I’m still working out how I feel about air conditioning.
After three heatwaves already this year — and more likely on the way — it’s a question I will need to address.
Does it have a place in a climate-aware retrofit? If I’m replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump, should I be thinking about cooling too? How would that work? How much would it cost? What would be the effect on my carbon emissions? There is so much I don’t know or understand.
I don’t have the answers yet — not even close. But this gets to the heart of the question I keep coming back to, what does it mean for how I want to live, here, now, in a part of London that’s expected to get hotter in the summers ahead?
More on that later.
In the meantime, this short episode of Everything Everywhere Daily is a useful entry point. It sets out the basics of how air conditioning works, how it spread, and why it matters, especially now. This is an American story.
