British Homes Have Air Conditioning ?

And how serious is the government really?

You can still fly across Europe for £29.99 kinda thing

Not usual in UK homes but I have a friend, ex software tech and loves gadgets, who has it in a couple of rooms in his house and now uses it for heating and cooling. He is very impressed and reckons it is cheaper than his central heating in the winter.

I believe most offices now have it, we didn't when I retired but most working folks I know seem to have it. Part of our factory was temperature controlled, the gear shop and standards room, but the rest of us just had to grin and bear it...

If it's government propaganda, then it's propaganda that's being pushed worldwide by 196 separate governments.

Plausible?

Like some others, I have installed air to air heatpumps (two multi-split units). Had it in my last place too. These provide very cheap and green heating as a primary function and cooling on the not too common times that it is required.
A very worthwhile investment.

Robert G8RPI.

Note "air conditioning" is a heat pump that only pumps heat out i.e. cooling only. Mt air to ai "heat pump" is the same technology but the circuit is reversable so can pump heat in in cold weather (making the outside colder.
The air (or ground) to water that you can get grants for only pump heat in to the house.

I used to have air conditioning (bought by my parents when my ex-wife was pregnant with my son during a very humid hot period) but since installing ceiling fans I've not needed it.

A friend of mine laughed at them, claiming I was living in the 1970s. You stay in your "up-to-date" house mate, I'll stay in my comfortable one.

It's funny how the USA <> UK relationship works. Lots of things are taken for granted as being the same yet we suddenly find great gaps in understanding. Like loads of Californians have their HVAC (Heating, ventilating, air conditioning) but have never even seen coal let alone an open coal fire in the living room. Come to think of it not many Brits nowadays know how to handle a living flame fire. (BBQs don't count)

And the other end of air-conditioning , the jet engines placed around the vineyards to keep the frost at bay.

I couldn't agree more. Aided and abbetted by the MSM who can't get enough of "Climate Change" Most of us laugh at it all when Winter comes and it is freezing cold!

People who are convinced that global warming is a scam should Google Dunning-Kruger effect.

I wouldn't bet my grandson's survival on it being a hoax.

About 3 years ago after a few days of extra hot weather we decided to look at Air con for our living room. We live in Norfolk. We missed the boat that year but had it installed the next year. I would say that we have used it for no more than 10 days a year but it's been lovely these last few days! Yesterday it was 38c outside and 25c inside. It also heats as well if needed.

I wouldn't say it's a scam, it is the propaganda that we are causing it that I am skepical about. What is undoubtedly true is that many individuals and organisations are making millions from it all.

That's the clever thing about it. it was never a hoax.

Everyone and his dog knows the world has been warming up for 30,000 years so far, and the sea level has risen about 400 feet to date

The hoax is a zillion dollars of government handouts to people who confirm that the sky is indeed blue

we can't stop global warming, we never could

The reduction in pollution is a positive thing, but it won't alter climate change

Returning to air conditioning, this is a relatively modern necessity in some climates.

Work sent me to Sao-Paulo, Brazil, and Brindisi, southern Italy, during hot summers. Being a soft Englishman I was given a desk in the only air conditioned office at the Sao-Paulo works. The factory itself was surprisingly cool and I was told that Brizilian architects once knew how to design cool buildings. The Fiat works at Brindisi was a large, airy, pre-war concrete building, without air conditioning, which was very cool even on the hottest day in, I think, 2003. I remember that there was a very hot, very unpleasant, Sirocco blowing at the time.

JA

Edited By JA on 20/07/2022 16:30:19

I only have AC in my home office and its lovely these last few days. Its also made me do stuff in here that I had put off doing. It was a DIY package, already charged so all that was needed was fit the 2 units, pipe up, bleed some gas and it worked. When I used to spend all day inhere it was a god send. It heats and cools.

Any millions being made from global warming are tiny compared with tens of trillions made by economies based on fossil fuels!

Many find it hard to accept humans have anything to do with global warming, but nothing else fits the evidence so well.

Unless someone knows different. If it's not human activity, what exactly is causing our living space to heat up?

Dave

Edit:  Just babbling along here, getting ready for the morning work rush, so nothing of importance, but just a few random thoughts this morning.

Those are some interesting comments for sure.

I did not realize the UK was so far north.

I am going to have to pull out my globe and try to get more educated.

I normally use a polar map, since it shows the adjacencies of the continents better, ie: India is on the opposite side of us.

Looking at a polar map, I can clearly see how far north you guys are.

It is unfortunate that students in the US don't get to travel more when in school, and discover and appreciate more of the world.

My wife traveled to Greece and Rome in high school, but unfortunately I never left the country.

My daughter has been to the UK. She said the driving was pretty wild (she did not attempt to drive).

The driving here in the US is getting worse as time passes, with folks getting hyper agressive in their driving style, more like using their auto as a weapon to drive you off the road.

I was driving down the expressway a few months ago, and a large tire from a trailer about 100 yards in front of me came off and rolled a long way down the road before finally rolling off to theside.

I have seen many videos of cars flipping if they hit a rolling tire, so I was glad to miss that one.

