Today I Learned: More Europeans die each year due to lack of AC than Americans die due to firearms

Including suicides!

https://www.who.int/europe/news/ite...years-yet-nearly-all-of-them-were-preventable

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/28/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-us/

Fucking Christ Europe!

Have y’all not heard of heat pumps?!?!

Heat deaths: Also the number one USPS Mail Carrier killer

It’s crazy to think that when I lived in Germany I SHARED A TWIN BED with my partner at the time, Vandygoddess.

I hate sleeping in anything smaller than a queen by myself these days.

Sundays were the fucking worst. Every fucking bell in every fucking church (Heidelberg has a couple) is just ringing off the hook all morning to wake you up for church.

Your only two options are swelter with the windows closed or put up with the cacophony.

How the hell is one of the biggest selling points of the new trucks: Has AC.

How was this not a thing already?!?!

My mail truck is a Mercedes Metris. It has AC.

I hate even sharing a king with the 6 year old. How the fuck are you only 40 pounds and you take up 95% of this bed?!?

Well, maybe you should have gotten up and gone to church, you fucking lazy heathen.

Yeah I’ve got family there and have lived through it while on vacation, it’s insane

It’s this strange mix of historical temps not being that bad so there was no need, high energy costs, old buildings that are hard to update and more recently crazy leftist public sector people saying you’ll murder the environment if you do it

Dunno if anyone saw the temps today in Paris but they’re setting records. It’s like Texas - imagine Texas with no AC

Throw these poor people a chilled bone for crying out loud

Having survived two summers in Italy without AC, it's absolutely fucking bonkers that the continent has not adopted AC as widely. The humidity was almost worse than when I lived in Philly, but I at least had AC in Philly.

And this was all like 10-15 years ago, I'm sure it's worse now.

I imagine it will get better over the next couple of decades as heat pump systems become more widely adopted.

Holy shit.

It's been cooler here this week than it's been there.

Yeah, historically we haven't seen these sorts of temperatures (thanks climate deniers!) and also many buildings lack the exterior space for the venting to be easily fitted.

If the UK gets more heatwaves like this one, I'm considering a downstairs heat pump to keep the living space cool (fans are enough at the moment - it's 24C downstairs and 26C upstairs) and I can use the sofa bed if the bedroom isn't benefiting. Will make the lounge cheaper to heat than the electric smart radiator I have at present too.

But that's for after the mortgage is paid off next year.

https://bsky.app/profile/garius.bsky.social/post/3mp3umzxcas2w

Why are your legs on my chest?!? How did you get horizontal?!!

The problem here at least is that housing is built to keep heat in, rather than out. With the weather we have at the moment that requirement is reversing itself.

AC is fast becoming a political discussion here. But trying to get Europeans to see the use of AC is like trying to get Americans to see the use of universal health care.

It must be said, though, that with our masonry houses, it isn't as hot inside as one might think. With temperatures running around 40° outside, our ground floor (with no AC, and keeping the windows closed) stays at about 24°. That is very bearable.

Upstairs, where our offices are, there isn't as much masonry in the walls (this is an old half-timbered house; only the ground floor is all stone). We have to keep fans running in order to bear the temperatures. And once it really gets hot outside, we keep the windows closed, so the fans aren't just sucking in hot air. And even with that, daytime temperatures in our offices tend to run around 33°.

I will leave it to those of you on the other side of the pond and south of the 49th parallel to convert those to the funny temperatures you use...

always and forever horizontal with her dragon toes on my back!

I'm considering putting a weather-proofed shed in my yard to use as an office. Given that it's Canada, temperatures in my part of the country can swing from -30C in the winter to +30C in the summer.

I will definitely install a small heat pump if I go ahead with the project. It really isn't that difficult. *waves to Europe*

Actually, there are programs all over everywhere encouraging people to install heat pumps, and there are more being installed every day, all across Europe. It's not like Europe hasn't heard of them, or doesn't want them. But installing heat pumps for 750 million people (or "only" 450 million, if you only count the European Union rather than the whole of Europe) takes time. It is not something that can be accomplished overnight.

You condescendingly say "It really isn't that difficult", which is true for one installation, especially one new, isolated structure. It is not true for the hundreds of millions of installations needed in Europe, especially when so many of them are very old "village houses" with not one square centimetre of land around them.

Simplistic "it isn't all that difficult" claims simply do not measure up to the reality of Europe.

Sheesh. I'm not suggesting European countries install several hundred million heat pumps overnight. They'd need at least a week or so.

But the footprint of a heat pump is relatively much smaller than a traditional air conditioning unit, and it can be mounted on exterior walls or even rooftops.

That's why there's such a push for them here.

Houses in the old parts of towns (like ours) don't usually have any exterior walls, except the front wall that is directly on the street, with restrictions on what you can and can't put there (it has to fit in with the historical look). And I'm not sure that mounting one on the roof would be such a good idea. What use is there in exchanging heat from inside the house, where it is too hot, with up on the roof, where it is even hotter?

That's not how a heat pump works. It doesn't "exchange" air when in cooling mode.

But understood about the frontage issue. So on the rooftop it goes!

I know it doesn't exchange air. It exchanges heat. That's why it's called a heat pump.

But when your choices are "hot" and "hotter", I don't see where that's going to help.

The things I have seen about heat pumps have a part that's undergrgound, not on the roof.

Obviously not the same scale but Seattle and Boston are the two major US cities with the lowest percentage of AC installs.

Which historically hasn’t been an issue but is now a pretty major one. Unfortunately a lot of our new housing stock was added in the 2010s after the high efficiency swing out windows became standard but AC not so it is hard to put a window unit in. The newest ones have that hole in the wall you can hook a standup in.

Moving forward though heat pumps and mini-splits really are the solution. When I added AC to the bedrooms of the house I did a ducted mini-split that sat in the attic and got all three bedrooms and both bathrooms.

I have a portable fan that I switch on at night so I can fucking sleep.

The roof being hotter than the inside of the house has no bearing on whether the heat pump (working as an air conditioner) can efficiently transfer waste heat to the outdoor unit.

Plenty of roof mounted outdoor coils in Phoenix, AZ and Las Vegas, NV.

You're talking about a ground source heat pump, by the way, and that's not the most common type of heat pump in hot areas.

The most common type of heat pumps in hot areas are ducted air source heat pumps and they look almost exactly like regular air conditioners with an indoor coil and an outdoor coil (which can either be on the ground outside or on the roof).

Mini-splits are awesome.

Heat pumps are just air conditioners you can electrically swap the evaporator and condenser parts of at any time. What you’re describing is a geothermal heat pipe, which is a type of heat pump, but far from the only one. Heat pumps have no problem rejecting house heat into a hotter environment any more than a normal air conditioner does.

What makes them any more efficient than central air is that they typically run hoses rather than full ducting to the rooms that the mini-splits are in, and only to the rooms where the mini-splits are on. This is not a huge advantage. BUT what makes them awesome is that they’re 3-4 times as efficient as resistive heating.

Did someone say "the refrigeration cycle and latent heat of vaporization"?



Not sure if it's in this video or not, but there are AC Units that are essentially dehumidifiers with an exhaust hose so they can be used as air conditioners. If a dwelling doesn't have a window or chimney one can stick a 2in hose into to vent heat outside, humans probably shouldn't be living there.

You're tempting me to start explaining a Temperature vs. Specific Entropy diagram.