Yeah, even office buildings in nice climates all are climate controlled, when for most days just opening the windows would bring the same heat-shedding benefits.
The OP specifically excluded offices.
Germany, and I’ve never encountered AC in a private home. Temperatures can hit 40° C, but that’s rare.
Yeah.
Air conditioning was pretty rare in upstate New York until relatively recently. Lots of people have it now (though not everybody, yet.)
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California is a large place. Like 750x250 miles = 1200x400km. Lots of diversity of climate.
The ocean is quite cold for the latitude which makes the coastal land between the low coastal mountains and the sea cool for the latitudes as well. Much as the warm northbound Gulf Stream warms your climate vs. your latitude, the frigid southbound Humboldt current chills coastal CA’s climate vs its latitude. Little to no need for AC there.
But once you get further inland over those first hills it gets a bunch warmer & AC become common. Then further inland past the real mountains much of California is hot dry desert or hot dry irrigated desert full of crops. Where AC in housing is near universal.
Continuing inland you get to bigger mountains covered in snow much of the year, at least in the northern half. Few inhabitants there, and even fewer air conditioners.
I’ve lived, on and off for 12 years over a 20 year period, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, starting in 1984. Between 1984 and 1989, and between 1993 and 1994, we didn’t need A/C. We returned in 2008 until 2013, during which we definitely needed it.
When my family moved to Green Bay, WI in 1975, the house that we bought had central air conditioning. It was, according to my parents, very uncommon for houses, at that time, to have it; my understanding is that summers weren’t hot enough, or humid enough, to warrant it for most people.
Now, almost 50 years later, summers are hotter and more humid there, and AC is the norm in houses.
New Zealand’s climate is very similar to the UK’s which is probably not surprising when you look at the similarity in (inverted) latitude and the similar vast oceans they’re exposed towards. No air cons when I lived there.
Climate change may make NZ warmer (it’s also making Australia more changeable tending towards colder, in my experience) but for now it remains temperate.
I never knew that. Learn something new every day. Dublin is a place where you certainly don’t need air conditioning.
My boss was transferred to St. Louis. They had been living in upstate New York near the Finger Lakes. The first spring they were here, the wife was complaining about Midwesterners’ addiction to air conditioning and how there was no more refreshing way to sleep than with the windows open and a breeze coming in through the window.
By August, after she had been exposed long enough to our famous 90 degree/70 percent humidity summer, she was calling contractors to see how fast they could install a whole house system.
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You can also enter a bit of anything else you want in the “about me” field and that will also show up when somebody clicks on your avatar.
So true. I grew up in coastal South Bay and back then only people living in “The Valley” had a/c. I honestly don’t recall ever feeling too hot inside our house. Now I live further south and inland and some days are hotter than Herculaneum.
A factor not mentioned to date is city-created microclimates.
For years I lived in Albuquerque NM, trust me, you needed A/C in the home during the summer, but as mentioned you acclimate quite a lot. To the point that with care, and the appropriate heavy-walled structures, you can take advantage of the overnight lows to cool a home quite a bit with simple fans, and seal up in the morning to dramatically cut the need for A/C except for the hottest portions of the day.
But.
Doing this on the outskirts or bedroom communities was a LOT easier than in the midst of the city, where the temperatures were easily 5F more than the general area. All the concrete and asphalt sucks up and spits it right back out for hours after more rural areas have cooled down.
The high Colorado mountains doesn’t do AC. We have a passive solar house, so the sun does a pretty good job and my wife might open some windows, but that works just fine.
Yeah, our summers our average high is about 70 degrees. There are immigrants here that will be walking around in parkas while the rest of us are in shorts.
I’m in western Pennsylvania. Many (most?) people have air conditioning. When I first moved in with my gf there was no air conditioning. Shade trees and open windows made it bearable, other than a handful of extreme hot days/nights.
My gf had some medical issues that made her very uncomfortable in the heat, especially overnight. I picked up a window air conditioner and was the hero.
Then she started working from home. Her office was horribly hot, especially when she closed the door. I bought a second window unit and fixed that.
My neck of the woods (Spokane, WA / Coeur d’Alene, ID) doesn’t really need AC even though all new houses are coming with them. Our house has AC and I ran it a grand total of two afternoons this summer. The nights get so cool that you open windows and then close them in the morning and capture all that cool. I’ve lived in other houses without AC and it was only a week or so I wish I had it.
With all that said, when I was younger I lived in a small old apartment that was exposed to the afternoon sun and it got hotter than hades. I would’ve killed for a window AC. So, I guess it does depend on the unit.
We own a rental house in Duluth Minnesota, which our kids used while going to college there. It’s along Lake Superior, so it gets lake-effect cooling. It’s typically ten degrees cooler than just five miles away on top of the bluffs. There may be a few days when A/C would be nice, but with warming climates I anticipate that in a few years we’ll put in some split units (yay radiator heat).
The winters, on the other hand, are a different story.
In the wider sense, no one needs air conditioning, what they need is climate-adapted housing. People have lived comfortably in hot climates for several hundred thousand years, by using intelligent design for housing, and adapting their life rhythms to the temperature. It is only with the advent of fossil fuels that all houses are built nearly identically whether they’re in Florida or Tierra del Fuego.
Montreal - I’ve never had a/c, and I feel that there are fewer than 5 days a year when I would prefer to have it. Less than 20% of buses have a/c and it feels a lot more comfortable with air blowing through an open window rather than a/c controlled by the driver.
Most newer residences (but many never use it), but just about all office buildings have a/c, Commuter trains have it, but not the Metro, since it’s all indoors. The Metro has continuous air blasting at you, but still slightly cooler than in the hotter tunnels. It takes several days for the Metro stations to start heating up during hot spells, and hot spells usually last a day or two…
I have a good friend who lived for a time in Novato, CA, which is about 30 minutes north of the Golden Gate. He had no AC, although summertime temps sometimes got close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in late afternoon. But then the fog would creep in and the temp would drop like a rock and it became a very pleasant evening.