No, you can’t just pop in a window AC in Germany.
I pulled this image off a thread on Facebook two days ago. The person who posted it did so with great pride, because they were successfully cooling their house.
What you see here is a portable AC unit running a hose out the window to expel the hot air.
Notice that the window is not an American style sash window. It’s a tilt-and-turn. With the handle horizontal, you can open it like a door, as seen here. With the handle pointing up, you can lean it in three or four inches, opening at the top. With the handle pointing down, it closes tightly. I’m a big fan. The technology is unequivocally superior.
EXCEPT. EXCEPT that you can’t put a window AC in it. Even to use a portable AC, you’re going to have to rig an imperfect seal around the expelling hose and it’s going to look like hell and be fuck-inefficient. The somewhat better solution than this is to get a piece of plexiglass with a hole cut to order the exact size of the tube, though you do have to be ready and willing to swap the plexiglass pane in and out of the window at will bc you’ll need a normal window without a hole in it in winter, so it’s not one and done.
(Also visible here are rolling exterior blackout blinds. They work quite well against the heat, but of course you can’t have any sunlight indoors, except for very early and very late. People will literally seal off and live in the dark in the daytime, only opening the windows at night. But it costs 0 electricity so there’s that. These exterior blinds are ubiquitous in Germany but, for whatever reason, not Berlin.)
The superior technology that everyone in Europe is desperate to get their hands on in this current 2026 heat wave? The Midea PortaSplit. It looks like this.
Here someone has found an ingenious solution to the sealing problem: pool noodles.
The tubes are smaller on the Midea, which, as you can see, helps a good deal aesthetically but doesn’t exactly eliminate the issue.
Moving up from that, you have regular minisplits and splits (I’m not sure of the difference if any. I didn’t WANT to go down a rabbit hole about HVAC okay it’s BORING picture me kicking and screaming about it). These frequently are prohibited by rental contracts because installing the external bit involves doing things to the facade and/or looks unsightly from the street. Most Germans rent, so that can preclude what probably is the ideal solution for these buildings. (The reason the Midea is such a hot ticket, I gather, is that you can just sit that part innocently on the balcony and not be in violation of anything.)
Up from there is real central air, which is so hard to retrofit that it’s almost never attempted in old buildings. New developments can have it. Generally, only the very fanciest ones do, because Germans criminally underprioritize climate control. In literal current year S-Bahn cars are being ordered and delivered without AC. HOSPITALS are being built without AC. People are recovering from surgery and dying of cancer in hospital in puddles of their own congealing sweat as I type this because Germany has its head thrust way the fuck up its ass about AC. They’d never consider normalizing living without central heating, oh no, that would be dangerous! But it’s perfectly fine and even virtuous to just let people die for lack of cooling. There have been three hundred excess deaths in Berlin alone in this heat wave. SO FAR.
tl;dr no it’s not simple to JustTM get AC here
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