this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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A lot of that AC usage comes down to poor insulation, older and poorly maintained units, single family housing, overly large housing, vacant housing that still needs to be cooled to keep it from deteriorating before someone can cover the inflated asset price, the need to insulate offices separately from housing because we've abolished work-from-home rules...
A well-maintained stock of publicly accessible homes in dense mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, with a professionally managed building-wide AC unit, could reduce the per-capita electricity demand enormously.
But instead, we've queued up billions of dollars in concrete and steel to build city-sized warehouses for scorching hot chipsets.
Bruh, a window a.c. is sold in grocery stores for under 200$.*
That doesn't seem necessary.
Sorry for the rudeness I will adjust the comment.
? and how many to cool a house and how much power does each draw. Which was their point. Not the dollar cost of the unit.
Well obviously it would take more a.c.'s to cool a house but again it depends on needs. If the house was a single floor unit it wouldn't need a mini split. It could use a window a.c. which can be 120v; mini splits are 220v-240v. It's probably a little more on volts but that's if both are ran at the same time. If you're in a main room while the main bed room AC is off you're not consuming twice as much power.
But the more cassettes with mini splits the more power you draw, the more you have them on the more energy you're consuming regardless.
So if you have two cassettes running 4 units, you're running 2 zones per cassette at 220v-240v each cassette plus the refrigerant, plus the amount of time on which can get to over 1,000w each easily. How they make it cost effective, idk. Maybe city programs but they cost 4 times as much as my window ac, the unit not the amount of money to run them.
I'm only going to use my AC 4 months out of the year, if that. It doesn't seem worth drilling into my house for 4 months out of the year.
You don't need to cool an entire house unless you have a family or pets and even still you can get away with using a 24" pedestal fan with using the AC you can cool an additional 900 sq ft on top of what the actual is providing in the living room.
I mean yeah a mini split is the modern option but not everyone wants to drill into their homes.
It's all about needs vs generalizations. I don't need to cool every room in my house and I can get away with using one whirlpool brand window ac in my living room and sending the cool air through my house with a penguin pedestal fan from Ocean State job lot.
Yeah it sucks having to put it in the window every year and it sucks bringing the fan down and walking by it but I have a natgas boiler based steam radiator system with heat in every room and given how the winters in New England are harsher than the summers, I think I'm okay.