Germans are air conditioning muffle. But that apparently changes

A while ago I was able to look into the air conditioning in the basement of our office building at the time, more precisely: in a system that cleaned and tempered the outside air. A friendly in -house technician opened me a basement tract that I had never entered, and opened the heavy steel doors of several containers, everyone as big as my small office. Lamellae made of filter fleece close to tightly hinted to divide the dirt of the sucked city air: hair, pollen, mold pores, diesel soot – all the coarse and fine dust that flies around there. In addition, the ventilation machine brought the air to moderate temperature and slightly moistened it.

What particularly impressed me was the color difference: in the first container, the slats cleaned what was imagined under “fresh” air from outside. Here the filters were dark gray from the city dust. The second container filtered what was returned from our offices as an exhaust air. Subsequent cleaning should protect the expensive air conditioning system from lint and other small stuff. But these slats were snow white. Was our office air so clean? What did I breathe in when I just teased the window?

Impressed by my trip to the ventilation cellar, I planned to turn on the system a little more often. But others wrapped their noses.

“I never use the air conditioning system. I need fresh air!” I heard from a colleague. Others said that the icy drafts would get a stiff neck, headaches from the whisked pollutants and from the mold from the ventilation of allergies. I thought back to the dirty gray slats, which apparently kept us a lot of the body, and noticed that it is complicated with us and the air conditioning systems.

So far, the skeptics seem to be in the majority. Despite the German climate change and heat waves, Germans are still considered in an international comparison as a climate system muffle. In the car we have long been looking forward to cooling and ventilation on hot days. Also on vacation on the Mediterranean, in the USA or Asia, you can escape into chilled shopping malls as a matter of course in heat. But with the air condition in buildings, we are still struggling in this country.

An estimated every fifth household has an air conditioning system. Many sensitive buildings such as schools, nursing homes or hospitals cannot be cooled in the heat. At the beginning of 2025, the German hospital company criticized that fans and darkening curtains were still the standard in most hospitals – but not sufficient than heat protection.

There are many reasons for the low degree of air conditioning: old buildings have to be extensively retrofitted, but there are no money and specialists to incorporate plants. Many hesitate in the private sector because they are concerned about health risks, high costs or the electricity consumption of air conditioning. Some may also consider whether the installation of air conditioning is worthwhile, or whether you do not replace the entire heating and buy a heat pump with an additional summer cooling function.

With regard to possible health risks such as the “Sick Building Syndom”, in which people in office buildings complain about headaches, itchy eyes and other symptoms, studies could not find a clear connection with air conditioning systems. The German Proklima study came to an almost paradoxical result years ago: Although the air in air-conditioned rooms was cleaner than in buildings with window ventilation, many still felt more sick-which could indicate a participation of mental factors.

But our previous experiences with weather, climate and the perceived temperatures also play a role in reservations about air conditioning systems. “There is something like cultural habits. The experience of getting from the heat into a felt ice-cold space is unusual for Germans,” explains the cultural and literary scholar Eva Horn in an interview with the German press agency (dpa). She is a professor at the University of Vienna and author of the book published in 2024: “Climate – a history of perception”. According to Horn, the systems are often too cool and are therefore often perceived as uncomfortable because they assumed a standard temperature: 22 degrees Celsius, 50 percent humidity.

But recently, acceptance for building air conditioning also seems to be increasing in Germany: In 2024, in a representative survey of the comparison portal Verivox, 19 percent of those surveyed stated that they already had a air conditioning at home. That was six percentage points more than in the previous year. 19 more percent planned to buy one. And almost half (41 percent) of the other respondents could also imagine this if it should be noticeably warmer in the future.

The more gracious view of cooled living rooms recently seemed to inspire the market, as new figures from the Federal Statistical Office show: According to this, almost twice as many building air conditioning systems in Germany were produced in Germany as in the previous year: domestic production rose by 92 percent from 165,000 devices to 317,000 systems 2024. The total value of the manufactured devices was around 1.5 Billions of euros. In previous years, fewer than 200,000 devices were manufactured annually. In addition, Germany imported plants worth almost one billion in 2024 – a similar value as in 2023, when imports had already reached a record height. In contrast, the export of air conditioning systems fell slightly in 2024, presumably because more devices were needed and installed in Germany.

Climate systems as part of heat protection concepts could possibly save lives in the future: Only a few months ago, a study in the science journal “Nature Medicine” calculated that in Europe by extremely temperatures, 2.3 million additional heat deaths are threatened if no countermeasures are taken. In contrast, the health risks of climate systems, for example through the swirling of bacteria or viruses, are considered comparable if the systems are properly maintained.