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Ancient Iran had air conditioning
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
1895 points (98.7% liked)
Mildly Interesting
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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
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This isn't just mildly interesting. We should be considering methods of air cooling that do not use any carbon in order to avoid aircon usage becoming a contributor to the climate problem as things get hotter and hotter.
I agree with you that we should be exploring alternatives, but aircon is extremely energy efficient for how much thermal energy it moves (reaching 400% efficiency in some cases) . The problem isn't aircon itself, but what is being used to power it (coal/natural gas power plants)
In fact the technology behind aircon can be expanded into a heat pump to both heat and cool, being more efficient than electro-resistive or gas heating. There's even water heaters that will actually cool the area they're in and use the heat they gather from the space to heat the water.
Technology Connections has a great series of videos that go in depth on both heat pumps and aircon.
Can you explain 400% efficiency?
IIRC for every watt of electricity, 4 watts of energy get moved from the inside bit of your AC to the outside unit