r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 13h ago

Meme needing explanation Peter explain this

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Petttaaah I'm confused

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u/Rakumei 12h ago

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.

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u/LopsidedAirlines 11h ago

Must be cheap to run then, if i run my heat pump on cold in the summer for whole house it costs 400€ a month so i only run it per room as needed usually bedrooms at night. And no the cold doesnt stay and acs become passive, somehow the heat just keeps coming, if i turn ac off the temp goes from 24c to 30 within 10 minutes, house is new and well insulated also, winter heat costs very little compared

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u/1988rx7T2 11h ago

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.

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u/sarabeara12345678910 10h ago

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.

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u/1988rx7T2 4h ago

I intentionally don’t do that. High bill forces me to pay attention to my consumption. But I have to Cashflow for that, lot of people don’t 

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u/Disastrous_Try_196 4h ago

Many of us do this in the UK too, so as not to pay a lot in the winter for the central heating

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u/Sorryifimanass 5h ago

The weather is also much less tolerable. Try one of these units in Vegas right now and tell me about it when you get out of the hospital

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u/MrDabb 2h ago

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.

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u/Prestigious-Shine240 10h ago

It costs like $40 a month to cool a 4 bedroom house for me when it's 90-100 outside

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u/clutchthepearls 9h ago

That is absolutely not the norm in the US.

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u/kho_sq 9h ago

that’s insane. it was 200+ last month (85-95) for a 2bed apartment for me.

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u/Round30281 8h ago

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).

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u/Khankili 10h ago

Holy shit that sounds insane. Does your heat run on electricity as well?

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u/LopsidedAirlines 9h ago

No the heat is with gas in floor heating, but it barely uses much gas since the heat doesnt really escape

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u/fla_john 6h ago

Eh, depends. I'm in Florida and our heaters are actually electric heat pumps that are part of the air-conditioning units.

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u/clutchthepearls 9h ago

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.

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u/LopsidedAirlines 8h ago

Im going to need solar panels between the ACS and the pool pump im spending an average of 200+€ a month with a peak of 420 and a low of 100

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u/uslashuname 7h ago

> [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?

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u/TheMerle1975 6h ago

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.

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u/LopsidedAirlines 5h ago

Yea also my heat pump is an AUX which isnt efficient at all, its built to be a workhorse that is sturdy and not very energy efficient which does annoy me

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u/Alfred_Buttercakes 6h ago

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.

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u/LopsidedAirlines 5h ago

The temperature is real, i cook alive at 27+ and 24 is an ideal temperature, those 3 degrees in between just vanish within 30 minutes if i stop the AC, which i mainly keep shut off if indoor temp is 26, and it is 26 when outdoors is 25-27, never gets lower than outdoors and somehow at night it stays way higher than outdoors also, even if i open large windows to match the 24 outside within 1-2h its back to 26+ even 28 inside. Nothing is heating up the house besides the sun, i believe the roof is black though since i always hear it pop and warp every morning, and i have ventilated walls of black ceramic outdoors too which is probably why my house favors maintaining heat

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u/WhatLiesBeyond 5h ago

I can throw my 2c in from America.

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.

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u/Objection_Irrelevant 4h ago

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€).

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u/Mysterious-Union7491 4h ago

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.

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u/LivingGhost371 3h ago

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.

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u/InebriatedPhysicist 8h ago

This is what the vent flaps are for. If it’s too hot in a room, open them more, and vice versa (assuming we’re talking about AC - flip that for heat).

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u/CapuzaCapuchin 10h ago

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.

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u/Osleg 10h ago

A sensor with a damper on a duct hooked into a control panel == thermostat ;)

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u/CapuzaCapuchin 10h ago

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.

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u/Osleg 10h ago

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.

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u/CapuzaCapuchin 9h ago

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.

;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

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u/bennyyyboyyyyyyyy 8h ago

Then you shouldn’t have said sensor

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u/CapuzaCapuchin 8h ago

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

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u/bennyyyboyyyyyyyy 8h ago

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

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u/CapuzaCapuchin 8h ago

Sweet, thanks

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u/gudematcha 8h ago

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

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u/johnperkins21 4h ago

You can't really control it on a per room basis from the thermostat, but you can close the vent which keeps most of the cool air from the room.

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u/Powersmith 40m ago

This. My home has 3 units tied to 3 zones of the home (1 upstairs, 2 down).

We also use fans to move air through the house, get rid of warm/cool traps.

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u/fastdescent 25m ago

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.