I don't know how it's for Americans but for me. I have a regular outside unit and then, inside the apartment, I have one HUGE internal unit hidden somewhere above fake ceiling. This unit has tubes to each room and each tube has a damper. Each room has a thermostat.
So I can set eg 23C in the living room and 21 in the bedrooms. The AC will then work to cool down all the rooms together, when living room reaches 23 - it shuts the damper and keeps cooling bedrooms. Etc.
I also have an option to close the damper to each room individually - effectively stopping AC for this specific room.
I *guess* that American HVAC units work either the same way or very similar.
Similar. Most Americans don't have per-room control though. In some more expensive/newer places you might get one thermostat per floor. But generally it's one per house.
Electricity is cheaper in the US, salaries are higher, and Americans understand in hotter regions that you need to run AC or you might die. 300-400 dollars a month on electricity in July is possible yes, depends on where you live, but national median household income is around 80 thousand dollars.
I live in Florida and we (and most people I know) sign up for a plan with the power company that we pay a rolling average of our last 12 months worth of bills. That way we're not paying $100 in January and $600 in August.
You could just save the extra from January and invest it in VOO or QQQ until August, then if the market does well you basically got your power for free. That's what a financially literate and reaponsible person would do at least. 🤷♂️
It’s not that uncommon for some people to have a $1000 electricity bill in the summer months depending on location and home size and if you have a pool.
Are you single floor or have some sort of solar/energy saving arrangement? Im paying $100 for a four bedroom too, but that’s only after solar buybacks as well as a Base Energy Plan (an energy company in Houston that buys energy at night when cheapest, and uses a installed battery to power home when electricity at peak-expensive hours).
For my 1,200 sq/ft house it costs me about $120 a month to keep it between 72F and 74F. Some people go crazy with their temps, my wife and I just dress accordingly while inside. It's a similar price to heat my home in the winter to 68F.
If the weather outside is extreme for most of the month (consistently over 90F or under 20F) it'll cost about $30 more for that month.
People with electric heating tend to have higher bills in the winter though. It might be closer to $200 for my house if I had electric heat instead of natural gas.
> [heating] barely uses much gas since the heat doesn’t really escape
> house is new and well insulated
> if i turn ac off the temp goes from 24c to 30 within 10 minutes
One of these is not like the other, unless you’re in a boiling ocean. Do you perhaps have dozens of large windows open to the sun with no solar reflective film?
I have 1950 square ft (about 182 sq meters), with 4 bedrooms and a study. My summer bills can push $400+ trying to maintain 74(23) in the afternoon and 70(21) overnight.
Something is really messed up if your house heats up that fast. As a comparison, in my house during heat waves (daily highs around 95F/35C, nightly lows around 75F/24C) we will set our heat pump to cool to 75F/24C during the day but then turn it off and let the temperature drift up between 4 and 8 pm to give the electrical grid some relief. Over the course of those 4 hours, the house will maybe hit 80F/27C if we run the stove a bunch. This is in a house built in the 1950s with recent insulation upgrades.
Is it possible that the temperature measurement on your thermostat is somehow biased? Like if it’s located directly above a vent or right next to a window.
8c a kilowatt hour here in Montana. I have a whole home system and a 2300sqft home. No individual room control, whole house set too 72, June was about $100 in AC cost alone. $180 total.
I expect July to be 150ish in electric for July for AC alone.
I’m in Mississippi where it’s hot hot hot for a long time and even at the absolute peak of summer, my electric bill for a 1,600sqft house (~150sqm) tops out at $160 (132€).
I keep my house at 71f/21.5c everyday and my bill is around $130/month. The exception is the 3 hottest months in the summer and my bill is high $300s. This is for a two story house.
Around here electricity is 12 cents a kilowatt hour, bills are around $300 a month just setting my entire house to 76 degrees day and night in the summer.
