It’s not the AC that are incredible. Modern heat pumps are incredible. They are the best thing since the sliced bread. I could talk for hours about heat pumps. They’re just so efficient.
Heat pumps - they pump my heat.
Did I mention I like heat pumps?
It’s literally the same machine
Non-native English speaker, but I looked it up the other day and it seems that pedantically an A/C only cools things down and heat pumps can both heat and cool.
ACs are just heat pumps where they forgot to install the reversing valve.
Heat pumps running in heating mode are basically ACs that are trying to cool down the outside. The fundamental technology just moves heat from one place to another, leaving one place warmer and one place colder.
This is also how fridges and freezers work - they have heat pumps that pump out the heat from inside their box and as such make the room they are in warmer.
It’s why it’s so annoying that dual function AC/Water CH don’t seem to exist (or at least, they don’t qualify for government subsidies).
In the summer, I’d like 3KWH of cooling. And in the winter, maybe 15KWH of heating. But to do that, I have to buy two boxes.
Most ACs nowadays can do both. And are actually more efficient at heating.
Yes, an air conditioner is a heat pump with a fixed orientation, what basically equates to a handful of valves to switch the direction of the refrigerant. The actual expensive parts that generate the temperature difference are identical between the two machines.
In my country, air conditioners can condition air that’s too cold. Sounds like American air conditioners can only condition in one direction. Our air conditioners do all of the air conditioning.
No we have both, and they’re still heat pumps. The direction the heat pumped is irrelevant; the fundamentals are the same.
Yes, air conditioners and heat pumps are indeed the same thing. Americans just don’t call the two-directional heat pumps air conditioners for some reason. I guess they don’t believe you can condition air by making it hotter. In my country, we consider heating part of conditioning.
We call it HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning), and so do other countries that speak English for a reason. It’s different from heating in that air conditioning can also involve controlling air humidity/quality.
Heating gets its own because until reversible heat pumps, it was a separate system that only heated the building (sometimes not even the air directly in the case of heated floors).
Nope AC at least where I have been can do both. Heat pumps are for water.
Probably a local nomenclature thing. Heat Pump is the most common name for phase change cooling/heating system. (No matter the medium(s) being heated/cooled)
Yet I have never seen a food refrigerator called a heat pump. Air-to-air always seems to be called AC to differentiate it from the air-to-water the UK government wants to push.
I never see refrigerators being called AC either, and they’re air-to-air heat pumps too. People just call things what they want regardless of the technical details.
Because at some point society decided to call them refrigerators or AC. The thing *inside the refrigerator or air conditioner" that makes it work is called a “heat pump” – that’s the unambiguous name of the device. Just like the bit inside a car that provides motive force is called the “engine” or the “motor”.
The device that uses a heat pump to both heat and cool a building is actually called an Air source heat pump, but since that’s a mouthful most people simply call it a “heat pump” to distinguish it from traditional AC that only works to cool an area. Sure, maybe you get that odd area the calls it something different (my region calls soft drinks “pop”) but that’s not the norm.
There are also heat pumps that only heat. It takes a second valve or so to enable it to switch directions.
I could just mount it backwards in my window!
Colloquially, “air conditioner” often refers to a centralized system with ducting, while a “heat pump” usually refers to a ductless mini split.
At least in North America, the term “Air conditioner” means a device designed to cool a room, where a “heat pump” can cool or heat that room. They work by the same exact principle (all the compressing, condensing, evaporating stuff) but a “heat pump” has a method of running in both directions. You could probably contrive one that could run the pump in either direction but I think most use a valve to switch which is the high pressure/hot side and which is the low pressure/cold side.
I grew up in a house with a heat pump, I currently live in one with an air conditioner and a furnace. When it’s time to replace my air conditioner (or do other heavy maintenance to the system) I’m going to look into a heat pump, with the furnace as a backup heater in lieu of strips.
Nope AC does both. What the word heat pumps means seems to vary on where you live. Here it’s mostly things that only heat water for radiators or hot water tank.
Arguably they should all just be called refrigerators as they all use the refrigeration cycle.
Well… Kind of. Heat pumps are a more modern iteration, which can both heat or cool a room. And they’re not like a traditional central AC system, where you have a central compressor and ducts running to each vent. Instead, you run refrigerant lines to each room, then the individual room unit actually does the cooling locally. It’s the same basic principle (using refrigerant to move heat outside, thus cooling the air,) but heat pumps are a more modern take.
