliefs, as the locals said they were afraid of getting sick due to AC -- while I don't disagree improper maintenance can provide breeding grounds for a bunch of microbes, just do the scheduled maintenance and everything will be fine!

f6v 6y ago
It's also that "it's hot only several days in Summer, why do we need Acs?" and then year over year Western and Central Europe is suffering from "unexpected" heat waves. What makes it worse is that residential buildings haven't been built for this kind of climate.
- altoidaltoid 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave 14000+ dead in France that year...
aeyes 6y ago
It's the dry air that makes people sick who aren't used to living with an AC, I see it in the office every year. I'd say Barcelona is right around the area where an AC makes sense, you have 2 months per year being a little annoying but nothing unbearable. Also, it still rains in summer.

nslav 6y ago

I spent a couple summers working at a printer in Massachusetts around 2005-2006 and the first year the shop did not have air conditioning. The paper came off a large roll at the back of the press which was pulled through from the front. Part of the process involved sending it through an oven presumably to set the ink, then it would go over a chilled roller to cool it off again. On particularly hot and humid days it would be difficult to restart the press after stopping it as the condensation on the chilled rollers would saturate the paper and it would immediately rip (referred to as a "tear out") and would then have to be manually spliced back together with tape. One night we spent something like 10 hours trying to get the press started up again after stopping it to change the plates. Anyway, that's just my story about humidity and printing. The second summer I worked there they had installed air conditioning and those problems went away. I'm sure they did it for business reasons and not because they thought it was cruel to force people to regularly work in 100+ fahrenheit temperatures.

dan_quixote 6y ago
In a previous life I worked for a company that made extremely precise tooling for airplane manufacturing. These things were often upwards of 200ft long and 60ft tall. And they are so precise, that a difference of 5F could make the steel structures grow enough to be out of spec. Most aerospace factories have tightly controlled HVAC for this reason. Well, anyway, we installed a set of tooling in a factory in Japan where the summers can be quite hot. They didn't have HVAC in the factory and this resulted in a 30F gradient from bottom to top. This meant that we had to redesign some connections between parts to progressively account for thermal expansion. This crazy problem would not have existed had they just had HVAC!
- Hello71 6y ago
  wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a few dozen box fans from the local electronics store?
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Circulation is not cooling.

csours 6y ago

I wonder if octovalve/superbottle is coming to home hvac. I spend energy to make my water hot for showers and washing. I spend energy to make my air cold so I can work without sweating. I spend energy to chill my groceries. I can't help but feel that coordinating those better would lead to reduced energy usage (thus reduced cost). I don't know if I can feasibly do that right now with residential/consumer tech.

airstrike 6y ago
Sounds very interesting! I'd love to learn more if others could chime in
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  A version of it is a heat pump water heater: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating/heat-pump-water-heaters https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating/heat-pump-w... In my home, we leave the garage door open when it’s warm so the cold air that the heat pump water heater expels can come into the house. It’s basically an air conditioner that dumps heat into the water, instead of the outside air.
thebluehawk 6y ago
That's a compelling idea. I've seen systems that use essentially solar panels on the roof that heats up a liquid in a loop then goes to a heat exchanger which heats up your water before it goes to the water heater, thus making it so the water heater doesn't have to work as hard. Could we use the exhaust from your fridge, A/C, furnace, etc. to also heat coolant in a similar system that circulates to your pre-water heater, thus boosting efficiency. Especially if you can dump the exhaust of your fridge outside rather than paying to heat up that air, then cool in down again with your A/C. The question is if the cost savings would be worth the cost of the system.
- csours 6y ago
  > The question is if the cost savings would be worth the cost of the system. I think it might be, if it was built into the home from the beginning, and the engineering cost was spread out over a large number of units. In other words, I don't expect it to make sense for one homeowner to retrofit their house. It would make more sense in a condo/apartment/multi-unit/commercial situation.

chaz 6y ago

I toured the main FedEx hub in Memphis several years ago. They have many buildings that sort packages on high-speed machinery. In one building, there was a long line of parcel trays, each carrying a single item. The trays would move fast down the line and, at just the right moment, tip the parcel out and into a bin below, each for a different flight. Because of the tray's speed (and the trays don't stop), the tipping needed to start well before it was over the bin, at a precisely calibrated time. A video of these machines is here, at 1m 45s: https://youtu.be/xytmh6t3Grk?t=105 https://youtu.be/xytmh6t3Grk?t=105 It was one of the few sorting buildings that was air conditioned in the hot Memphis summers, and not for the humans. The humidity affected how quickly the parcels slipped off of the tray, and they might end up in the wrong bin.

NullPrefix 6y ago
Was wondering why the video quality looked like shit until I realized that it's a "virtual reality video"
- knodi123 6y ago
  I was wondering why a simple youtube video was making my CPU fans kick into overdrive, then I realized the same thing.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    It's just mapping a rectangle to a sphere. I wonder what's wasting the CPU.

causality0 6y ago

The headline is not strictly accurate. Putting aside non-mechanical indoor climate conditioning that dates back thousands of years, in 1842 John Gorrie used an evaporative cooling machine to create cold air for hospital patients. Carrier was just the first to use an electrically-driven compressor.

kortilla 6y ago
IMO evap isn’t even worthy of consideration when discussed in the context of the south where you’re dealing with 90+% humidity.
- causality0 6y ago
  By evaporative cooling I mean using controlled phase-change of a cooling medium in closed-loop condensation/evaporation coils, not something analogous to a swamp cooler. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

hinkley 6y ago

It's odd to me how both this history and the one on Wikipedia seem to keep industrial refrigeration and industrial air conditioning at arm's length, as if air conditioning isn't a walk-in cooler scaled up to building size. 30 years before Carrier, Carl von Linde was refrigerating beer for Spaten Breweries and within 10 years everybody was doing it. It seems like the key difference is that his chiller was indirect, freezing water instead of chilling air. I think I first heard of this on Connections 3, which of course makes these connections because that's what they do.

p1mrx 6y ago

It'd be nice if someone could properly design a dual-hose portable A/C with attention to soundproofing and efficiency. Lots of people will be needing these over the next few decades. I recently bought one, and found the low-hanging fruit to be pretty pathetic: https://pmarks.net/ac https://pmarks.net/ac (The ability to wirelessly integrate with a standard thermostat would also be nice; I'm currently hacking that together using ESP32 modules.)

akeck 6y ago

I thought it was first for watching movies. https://wfpl.org/air-conditioning/ https://wfpl.org/air-conditioning/

clintonb 6y ago

The podcast "50 Things That Made the Modern Economy" has an episode about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0504qtn https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0504qtn.

im3w1l 6y ago

It depends on how you define air conditioning. The story from the article describes different technologies from the modern AC unit: cold water and evaporative cooling. But already the ancient egyptians used evaporative cooling for their homes. And with an even looser definition, we might include root cellars. They are also rooms with controlled temperature and humidity, dating even further back than ancient egypt.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"In 2018 the International Energy Agency predicted a coming “cold crunch” driven by a combination of three key factors: Incomes will continue to rise in the emerging economies, where one of the first spending choices is for a window A/C unit."

unixhero 6y ago

Fahrenheit, what is that? A fruit?