this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Geography
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Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments. Geographers explore both the physical properties of Earth’s surface and the human societies spread across it. They also examine how human culture interacts with the natural environment and the way that locations and places can have an impact on people. Geography seeks to understand where things are found, why they are there, and how they develop and change over time. Read more...
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Huh, go figure. Anytime I've ever mentioned anything about this online, I got downvoted into oblivion with everyone basically saying 'this is a non-issue'.
I knew I wasn't crazy. Take my upvote.
It's pretty logical really... Ac units consume a lot of energy to do their job, that energy will eventually end up as heat. They're not magic, even if some people think they are.
They also take heat from inside and move it outside. It’s kind of an air conditioner’s while thing.
Yeah, but that's not relevant. That heat came from the outside in the first place. Heat pumps are very effective at moving heat, i.e. a 2kw unit kan move 8kw worth of energy. It's not that 8kw that's the problem. That's just the heat that's being moved. That's a net-zero operation. It's that 2kw that's used to move the heat which is a problem. That 2kw is effectively being added to the system, and it comes from whatever your local power grid energy mixture is.
The 8kw of heat may have originally come from outside, but now it's been put back and concentrated around the AC unit.
So the area around the AC unit has 10kw of extra heat that it would not have otherwise had.
Have you actually ever stood next to an air conditioner exhaust fan? Have you ever worked on air conditioners to even understand how they work?
Sure some of the heat they generate comes from the electrical energy they use, but the whole thing is designed as a heat pump.
An air conditioner moves the heat inside the home or building to the outside. That heat doesn't magically just disappear, you're literally moving the heat outside of the convenience of your facility, only to heat up the environment around it.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
It doesn't just magically appear either.
True that. We should figure a way to harness the exhaust heat from air conditioners. Easier said than done though, as I'm not aware of any source of energy that doesn't itself generate heat..
The heat absolutely did not (all) come from outside. Some of it did, varying amounts depending on your insulation. But everything in your house using electricity is adding heat, any gas powered anything is adding heat, and you are adding heat.
A rule if thumb for spaceship design is one person = 100 W
The 8kw you moved are. It irrelevant. The problem is that you consider the system as a whole, but that's not how it works. If you consider the transfers like that, interior and exterior are 2 different systems, and the exterior system does get this 8kw time tens of thousands to units in the city. You modify the air flow and amplify the heat. The 2kw of energy used is added to city, sure, and that's also significant, but "simply moving the heat" also has an effect.