And as an added bonus, a heat pump can also be used as a heater (and be much more efficient than a traditional heating coil.) Because it’s just moving heat around from the interior and exterior, and that can include moving heat indoors to warm the interior. And since they’re just moving heat (instead of using a coil to generate it) they can be over 100% efficient when you’re measuring wattage consumed vs heat produced.
My HP is central ducted. You’re talking mini splits, one kind of HP.
And some companies even install AC only mini splits.
AC is a version of heatpump that cools your house. Refridgerator is a heatpump that keeps your food cool. Freezer is a heatpump wäthat freezes things.
AC is not the same thing as heatpump. AC is just one application of an heatpump.
It is the exact same hardware running in different configurations, all that changes is refrigerant flow direction.
That is exactly what I said. I was just trying to say that heatpump is not the same thing as AC just as car is not the same thing as an engine.
Seems like you’re talking about heat pump (technology) and I’m talking about heat pump (commercial product)
But yeah, heat pumps (technology) are used in lots of every day places.
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You’ve surely seen one of the many videos from Technology Connections, then?
Of course I have. Matt Ferrell has some nice videos too.
Im gonna have a nice long wank listening to this user passionately talk about heat pumps
You meant walk, right? Right???
You heard the man.
Did they fucking stutter?
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The refrigeration cycle is humanity’s greatest invention.
I have that ingrained in my brain.
This is the way.
Are the twin of Technology Connections?
We’ve got a ground source heat pump with underfloor heating and cooling since two years. It’s always a comfortable 19-22 degrees Celsius inside (66-72 Fahrenheit) and we’d never want anything else.
Tell that to the vast majority of Germans. They’d rather throw their relatives into the furnace for heating than buying a heat pump. That’s all thanks to far right populism by the way.
They’d rather throw their relatives into the furnace for heating than buying a heat pump.
Sounds more like a german tradition.
Yeah, in hindsight that was some unfortunate wording Ü
Guns are fun as hell, it’s true. Unfortunately as with most things in the world, shit gets ruined because people don’t know how to act right
Hopefully OOP lives in a country that has good gun laws - like Czechia.
I’m Australian and guns are really strictly regulated here, I also believe that guns are FUCKING FUN. Sometimes I get shitty about how hard it is to own a gun for recreational shooting then I see a smackhead at the supermarket screaming at random people and how unlikely it is that they have a gun and I think “Yep, Ill take that trade”.
At 40 cents / kwh you learn to tolerate heat very quickly.
Heat is quickly becoming deadly around the globe. Better figure out how to budget that cost, asap.
Keep yourself cool to worsen the problem? sounds like a great plan! /s
AC users anywhere in the world where temperatures / humidity are in a range that humans can adapt to are morons.
Passive cooling and designing buildings to not overheat during summer in the first place is the way. And phoenix or Las Vegas shouldn’t be much more than a gas station, they’re unlivable hellholes without permanently pumping enormous amounts of energy in.
Absolutely agreed.
I have AC and heating and live in a very human-fiendly climate. I don’t feel like a moron running it off my green power to heat and cool a very well insulated house beyond what the geothermal handles.
Exactly. You can use a kajillion megawatts to power your A/C, who cares if it’s all renewable. Especially if it’s onsite generated (solar).
At 40 cents/kWh I would buy a solar array.
Gotta buy a house first!
You can get solar panels for balconies in your local home supply store
Oh, yeah, I looked at that. I can get a couple hundred watts of panels that will realistically generate about 300 watt hours of power on my balcony on the sunniest days, given that they won’t be mounted at a very good angle. I can have it charge a battery pack that’ll last a few years. Then I get about 90% efficiency if I’m lucky with the inverter. Even at $0.50/kWh, that’s $0.15/day I’m saving or about $50/year if we just assume a cloudless year-round summer. That’ll save me just enough money to buy a new battery when the first one gets old.
Solar power will get there one day. Its great for many purposes but its still not practical for most apartment dwellers.
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These won’t even power a small portable AC, if you have a balcony and it’s on the south side and you have enough m² to angle the panel halfway properly, you’ll be lucky to generate 500 W.
