Most people here don’t have air conditioners - more than used to, but most of the people I know here (Nürnberg area) don’t.

I feel like we temporarily dodged a bullet by sheer laziness - before the pandemic, we were all set to do the whole Energiesanierung with full KfW incentives, which would have required chucking out our oil furnace (replaced right before we bought the house a few years ago) for, most likely, natural gas. Instead, we are still sitting on 1.5 years of normal or possibly 3 years of very carefully used heating oil supply.

Now, like everyone, we’re looking into heat pumps. Because we are still sitting on a year or two of heating oil, I think we shouldn’t be competing against our gas-heated neighbors for that changeover this year or next.

It is more like 2-3 times, depending on the outside temparature and degrading rapidly below e.g. -5C. Also, there is a noticeable effect on quality of life (noise, sometimes uncomfortable air currents).