I have a home on the east side of the Big Island of Hawaii and pretty much no one has A/C that lives there. The Trade Winds blow much of the time and that keeps things comfortable.
I grew up near the coast in southern California and nobody that I knew had A/C.
Are there other areas where its common to not have A/C?
Northern Maine, northern Washington State?
Here in foggy San Francisco we typically don’t have air conditioning.
Pretty much the entire western side of Washington and Oregon.
I mean, there’s AC here and there, but the average home does not have it. And does not need it.
You’d have to divide Washington state into East and West. The coastal side is pretty cool and most people do without A/C at home. Once you go east over the mountains, though… it’s more the high desert climate and can get pretty toasty in the summers. On a warm summer day, it would not be unusual to have Seattle in the mid-70’s and Spokane in the high 90’s.
Oregon is much the same.
(All that said, I’m in the Seattle area, and I do have a portable room-sized A/C unit. I’ll run it for two or three weeks in an average year, just to take the edge off of our warmest days.)
It’s probably common in most of the northern US. We can still get Too Damned Hot, but usually only for a few days a year, and you just go swimming or see a movie (in an air conditioned theater) or stay late at the office those days.
Ditto here, I live about 30 miles north of Seattle, and I have a little portable unit on wheels that I bring out when it gets really uncomfortable, but honestly that’s only one year in three. And maybe two weeks a year, max.
I was in Carmel over the weekend. It got up to 75 deg. Back where I live, near San Jose, it was 100 deg. No A/C in that lovely little city-by-the-Sea, as is the case for much of the coast in NorCal. I happened to be in Carmel a few years ago in October when the thermometer reached 90 deg and the local were freaking out. That’s a rare event, indeed.
Folks right along the western shore of Lake Michigan usually don’t have it. We installed it a while back after decades of doing without, for a few specific needs. But most summers it gets turned on maybe 3 days a year.
Yesterday, inland 1/2 mile it was 93 degrees. Down by our house on the beach it was 75.
Coast areas of Montery County, and Santa Cruz County.
Much of Minnesota doesn’t have A/C.
Or didn’t used to – now it’s being added as people replace/upgrade furnaces, just because HVAC dealers usually offer package deals. Qnd most houses have forced air heat, so it’s a pretty easy addition.
But it’s still common to have A/C, but not use it much. I think I turned mine one a total of 7 days last summer.
Percentage-wise, it would have to be Alaska.
Most of the homes in the higher altitudes in Colorado don’t have A/C… I lived in Colorado Springs (not that high) and the older homes on the North side of town almost never had them.
Pretty common here in Michigan’s UP. We have a couple of freestanding window units, but that’s only because we work from home, and I’d say on a heavy year we use them maybe 30 days total. Many years we don’t use them at all.
We got an estimate once to put built-in AC in maybe 40% of our house. It came to something like $13K, and for that amount of money we can take vacation days and live in hotels for the rest of our lives every time it gets above 90 degrees, so we declined.
See, I don’t understand that. I lived in Minneapolis for two years and summers were BRUTAL…high 90s most days and 70-80% humidity. I would have KILLED for an a/c in my little apartment.
A/C is extremely common in the northeast. It doesn’t get as hot as the south or west, but the humidity is usually sky-high in the summer. A couple of years ago someone from the southwest mentioned having humidity during the summer under 15% which baffled some of us because it’s consistently over 30% during the winter, and usually over 85% during the summer. In fact we have a severe weather advisory right this minute because it’s supposed to be in the 90s tomorrow but “feel” 100-103 due to dew point & humidity.
Yes, New Hampshire does get hot and humid during a brief period in the summer. Massachusetts does even more so. It is going to be close to 100F tomorrow and and the next day for example in places. I have central air in Masachusetts and it will be needed off and on for the next 3 months.
However, don’t get too cocky in your ideas about hot though. I grew up in Louisiana and you HAVE to HAVE air conditioning there at least for houses of a modern design. The air conditioners run for at least 5 - 6 months of the year and the combined heat and humidity there is life threatening if the air conditioners don’t work in houses that were designed to have it. It is more of a comfort issue during peak heat periods in the North.
I should add that central air conditioning isn’t that common among houses in Massachusetts except in the newer and fancier homes. Most people just have window units that they put in place about mid-June and take them out again late September or so.
In my town it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. Before the 90’s or so, nobody had AC and some developers liked the forced air systems and some liked central boilers. So now in the neighborhoods that just so happened to get forced air, AC is a cheap upgrade and lots of people have it, but if you’re in central boiler town it’s rare.
When I grew up in upstate New York, air conditioning was rare. But it’s been standard in every new house and business - except the very poorest - for the last generation. There’s a lot of older stock remaining so I’m not sure where the majority lies. My guess is that it’s with newer buildings, though, since the suburbs now have several times the population of the inner cities and they’re predominantly newer.
Besides, people Upstate think Too Damned Hot is anything over 70.
We had it in Madison, Wisconsin, and used it often.