That’s only half the power draw of a small AC unit, and doesn’t even get into the fact that in most places you cannot hook up a solar to your house without an approved inverter with appropriate safety features (otherwise you’d endanger the linemen in case of an outage). Where I live if you still have an old installation with net metering, you also pay a tax based on the inverter capacity (which is good because net metering is bullshit subsidies from the poor to the landowners).
PV energy is good, but apartments are not a reasonable use-case for it. Residential PV is inherently a tool for privileged house owners, and if PV is to help apartment dwellers it’s through grid-scale renewables and dynamic pricing and/or smart grids that provide cheap power for A/C on sunny summer days.
Hello fellow countryman!
I think you grossly overestimate the power consumption of a heat pump (a split heat pump that is). On the hottest period of the year so far, ours used about 1,75kWh for a 40m² space.
One or 2 balcony mounted panels (given the right orientation, even with a suboptimal inclination) will easily deliver that much.
You are however right that most apartments can’t profit much from solar power… The dynamic pricing however can make the cooling really cheap in the summer months. Just switch to non-dynamic pricing before the winter months to get the best year round price.
Two panels on the balcony of a 40m² studio? The 2x1m 400+ W ones? I did not even have a balcony when I lived in a studio lol. Anyways if you only require 1.75 kWh that’s less than a euro of electricity even on fixed pricing. I think the real lesson here is that we haven’t had summer yet this year so the AC barely turned on at all.
I just checked on Hubo, their cheapest portable A/C is 7000 BTU, i.e. 2 kW. That means if you had to use it at full tilt for an hour (not exactly an outlandish scenario in the previous years’ summers), you’d use more electricity in that hour than you’ve had all year this year.
You might not entirely cover the power consumption of an AC, but you can drastically lower the cost of using one by at least partially generating your own electricity. As for the technical aspects I cannot argue at all, as I have no knowledge whatsoever in that regard.
It will take years before you make that money back on the investment though, depending on local taxation and electricity prices. And that’s assuming that you have a decent enough orientation in the first place - some people live on the north side of their apartment block!
Always do the maths on PV for your situation, a 25 year positive ROI does not justify a purchase but a 10 year ROI might.We need more A/C to survive climate change, but the solution can’t be “put PV on balconies” because it’s highly situational (not everyone has an adequately big south-facing balcony) and won’t solve your problems if you could not afford the cooling bills in the first place (the only people who consider a 10 year ROI a good investment are the ones with capital to spare on home improvements). As with all personal renewable tech, it’s a cost-saving tool for the well-off, not a structural solution to anything.
I can barely afford food. a solar array is super luxury. plus i don’t have place for it anyway.
Or get solar on your roof. Usually when it’s hot enough outside to need AC, then that means the sun is shining
That’s fucking nuts; the only time my power bill gets anywhere close to being that high is for three hours a day in June and July (34¢/kwh). For most of the year it’s only 9¢/kwh.
Don’t know how other countries do it, but in the US the home energy sector is highly regulated. Probably one of the only things we do right; but we soon as lawmakers try to propose similar regulations to healthcare and the internet, suddenly it’s “SoCiAlIsM”
Jesus, where is this?
California
Yikes. And my yikes is by Australian standards, where the cost of living compared to most parts of the world is pretty high.
Or, you know, buy a solar array. I hear it’s windy in the UK too. 🙄🙄🙄🙄
I am at this point considered liberal, but I have to say that I do like guns. Range shooting is super fun. If I could I would take up competitive Three Gun as a hobby, but I don’t have a course in my area.
Also, I hike with either my 45-70 ammunition rifle or my .45acp pistol with high grain ammo. Why? I live in Wyoming where we are definitely not on the top of the food chain. Even my pistol is liable to just piss off a bear if it really means business.
Yeah, I would definitely carry a .44 magnum in grizzly country.
Man, if you think target shooting is fun, wait until you go skeet or trap shooting! That’s the most fun shooting there is IMO. Give it a try if you haven’t already. I just bought a really nice Franchi over-under 20 gauge specifically for trap and skeet. It would make a great upland game bird gun too, but I don’t really have any interest in that.
Bear spray is usually a better choice, on account of a whole lot of factors. At the very least you should bring both and issue a warning with bear spray.
Edit: how to use bear spray
Also, be aware that the weather is orders of magnitude more likely to kill you than a bear, and avoiding bear encounters is usually fairly easy to begin with. If you’re carrying a gun but not a compass, your risk assessment is WAY off.