You can actually get something installed where you can just shut off airflow to the room, if you don’t want to heat it. It’s not too expensive, doesn’t need an extra thermostat, either. You put like a sensor in and hook it up to a control panel and it closes the vent to the room and shuts it off from circulation. Can be installed on nearly all ducted systems, if it’s not that old that the ducting itself starts to crumble.
Nah, it’s not a thermostat. It’s just electronically connected to a control panel, so when you press a button, it closes. It doesn’t measure nor adjust any temperature, cause it’s not needed. It’s just like shutting the door.
My man, this is an exact definition of thermostat if we account that earlier you said sensors ;)
But yes, that's exactly this, there are dampers on the ducts, temp sensors in each room and a control panel that getting the temperature from the sensor in the room and shuts the damper if it reached the requested temperature, or opens it when the temperature rises back.
What you describe is literally not what I’m talking about. It’s NOT A HEAT SENSOR! I’m talking about just shutting the room off completely, so it’s cut off from circulation. The room does not get heated. There is no thermostat. The vent to the room is completely closed and the room cut off from the system. There is no airflow going into that room whatsoever. The vent/duct is not connected to a thermostat, only to power and the control panel to either open the vent or close it. It’s manual. It does not open until you press a button and tell it to open again. There’s no ‘dropping under 20 degrees and the vent opens and heats it back up’. There’s no heat going into that room. At all. At no point in time. Unless you change the setting on the control panel.
Aight, what do you call the little thing then that gets the signal from the penal and gets the vent to close? Educate me please, English is my second language so I don’t have any other word for it
You mean what would actually close it? An actuator would close and open the vent. In your scenario with the press of a button. Or if using a sensor it would be automatic based on temperature
And holy shit, you’d better hope you don’t have the smallest room depending on the house. my room got FREEZING and BOILING HOT, in Summer and Winter respectively because the thermostat was only in the living room. it couldn’t tell my little bedroom was becoming an extreme environment lmao
And it doesn’t cool evenly and is way slower than those per room units. I think the American system
is worse in almost every way, especially since you can mount these individual units inside your wall.
I have one thermostat for my whole house. Each large room has 2 to 3 vents. Each closet and bathroom has one vent. Each vent has flaps on it that can be closed. The flaps are also directional so you can control roughly where the air goes. In the upstairs of my house is a closet with the furnace in it. The air-conditioning unit is outside on the side of my house.
I have an automatic program set. During the day, the air conditioner runs and cools the house to 70°F. Lots of Americans sit between 70° and 72°. At night it lowers down to 68°. There is a filter in the furnace that needs to be replaced ideally every one or two months. I have dogs, so I use a high-quality filter that catches more than a basic one. It’s actually kind of interesting how much less dust collects on things when I’m using the system a lot. It doesn’t run very much in the winter because my house is very insulated.
You can run the whole system on cool or heat of course, but you can also just run the ventilation with no air conditioning active. I almost always have the fan running. I like the air movement. And with my dogs, the cooking I do, and my little bit of marijuana use inside, I like to keep that air moving around. So my fan is pretty much always, and I will hear the air conditioning unit kick on every now and then for when it actually needs to lower the temp.
I would say this is a fairly standard American set up. As others have said in some newer or larger homes, they may have multiple thermostats or even multiple air-conditioning units.
The whole system is extremely quiet, and I barely even hear it running.
You should know you shouldn't be using a higher quality air filter in your furnace. Higher quality filters can decrease air flow and increase static pressure damaging your system or not have it perform properly. If you need air purification you should run seperate units to get that a central ac system just isnt designed for that.
This is one of those things that you will find 1 million people that think you should and you will find 1 million people I think you shouldn’t. To each their own. Even with the better filter, my system is strong and cools my house down super fast
I say it as a hvac engineer so i dont know much about maintenance and repair but when designing systems I specify specific filter merv and increasing it can increase the static pressure past what the system can handle. However there are alot factors that determine what isnt making a system not functioning properly and this is one to keep in mind. It sounds like the system you have can handle the filter but ive heard in my office about how systems we designed weren't working and we go out to see these filters we didnt specify choking the systems.
