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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Maybe I’m getting confused due to a difference between Aussie vs American terminology. But pretty much every aircon I’ve seen, ranging from wall mounted units to ducted, can do both heating & cooling. Are aircons that only do cooling the norm in North America or something?

Wall mounted units, assuming you're talking about minisplit systems, have heat pumps built into them.

Ducted systems normally contain an air conditioner with a separate heating system in the same box. Sometimes this system uses electrical heating elements(like would be in an electric oven), but the preference has historically been for a gas furnace.

A unit called an "air conditioner" in the US will only do cooling. The typical setup in the Northeast is some sort of fuel (oil or gas) for heat and an air conditioner (which may well be a retrofit or just window units). Electric baseboard heating (resistance heating) is also not uncommon at least not in existing homes. Heat pumps (which can do cooling by running an air conditioner "backwards") have been pushed for many years, but there's resistance because

  1. Electricity costs more, even with the greater efficiency of the heat pump

  2. Even in the best of conditions the output air temperature isn't much above the existing temperature, so they don't feel warm.

  3. They don't work worth a damn when it gets really cold; either you're stuck with it being much colder than you'd like or the auxiliary resistance heat comes on and costs you a fortune.

Every few years heat pump boosters will swear up and down that the third problem has been fixed. Like the existence of the smokeless diesel or the decent compact fluorescent, this is never actually true.

So now states and municipalities are simply banning new gas hookups to make their citizens worse off to "save the environment".

To be clear, the claim that the third problem has been fixed is almost always rooted in a real claim by a real manufacturer which wants to sell some heat pumps. Manufacturers of HVAC and refrigeration equipment lie constantly for the purposes of taking advantage of green tax incentives and any actual HVAC technician is aware of this- but green boosters are 1) not and 2) disinclined to listen to HVAC technicians.

Judging by their excitement, they really were cooling-only units.

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