Overheated homes: why UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis
Overheated homes: why UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis
www.theguardian.com
Overheated homes: why UK housing is dangerously unprepared for impact of climate crisis
We need to be installing heat pumps and solar panels everywhere immediately.
The government needs to be pushing this hard with big subsidies otherwise we're going to have the NHS on its knees as the summer becomes just as bad as winter.
There will be mass death if we don't do something about this within the next few years
Neither of those things address the problem of heat, and they don't even address the cold due to the sorry state of most homes in the country.
The problem is insulation. It keeps the heat in in the winter (making a heat pump viable) and the heat out in the summer. British homes are largely horrendous on this front, so much so that we used to have a whole protest group called Insulate Britain devoted to the issue. In keeping with the British pattern of arresting and ignoring protestors however, they were widely demonised by media and politicians.
But they were right.
Another problem is just design. People in hot countries use shutters on the outside of the house to block out the sun. Pretty much every house here only has curtains, so the sun comes through the window and heats up the air between the window and curtains, which then circulates around the room.
Finally, the last problem is education. Too many people in this country have no idea how to deal with heat. Our neighbours were actually complaining about how well insulated our homes are because they hadn't figured out that you're supposed to keep the blinds and windows closed during the day and open them only at night.
I have been arguing with my local council planning department to install external window shutters for years. Unfortunately installing them requires paying for planning permission, which requires an architect. It's absolutely crazy
Correct me if I'm wrong, but surely both are necessary parts of the solution given the trajectory we're on?
No house insulation is 100% perfect, so some level of heat transfer will still occur even with blackout curtains closed during the day. After some number of days at say the 35-40 degrees we're already seeing across Europe (and let's face it, we're probably on track to brush up against the 50 degrees we're seeing in Japan within a decade or two), the temperature will equalise internally to that.
In order to counter that we need an efficient way of moving heat from inside back out again without letting any more in, which is not something many houses in the UK can do today.
In 2025, most people in developed hot countries are using air conditioning in addition to everything else
Also shutting the windows facing the sun and opening the windows facing away from it. Too many people do not know how to do this
it feels like such an obvious regulation, any unused roof space should by law have one of the following: