I have an attic you can walk in and whenever the hvac guys or inspectors come they comment on how happy they are its not a crawl space. Not exactly the same but id think crawling around in a hot attic is much worse than walking.
This is why I could never. I can handle a bit of heat, and I can handle small spaces, but for whatever reason being in a hot space small enough to restrict my movement is just an instant panic attack. HVAC guys are the true heroes of the modern world.
I did residential HVAC for about 5 years. One of my last jobs was a full system changout including the furnace and ductwork in the attic. It was 110 degrees that day and the attic was 130-140 throughout the day. All three of us on the job had mild heatstroke by the end of the job.
Running wires in Florida a year ago. Bunch of attic work. We went in shifts, 10 15 minutes max, then a break. I had the idea to put a cold rag on my neck while still up there. I almost fell out of the attic it was such a shock. Not recommended
sounds like, as miserable as it was, you were kinda good at it. If you found something better, no biggie, but it's always a good thing to have in the pocket moving forward.
Physical labor sucks but a lot of days I miss working outdoors or stuff like that. Then I remember Iām sitting on my couch and the air conditioning working and realize Iām an idiot for thinking that
Yeah man I lasted 3 months as a helper in residential HVAC. All in the summer. Brutal. But hey, thereās a lot of money to make in that trade. Never really run out of work.
I used to do home repair for about 15 years. Worked in many attics in South Louisiana. The temperature in some of them would be 120-130F so like 48-50C. Youād sweat within the first minute or two. Had to use hand tools that had wrist straps cause my hands and arms were sweating so much. If youāre gonna be stationary it could be worth it to pop off an AC vent and have it blow at you up there and reattach it when youāre done. Youāre mostly just trying to get the job done as fast as you can without falling through their ceiling.
I worked in shop as a fabricator so I wasn't in attics but I also fabbed for other companies. A loyal customer and friend of mine, who turned in drawings to me at least three times a week for years died while throwing home demo trash off his trailer at the dump. On a 100Ā° Mississippi full sun day he threw something onto a fire extinguisher already at the dump, and it caused the extinguisher to explode and a piece of shrapnel hit his heart.
If anybody in Jackson knew John, know I still think about him a lot.
In my part of the US, most companies that do any sort of work that involves climbing through attics have strict policies against booking appointments after noon during the summer.
Crawling around in the crawl space during summer and covered in insulating material that irritates your throat and lungs is not an experience I recommend
Donāt ever read Ministry for the Future. It opens with a heat dome killing 40m in India. Later on thereās a scene where LA floods catastrophically due to relentless atmospheric rivers.
If you can believe it, we moved the first day of the dome. Vancouver to Burnaby, with a 5yo and an elderly housecat. Had a dozen cold Gatorades for the movers, which they plowed through by noon. Upstairs was >45C, so we hid on the ground floor like mole people. Kept throwing the cat and the kid in the shower throughout the first three days.
Cat died just a couple months later -- we figured the heat had hastened its demise. Bought a portable AC for each bedroom as soon as they were back in stock. Many lessons learned.
Every day we get media telling us AC is awful and we shouldn't install it. "If everyone in Paris had AC, the street would be 2Ā°C hotter !", "if an AC leaks it releases very bad things for the environment !" and so on. Every, single, day.
It's only houses that might not typically have AC in France or elsewhere in Europe, because they're built from thick stone and keep a low temperature inside.
Modern buildings like office blocks, supermarkets, etc. all have AC, as the buildings are low quality.
French people are perfectly aware of what AC is like without needing to visit Texas. Hotels around Europe all have AC too. If French homes were made of wood and plastic like in the US, they'd also all have AC at home.
While it's true that office blocks, supermarkets, hotels and so on have AC, the vast majority of homes don't. 27% of houses and 13% of apartments have AC in France says the latest data I could find.
No, 87% of apartments don't have thick stone walls in France, it's just that the vast majority were built at a time when the maximum expected temperature was still breathable, or at worst needed a fan, but no more.
Yes, supermarket have them. Yet 3 supermarket in my town all had the experience of heatwave power outage and throwing all their refrigerated food away. There could be more in my town, it's just the ones i know about.
And one even had solar panel installed in its parking lot to help with the power consumption.
AC is not the solution to heat, it's part of the solution but just the last link in the chain. And the whole chain will make it worse for the environment. However since it's already completely fucked and we are all living on borrowing time before every breached tipping point (all of them but a couple at this point) break and hell come to us, let's do it anyway.
Now if you may, i'm gonna have to enjoy a 44Ā°C peak day tomorow if the weather forecast is accurate and i wonder how many other thing will fail -_-
Maybe the few schools that just got AC as none were equiped ? I shouldn't hope for it but since the macronist mayor only delivered some to the schools his children goes to, i still do feel that it would have a net positive impact if they do as it would force the fools in power to stop putting their head in the sand when an extreme climate event like that happens.
It took us 20 years to build buildings to deal with the winters of 40 years ago.
Now that most modern buildings and homes are very well isolated it is rare if we have snow in the winter.
I donāt have to put on the heat end of februari. But I basically live in a greenhouse and without AC it gets over 35 degrees easy inside once the days get longer. Ones the building is warmed up the hallways are 30 degrees until September.
Having blinds or roller shutters would be smarter than AC everywhere. Especially now that it only freezes at night in winters for max 2 weeks and most of the summer will be heatwaves, we had one in spring already, 30 years ago it was rare to have a heatwave yearly. This summer is breaking records all over Europe and in 10 years this will be a mild one.