I had a deer jump in front of my car about 10 years ago, when I was traveling about 78 mph.

Totaled my car, but I was unhurt. I called my wife at 1:00 A.M. and said "Honey, I am fine, but we are going to need a new car".

I had a perfect imprint of a complete deer in my hood, which was bent up like a snow plow.

I think many folks up north in this country do not have AC in their houses.

I noticed that heating is a bit different in Europe, as best as I can tell from the videos I watch.

Houses built in this country in the last 50 years generally have central air and heat, with a fan coil unit in the attic, a condenser outside, and rigid insulated metal ductwork. Heat in this area is almost always natural gas.

Occasionally you will see electric heat, with no natural gas, but that is an expensive way to heat a house.

Up north, I see a lot of oil-fired heating units, and so it would seem heating oil is more the norm.

In rural areas, folks use a large propane tank, and septic system in the yard.

Sometimes people use wells, but generally every small town has a small water system for potable water.

Urban folks are connected to city water, sewer system, and natural gas system.

In Europe, I see a lot of wood pellet heating units, and I generally have never seen hard-ducted aircondition/heating systems.

I always see radiators, with I guess a boiler in the basement (we don't generally have basements here due to the high groundwater level).

And as I understand it, you don't have combined hot/cold water spigots at the sinks, but almost all sinks here have combo units.  We don't separate hot water from cold water here; it is all the same system.

I think heating lends itself to a boiler/radiator system better than cooling.

The trend these days is ductless systems, but they are still pretty rare in houses.

One trend I see is packaged air condition units that you can install yourself, with pre-charged lines, and no AC technician required to install. The condenser hangs on the wall outside, and the evaporator is also on the wall inside. Very cost effective, but not the best for even air distribution.

I would love to get over to the UK one day and meet the relatives. I have a lot of cousins in Europe, some of whom I have had the pleasure of meeting.

My cousin from Copenhagen said that one has to be much more multicultural in Europe because there are so many countries close together. My cousin said he spoke about 8 languages, and he said without learning the languages of the countries around Denmark, then one cannot effectively travel.

Many houses here are slab-on-grade, but that makes it very difficult if you burst a pipe below the slab.

I have seen photos of the entire insides of houses dug up to replace pipes.

Conventional foundations provide a crawl space, such as my daughter's house, and so they are very easy to re-plumb and re-wire.

The shallow muddy lakes in this area get hot in the summer, and they can be almost too hot to swim.

The spring-fed lakes remain relatively cool year around, and they remain cooler since they are generally clear water.

My Canadian buddy bought a canal boat, and so I discovered the thousands of miles of canals in the UK, which I was totally ignorant of. I follow several canal boat channels on ytube.

We have rivers here, but not many canals. Once can travel for a long distance on rivers here, and I have actually done that.

Edited By PatJ on 20/07/2022 17:02:14

I'm not a climate denier and there is obviously a correlation with CO2 and recent increased rate of climate change. Apparently, we no longer call it warming While CO2 is easily blamed as the cause it might well be worth speculating about the other changes post industrialisation: Radio waves, mining, vehicular vibration, billions of people tramping about and passing wind. Even with pollution free power we must be putting energy into the planet's mantel in all these other ways...

Its warming up without doubt and sea levels are rising. There are 2 courses of action.

Stop the cause or treat the effect.

To stop the cause the countries with the biggest emissions need to stop making them. In the UK our 1 or 2 percent isnt going to make a huge impact, but we seem to be determined to make ourselves poor my pursuing that nett zero. China, India, Russia the USA are not interested, but they watch with interest as we go crazy over electric cars.

Sea levels will rise and places will become flooded . That and heatwaves are the effect. But as a civil engineer I know its not the end of the world. Engineering solutions are available, sea defences are relatively easy to make. Its water and we know all we need to know about how to stop its flow. Being an island gives us the edge on designing coastal works. Its not new of course Holland did to protect their low lands and the Dutch brought that expertise to the UK around 400 years ago when the king asked Vermuyden to drain the fens.

As much as we in the UK would like to think (or be told by others with a financial interest) driving a Prius, not flying on holiday and eating less meat will not stop the changes that are coming. We should be asking the engineers to prepare for the effects of global warming. They will do that, as I said its actually not difficult stuff.

The big BUT is who is going to pay for all the work needed.

A graph of temperature over time shows that there have always been hot and cold times/events.

There are extreme cold periods where glaciers cover much of the land, such as here in the US, followed by warm periods, where the ocean was all the way up to Tennessee.

We have a piece of land in Tennessee that has been preserved, and it has the most fabulous fossil record of all sorts of ocean creatures, and some land creatures too. I think it dates back to about 65M years.

I have visited the site, which is a few hours from my house, and it is fascinating to look back through time and see what was crawling/swimming around in your backyard 65M years ago.

The sand at this site is extremely fine, and somehow it perfectly preserved the remains without damage.

And I think the big meteor strikes tend to stir up a lot of dust in the atmosphere, and cause cooling periods.

Man is just a tiny blip in time compared to the climate record we have.

Climate has always changed, and always will, regardless of man.

.