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How do you suggest to keep buildings livable during the decades that it takes to (as you suggest) essentially rebuild cities?
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By switching from burning Russian hydrocarbons for heat to heat pumps so you can heat and cool while being more efficient? This isn't a rebuild, it is a moderate adaptation to the actual requirements to live in the Europe of today.

For steam based heat systems there is also cooling options, so that is a fix for those cities with central heat service.


Cooling buildings with air-water heat pumps like you would use to replace an oil or gas furnace doesn't work very well.

Yes, which is why we should stop installing them and use air to air heat pumps instead, which do both.

Bonus - you can throw your bulky, ugly radiators out too!


They are noisy though and many people including me would hate air heating, my airways suffer enough already.

the interior units are very quiet in my experience...

What's wrong with heating air? It was the norm in every house I grew up in...


Yeah, the outdoor units are quite often not quiet. Which matters with houses on small plots very close to each other. For that reason a water-water (earth-water) heat pump would be preferable as that's much more quiet but also much more expensive.

My nose simply doesn't work with it, I get an allergy-like reaction that never stops (non-allergic rhinitis), and my wife has the same issue, and many people I know too.


Rhinitis is not exactly a disease. It's just a matter of your body getting used to it. Most likely it disturbs existing dust. Also - does your house have proper ventilation system? In high co2 environments I get rhinitis too.

It is exactly a group of diseases categorized in the ICD.

Or you could just respect that people tend to know much more about their medical conditions than you will ever know.

It's not my house, it's many different places and many different irritating causes. It's not an issue with dust or high CO2 in my case.


Ah yes the same tone as my parents. I described this delusion at length here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48658494

You’d probably want to look at greater picture - I’d much rather have runny nose than suffocate in co2, catch infections or die from heat.

Billions of people live in air conditioned environments. They don’t seem to complain.




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