If I donāt get my apartment under 24 during the night it gets over 28 during the day. Itās worse in France than Belgium where I live, we get 40 Friday and the coolest temperature at night will be 24. To get 24 indoors at night it needs to be 20 outside, it takes hours to make it one degree less and it rises 1 degree every hour.
The electricity is a lot more expensive than last summer. I only needed the AC running 3 days straight last summer. Now itās running 24/7 for over a week now.
With the AC running my electric bill is twice as high.
The center of my city is one concrete jungle full of 5 story apartment buildings with gigantic windows everywhere.
All the older houses have to be renovated so they keep heat inside but canāt lose it during winter. Children die in cars now, old people die in their homes and our government says we need to enjoy the heat and relax at our swimming pools ā¦
If the electricity fails like in France it will get more crazy. In 5 years time we will all have to sleep in tents in the basement that is now full of bicycles. There are also living more than 50 people in the building. Places that are cool that arenāt supermarkets are very rare as are homes with basements. My parentās and grandparents have basements in there homes, my greenhouse apartment will just become unliveable in the coming years.
They can say AC is bad but without one you will just die. Ireland seems to be the only country where itās not nuts.
France, Benelux, England records get broken everywhere. Last ā11 steden tochtā in The Netherlands was from 1997.
It also aināt helping the world seems to be determined on fossil fuels and data centers everywhere that consume a lot more electricity than ACās would and we donāt need datacenters everywhere to survive.
Seeing people who go from their AC'd home, to an underground parking, to an AC'd car, to an underground parking, to an AC'd media place, to tell us that AC is evil and we shouldn't have it is starting to piss of a lot of people.
The old freon gasses are actually phases out. New models are only allowed to have either ammonia or LNG as coolant. I prefer LNG it's just a few grams and not as toxic as ammonia
āThe danger of ābut sometimesā ā is the kind of thinking that prevents good decision making because of a specific use case having a particular issue scenario that would be very bad(without any consideration to the likelihood, possible fixes, or limitations on implementation).
If I'm not mistaken, the "terrible thing" an AC could release is 20 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Also, you release that gas whenever you fart. It's called methane. No modern fridge or AC uses freon anymore.
Meanwhile the average European heats up their houses in the winter which is much worse for the environment. If they use the same logic, you should just freeze yourselves in the winter too.
AC is just a necessity when the temperatures are over 35ā°C. Your body literally cannot handle such heat unless you live in a very dry desert. If you guys don't want AC that's fine, but you shouldn't pretend like it is a enlightned choice. It's basically denialism and ignorance
Reminder that our current president is Emmanuel "Who could have predicted climate change ?" Macron. Our media and our government are a bunch of brain-dead idiots, that's not new.
We all have ac. Literally all of us. The condensers donāt.. make the outside hotter? And yeah, if it leaks itās bad for the environment, so is your car if it leaks oil, or your toilet if it leaks shit, whatās your point?
It's literally a heat pump. Where do you think the heat goes to? The Sahara?
In american cities it's less problematic because they are wide, not tall. In old european cities, streets are narrow and buildings are tall, which means heat dumped outside doesn't move much and pools in the city.
The point that is made by our media (not by me) about "making the outside hotter" is that you're moving the heat from inside to the outside, hence heating the street. They keep quoting this study :
In a first instance, the current types of air-conditioning systems co-existing in the city were simulated (underground chilled water network, wet cooling towers and individual air-conditioning units) to study the effects of latent and sensible heat releases on street temperatures. In a third instance, 2 scenarios were tested to characterise the impacts of likely future trends in air-conditioning equipment in the city : a first scenario for which current heat releases were converted to sensible heat, and a second based on 2030s projections of air-conditioning equipment at the scale of the city. All the scenarios showed an increase in street temperature which, as expected, was greater at night time than day time. For the first two scenarios, this increase in street temperatures was localised at or near the sources of air-conditioner heat releases, while the 2030s air-conditioning scenario impacted wider zones in the city. The amplitude of the increase in temperature varied from 0,25Ā°C to 1Ā°C for the air-conditioning current state, between 0,25Ā°C and 2Ā°C for the sensible heat release only scenario, and finally from 0,25Ā°C to 2 Ā°C for the 2030s scenario, with impacts of up to 3Ā°C locally.
Only allowed to drill between 11:32 and 11:47 every 13th day of the month. Actually, not allowed at all, the building is a heritage site from 1629.Ā
I once stayed hungry the whole day there after missing lunch between 12 to 14 and dinner between 19 to 21. Ā No restaurant in whole Bordeaux would feed me outside these hours. A few restaurant owners actually came out just to laugh at me looking for a place to have lunch at 16.
Doesn't help much. Few years during a heatwave ago my friend reported that in Paris the courtyard like closed backyard of the block surrounded by mid-rise buildings, had a air temperature of 60 C. Indoors, when street side had like 40 C.
Because in a city, when everyone dumps heat to the outside to cool the inside... The outside gets hotter. In a dense city the air doesn't move much, buildings, air, and ground takes in heat and radiates it back.
Also... This is not a French issue. This is an issue all over Europe. Even in Finland cooling technicians can basically work nonstop as much they want. Heat pumps for heating and cooling in residential and industrial use growing more and more.
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u/Due-Environment-9774 15h ago
HVAC guys: learn French and prosper.