[kayoone]

In places like Brazil were AC is everywhere but isolation and heating is limited, it gets really cold in the winter even if its only 15 degrees outside. In places like germany where home isolation and heating is generally very good, you really have to suffer in the summer because rarely any place apart from some offices have AC. Even more so, many don't like AC at home because it consumes a lot of power and can make you sick (not sure if this is actually true).

[ido]

We live in Berlin and the insulation and generally high ceilings make most apartments pretty cool even in the hotter summer days (which are rare and rarely much hotter than 30c).

There are maybe 2-3 weeks per year when I wish we had air conditioning, at most.

[czechdeveloper]

Once indoors temperature hits 26, I can't get any work done. I know I have short temperature comfort range, but 30 indoors is crazy for me.

[lorenzhs]

ido was talking about outside temperature.

I live in one of the hottest cities in Germany (Karlsruhe) and I agree with ido. There's around 2-3 weeks where home air conditioning would really be useful. The rest of the time, temperature is controlled easily enough by opening windows at night and closing the shutters during the daytime while at the office.

Air conditioning for offices is a different story.

[ido]

I don't think indoor temperature ever reached 30c inside my apartment (or if it did it was definitely not for long).

[kayoone]

i actually live in Berlin too and while Summer 2016 wasn't that bad, i remember suffering a lot in the 2015 summer heat in an office without AC. And that wasn't just a few days, it was weeks at a time.

[ido]

My office in 2015 was in an Altbau with very high ceilings and thick walls & it was nice and cool. I would still argue in favour of better insulation/construction.

EDIT: oh but transit here should definitely be better air-conditioned: I don't think there's much you can otherwise do to make subways/trains/busses pleasant once it starts getting hot.

[Noseshine]

The problem was mostly in the cities though.

I remember I returned from my parents where I had stayed over the weekend and it was okay - to a city that was still glowing from the heat at 11 pm at night. I say that as someone who spent a summer vacation in the Emirates (that place has cooled swimming pools right at the beaches, and for good reason the Gulf water is not warm but unbearably hot!).

In general, if/when global warming picks up we have to make some major changes to all our cities. As they are now they are giant furnaces and heat batteries with all the exposed concrete and asphalt.

[seanmcdirmid]

Southern china is really cold in winter for the same reason: no heat, no insulation. If you heat your apartment, you have to heat all your neighbors, so the only solution is a kokatsu. North of the Yangtze is much better because the central government has dictated that those cities get heat.

In HK, a few hundred people always die when it dips below 10C.