The air conditioning is one of the most common pieces of machinery found within a typical American household. The a/c is so prolific that, believe it or not, it ranks nearly second to cars in energy usage.Oh how good it feels to walk into a nice cool house after spending hours in the hot humid sea, that some venture to call the 'air'. When you walk into that cool house, you are the epitome of an energy sucking carbon Bigfoot beast.
Well, it depends how you look at it -- I suppose. By walking into an air conditioned home in the south, you are actually doing less harm on mother nature than the northerners walking into their cosy dwellings filled with warmth.
Did you know that if it is freezing cold outside, and you have to heat up your house, you are actually using a LOT more energy than if you had to cool your house on a hot summers day. It is official that the amount of carbon dioxide released in heating homes exceeds that of cooling them.
Looking at this from a physics perspective: air molecules have to be heated and excited to generate kinetic energy, and thus heat; this requires adding energy to the system and offsetting the equilibrium. In cooling, you actually take heat away from an object, which is much easier to do, being that heat (high kinetic energy) always flows to cooler places (low kinetic energy).
The difference is actually quite staggering. In a typical household in the northeast, 13,000 lbs. of CO2 is emitted in order to heat the house by fuel oil. In the south, say Phoenix for instance, only 900 lbs. of CO2 is emitted to cool a similar dwelling. Too heat a certain volume of space requires on average eight times more energy than to cool the same amount of space!
With all that said, it comes with great ease, the realization that heating a house is, in fact, highly detrimental to the planet. So next time before you turn on your heating, think twice, and maybe just layer up your clothing a bit more. You can help the environment by consciously making the change to green living!
2 comments:
Coming from the UK, where we get pretty cold in winter, I found it interesting to note that 40-ish years ago, only one room in a house was heated to an average ~15oC.
Today, every room in the house is heated to an average ~19oC, so that we can walk around in our t-shirts.
The EU noted a few years ago that low-energy lights, such as LEDs, and insulation in every home could reduce CO2 emissions in the EU by about 21%.
A lot can be achieved through simple measures. No mean feat, but we can achieve this in a few years with the right interventions.
Interventions that punish people are not nearly as productive as interventions that encourage and persuade.
M.
Metyu...
Thank you for your post. I find it quite interesting as I used to live in the UK myself.
A change from ~15oC to ~19oC is significant, and that fact alone left me in shock. That will surely use plenty more energy so as to heat up the house in the winter.
Over here in Florida, energy usage is very high during the summer, as people try to cool their house down to low low temperatures such as a shocking 72oF!
Coming from a psychological standpoint, it seems to be more advantageous to encourage people -- as you have mentioned. However, with little incentive, or little consequence, it is also easy to just keep living day to day without making any changes in your lifestyle.
E.S.
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