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I find it amazing that these regulations exist but apartments aren't even required to have AC. I remember spending many a summer in the Bay trying to survive by
by xvector 5y ago
I find it amazing that these regulations exist but apartments aren't even required to have AC. I remember spending many a summer in the Bay trying to survive by putting ice cubes in front of my desk fan in the day, under my pillow at night, etc. It was especially bad on days where fires meant that opening the window was bad for health.
When I first arrived, I was shocked to realize that AC was considered a luxury feature in the Bay. I've lived in dwellings in developing countries better capable of managing summer heat than most Bay Area apartments.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoYou probably shouldn’t move to Seattle. Quite a bit hotter summertime, and quite a lot of rentals explicitly prohibit AC window units.
- alexilliamson 5y agoTrue about the AC. But Seattle is slightly cooler year-round, right?
- ghaff 5y agoProbably depends where in the Bay Area you're talking about. The microclimates vary a lot. SF or the Santa Cruz mountains is one thing. The middle of Silicon Valley is something else.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI compared average temperatures with a few SV cities and the Seattle average is indeed lower than some. I compared recent years and it’s the opposite. Our all-time record this year (112-116 depending on where measurements were taken) certainly threw some of the averages off. But Seattle summers have been increasingly hot for the better part of a decade and I don’t expect that to trend the opposite way.
- jtms 5y agoIn new york a bunch of people use those portable rolling type units that sit inside and vent out the window with a big flexible accordion style tube. Always an option if a window banger isn't and much easier/safer to install/uninstall.
- anamax 5y agoMany houses in San Jose don't have air conditioning.
- Scoundreller 5y ago> I've lived in dwellings in developing countries better capable of managing summer heat than most Bay Area apartments. Developing recently has its advantages. They’ll install reversible AC mini-split systems primarily for cheaper heating than gas/oil/LP, but with the side-benefit of AC. Then again, a lot of Western Europe (hello France!) won’t use AC because “air conditioning makes you sick”. I’ve even seen it unused in a car during a heatwave for this reason, and it wasn’t an economic issue.
- xvector 5y agoI see what you mean, but these are countries I visited 10-15 years ago, so not recent by any means.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoHere in the UK we don’t generally use A/C not because of health concerns but because there’s only about three or four weeks of the year we’d actually need it so in practice fans and complaining heavily during those three or four weeks does just fine. Our climate is generally damp, grey, and mild; the summers don’t get very hot and the winters don’t get very cold. This might change with climate change though, I suspect in the future we’ll need better cooling and better heating if the jet stream gets interfered with. We’ll also need better drainage but there’s no shortage of scummy housing developers putting their underbuilt and overpriced shoeboxes on flood plains.
- Dylan16807 5y agoEven mildly uncomfortable heat can effectively waste 10% or more of the time you spend in it. And that number rises pretty fast as the heat increases. So even if you remove discomfort from the equation, it doesn't take many tens to hundreds of hours of heat to justify a £100 air conditioner that costs £0.05 an hour to run.
- avs733 5y agoWe’re finishing the gut renovating a house in the south eastern US were you definitely need both heat and air conditioning over the course of the year. We tore out our central hvac system, all the equipment, all the ducting and replaced it with mini splits. They are sooooooo much better. More effective, more flexible, and cheaper. Heating bill cut by 2/3. They let us heat and cool each room independently. No dust,smells, or heat gets moved between rooms. They even have a dehumidify setting. It is moronic that something similar is not standard practice in homes.
- ghaff 5y agoAC is generally optional especially in non-urban New England as well. It's probably pretty standard in new houses. But, in general, people in older homes, will put it in as part of a broader renovation, just stick in a window unit or two in the summer, or just make do with fans and it being overly hot for a few weeks a year.
- coldtea 5y ago>I find it amazing that these regulations exist but apartments aren't even required to have AC. If anything, regulations should discourage having AC -- to reduce the energy consumption...
- gumby 5y agoI rarely experience more than a few hot days a year on the peninsula, even these days. I can’t imagine having AC. I also have a house in the sierras there the summer temps are unbearable. But where I’ve lived in the bay (SF, Palo Alto) I don’t see the point.
- nitrogen 5y agoThe SF apartments I lived in for a few years would have been unlivable without A/C -- indoor temps would exceed 80F often. Not sure if it's because multi-story buildings don't get shade from trees, or something else.
- gumby 5y agoAh, 80 degrees seems like a normal living temperature to me and I would not make any effort to reduce that. But even in PA the temp doesn’t get even that high for long.
- rsj_hn 5y agoI lived in SF for 20 years and never once used AC. Heating, on the other hand, I used every winter. But temperature is very subjective.