Heat Stroke
100 degrees here yesterday in the Portland/Vancouver metro area. Our third heat wave for the year.
Only a couple of heat related deaths this time, as compared to almost a hundred last year. Tragic even still. A crash program of distributing small portable air conditioning units have saved a lot of lives. Cooling centers have expanded greatly and many people are much more aware of how dangerous extreme weather can be to shut-ins, the elderly, and the homeless. Many are using the rivers (Columbia and Willamette) to cool off in or on.
This kind of weather is unusual here in the Pacific Northwest. Air conditioning has never been a feature in homebuilding here. A small tract of homes(about 30) recently built near me had no AC included in the build.
So, all those families are scrambling to find and install cheap inefficient window or portable units when a modern efficient HVAC system installed at the build out would have saved the entire region in electric consumption.
On a grander scale, such as tens of thousands+ of people in the entire region, much more power is going to be used, and in turn feeding the climate emergency we all are facing. All for the savings of a few bucks to pump the profit line.
Passing the problem on down the road.
I have never been a big fan of government regulation and overreach, but here is an instance where committing billions of dollars (Inflation Reduction Act) can be avoided with simple regulations that require modern efficient HVAC systems installed in all new buildings. The added costs will ultimately be passed on to the end user, but the savings in future electrical costs will be shared by the user, in dollars, and the community as a whole in less consumption/pollution and/or new power plants.
IMHO, conservation and smart building standards trump spending billions of newly printed money.
What do y'all think?
The floor is open.
Comments
Trump
Trump is beyond parody
A different take
on Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Works both ways.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
For reference purposes only. Can't vouch for the accuracy but
it does put things in some sort of perspective.
A more viewable image.
I wonder how
the MOD comes up with these figures?
And Bolivia. Really? Arch enemy of this regime.
Must be Bolivian see eye a operatives that effed up and got sent to Ukraine as punishment.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
This should be coming from The Onion rather than...
the White House Deputy Press Secretary.
At least it would be more believable.
This is quite scary!
Good afternoon Earthling1. You make excellent points
about pre-installing AC at build time, but have you considered the impact of the poor utility Company sharholders?
/snark
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I remember something called water coolers
in window units people used before a/c became a "thing". We had one in one bedroom. That was for my brother, the high school foot ball star. The rest of the family just stayed under a fan.
I just recently went to the new heat pump tech a/c system, and I must say, my monthly electric bills are down by 50%-60% monthly. We should be changing our building specs and practices as we progress to burning the planet in a few decades. Enjoy some cool before there is none.
It is so hot and dry here, although we got a little rain for 30 minutes or so. Not enough, but we will take anything.
Be cool! Has taken on a new meaning!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Swamp coolers.
They are all over the place here in super-dry Colorado, where they really work.
In the humid parts of the country, not so much... They are useful for keeping wallpaper from sticking to walls, though.
There are a lot of older homes here with central swamp coolers. You can tell them because there's a big box on the roof wrapped in a tarp for 9 months out of the year... (;-)
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Swamp coolers work with low humidity
I grew up with them and rented a 2 story apartment with a swamp cooler that worked well on the whole house and especially the upstairs bedrooms, but the landlord installed the electric one and it only cooled the downstairs. I’ve used window ones for over a decade and they have worked well until this year where we’ve had 21 days of over 100 degree heat so I’ll probably get central air this fall and hopefully prices drop. I bought a new one for my bedroom but it’s too heavy for me to install on my own and it’s been sitting on the floor for a month. I’m afraid that I’ll drop it on my foot or wrench my back. 10 years ago I would have been able to install it myself but this getting old stuff is for the birds.
Scientists are concerned that conspiracy theories may die out if they keep coming true at the current alarming rate.