I carry bear spray in black bear country. Thankfully I don’t live anywhere near grizzly bears (although they’re talking about reintroducing them here). I thought I remembered reading somewhere that bear spray isn’t very effective against grizzlies.
sn’t very effective against grizzlies
To be fair, neither is a single round fired center of mass unless it’s like a 12.7×99 mm.
Are you familiar with the .45-70 round?
This is sound theoretical advice but I don’t think most people consider the practical implications of it. Bear spray is only effective out to about 20 feet. A bear can run 30 mph. This means that in order to use that bear spray you need to be close enough for that bear to have its paws on you in less than two seconds. I’m not deluded enough to think I have the balls to stand my ground while a 1200 pound grizzly bear is charging me. I’m reaching for the gun before I reach for the spray which makes it largely useless in practice. I still carry it but it’s not particularly reassuring when you put it in context.
The way bear spray works, you create a big cloud of spicy air in between you and the bear and the bear runs into that cloud. The bear very quickly decides to go do something else with it’s life the second it gets a breath of that air. You don’t wait until the bear is close enough to hit directly with with spray, you spray as soon as the bear starts charging or gets too close. It’s manual or operations is very different from pepper spray for people.
Just like you should be well-trained when carrying your gun, you should have had the training on how to properly use bear spray. This concern you’ve voiced suggests you bought a can and assumed you knew how to use it.
Here’s a fairly decent video to start with.
I hate guns, but alas there’s just no practical alternative for fulfilling my daily quota of wanton destruction.
I do some wonton destruction at the Chinese buffet.
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Bombs aren’t that hard to make. Nor are molotov cocktails.
You’re just lazy.
Get yourself a bat and a hollow core door.
I like the cut of your jib, good sir (or madam).
Lol yeah I’m a Southern progressive, and I love guns just to do range practice. But absolutely understand why they’re hard to get/going away. People suck and it’s why we can’t have nice things.
Guns are hard to get and going away? Clearly there’ve been some changes in the South since I was last there.
I was pretty sure every breakfast in Texas came with a side of biscuits and gravy and a revolver.
Wow, you’re describing use cases we can all agree are legitimate and you didn’t say anything about being careless or reckless, or trigger happy, nor express an impulse to “mag dump” someone. Yeah, that’ll piss off fellow liberals
.357 lever actions are neat.
I love target shooting and do conceal carry, but it does get a bit ridiculous around here. After leaving the Army, it took a lot of training and rigid selfcontrol to call it a “clip” again, just to troll the gravy seals down at the range. I laugh as they correct me, and the owner, who knows me, just shakes his head and calls me an ass.
Guns are amazing when they’re collector items made by Holland & Holland to your custom spec. When they’re mass produced crap, they’re not much different from air soft guns at the shooting range. At least air soft guns don’t kill people.
But America is DC, Europe is already AC!
Australia has AC/DC. Can’t beat that.
That… Explains so many things.
America is AC…
Explain Washington then
He had like 30 goddamn dicks…
He’ll save children, but not the British children
He’s coming
T̵̯̟̭̙̓̈́h̵̫͑͒͋ͅͅe̶͉͎̊́̍͜͝͝ ̴̫̖́͐̅̽͗W̶̨͔̃ą̸̖̭͑͗̃̀ͅs̷̛͙͗̎̓͜ḧ̷̼̣̯͕̓i̸̱͛̈́͆n̷̖̿̐̑ͅģ̴͒͛͆͛ţ̸̖̲̟̜͂o̴̞̓ṋ̵̘̗͔͌̔̈́̚,̷̯͇͛̐͒͛̚ ̸̛̥͑͊̏͝h̷̙̦͕̍̀̍͘e̸̟̜͛̋́́ ̴͇͔̅͐̚͝͝ć̵̡̛͔͓̦ͅỏ̶̱̻̝̜̾ͅm̶͖̗̤̳̏̔̓͗̂ĕ̶̢͔͚̺̞s̷͍̈́.̴̝͇̼́̒̓̈
I heard he could not tell a lie; he gnawed down a cherry tree with his wooden teeth and then threw it all the way across the Potomac, then told everybody about it.
That’s the part before the inverter duh
This is an impossible feat.
We call it an impossible meatre in Europe
Crossed the Delaware
My bad. I only remember something about them using DC to electrocute an elephant to prove how much better it was.
They’ll say “aw, Topsy” at my autopsy, but no one will be more shocked than me.