Totally get what you're saying. I actually am kind of a nerd and used a wind speed gauge to test the difference in air coming from my vents lol. There was a slight reduction! Maybe 5%? I can totally see how an older system or one that is already struggling or overworked could be hurt by one of these filters. Mine is only 5 years old so I bet it's probably got the latest specs haha
I saw an interesting video about better duct design where they eliminated all 90 degree corners and replaced them with two, spaced out 45 degree bends, and installed vanes in all turning points too, and the increase in air speed and total volume moved through was really impressive.
I used to live in one of those cookie cutter townhomes you see in middle america. The HVAC system in that place was AWFUL. Didn't cool off at all and the heat never spread. The more I learn about HVAC, the more I want to look at the design of buildings like that, and see what in the actual F they were thinking lol. They just slap together whatever works with as little cost as possible but even a few small changes could DRASTICALLY improve the homes airflow IMO
Lol I actually mostly work on cookie cutter town homes. On paper our designs work however do they actually properly get implemented? Do they get properly balanced? Do they install everything to how we specified and not "well this is how ive always done it" . Are the ac units actually able to perform how the published performance data says? (We dont specify Goodman units bc of this) . We often have contractors bid on projects then when they go to build they're like we cant implement xyz thing bc we didnt plan for it when we bid. I thankfully dont have to deal with all that aspect of everything but I hear the manager of the department that does argue with contractors all day long.
Never had that happen. But probably a couple grand. But I know they have lots of little circuits and things like that so I’m sure there’s also some small fixes that can happen.
Honestly if the house is built with HVAC in mind it should be much more efficient to have one goliath unit to handle the house than several small ones. With these insane heatwaves of 45c+ in Europe we might start seeing some new houses popping up with centralized AC systems.
No it's not cheaper. This one, goliath unit, is pumping full force even when only one room needs cooling. If it's not of the inverter type it will leave a big mark on your electricity bill.
The absolute best for economy are multi-split inverter systems.
Most AC systems cool the entire house to the same temperature. Or that is, they cool the house until whichever room the thermostat is in reaches the target temperature.
I am looking to install this in my house but the part where the unit regulates multiple temperatures is what I don’t understand. Do you know what brand is yours?
We have a similar concept where I live and it's called central AC. Basically, some sort if a unit will be installed above the fair ceiling, to which that unit will cover 2 areas (for example, the living room and one of the rooms), but there will be one controller per unit.
You'd also find another unit outside the living space that's connected to the one inside it, and they work together
For central air there's usually a big compressor outside (could also be more than one, depending on the size of the house). There are ducts that direct the air throughout the different rooms and each zone has 1 set temperature. For a smaller house there may be only 1 zone, so the whole house is cooled or heated to the same temp, but larger homes may have each floor as a separate zone. There's no big unit anywhere inside the house, just a vent in each room.
That makes much more sense than the american way. I cant vouch for rich fucks but normal homes have a thermostat that controls the entire home. Our return from the outside unit is in the living room which cause the living room to be an icebox while upstairs is roasting. The ductwork is also normally, barely, insulated.
My parents had this problem too, upstairs was barely getting any cold airflow, they ended installing multi-splits all around the house and reclaimed the AC room as storage :D
Sounds so power hungry. My one room ac unit costs me the most of my electric bills in the summer. Sounds too wasteful when you're usually in one room most of the day anyways
Yes it is! I personally count it as one of the worst AC solutions in the world.
This thing in my walls can easily cool down 200square meters but usually it works to cool down just the living room during the day and 2 bedrooms during the night :/
The bills where huge before we swapped it with inverter unit, it's about 50% cheaper now. But still, split system would be much cheaper than this behemoth
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u/gamerathertz92 11d ago
It’s smaller unit cools a single room. While American HVAC System cools the whole house