The UK’s houses are still designed to retain heat. In an age of global warming, that needs to change.
Climate change can mean more extreme temperatures. We need to be able to keep warm, and keep cool. The better you insulate a house, the better it can keep cool after cooling down at night, and keep the heat out when you do use air conditioning.
One thing helping with this is airtightness, and MVHR. Couple that with good insulation (keeps hot out, as well as in), and things like shades above south facing windows to block the sun when it’s at it’s highest/hottest, and we see a lot of improvements. MVHR especially helps to distribute heat between rooms, and provide fresh air without completely heating/cooling the house.
What’s MVHR?
Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery - basically you pull fresh air into the house and push old air out and transfer the temperature of the old air to the new air. This means you aren’t having to heat or cool the new air but you still get fresh air.
Mechanically Ventilated Heat Recovery system. It lets you get fresh air without losing heat / cool as the expelled air heats / cools the inlet air transferring its energy over.
https://www.greenbuildingstore.co.uk/information-hub/heat-recovery-ventilation-mvhr/
Im considering importing American tech when I eventually renovate my house, they have some great HVAC systems over there now.
If not I might put in some sash windows instead and buy the cheaper window aircons they use over there.
Im going to reder my house in brilliant white to reflect as much light as possible and also put in mirrored glass.
My house is completely south facing, which is great a lot of the time, but in this heatwave the rooms inside at hitting 30c by night. Fans arent enough anymore.
All that said, im glad we are getting some decent weather these days compared to summers of the past.
MVHR especially helps to distribute heat between rooms
Never thought about this aspect of it. Was going to just get single room MVHRs for the bathrooms and kitchen, but now considering this… Downstairs gets quite cool at night while upstairs is still hot as balls, so distributing that heat with vents makes sense.
If you’ve got an attic, you can try opening the hatch to it. The heat will rise up in to the attic and cool your top floor a little.
My first thought too: this post doesn’t really stand true
Houses, public and commercial buildings, everything needs to be rethought. Currently visiting the UK from a much warmer and more humid climate in the states. It’s bizarre that it’s pleasant outside but almost uniformly uncomfortably warm (and frankly, more important humid) inside. Out hotel room is supposedly air conditioned but stays a uniform 25-26c no matter what the thermostat is set on. It’s “working appropriately” according to management and their 3 different maintenance staff that have “adjusted” it, but it is not handling the humidity well. The only saving grace is one of the windows will open ~6in to allow us to open it at night. The bigger picture is how this heat and humidity are going to effect the buildings and their contents. It doesn’t take all that long a time for humidity and high indoor temps to allow serious mold issues to start taking hold. People forget the original use of ac wasn’t for human comfort but to keep goods (specifically paper) dry so it didn’t curl and become unusable by a printing company.
Serious mold issues are already a thing over here, in most public housing it’s a serious problem and some kid died from an infestation
A portable AC unit for the bedroom is one of the best purchase I’ve ever made. We put a hole in the wall for the vent which can just be closed when we don’t need it.
I can deal with the rest of the house being hot as long as I can get a half decent night sleep.
Bought it during the winter though as in the summer they are either out of stock or have a massively inflated price (or both!)
Genuinely considering this when I get into my new flat. Me and my GF are both radiators when we sleep and having a fan on just doesn’t cut it. Dries my mouth and nose out as well.
Summers in the UK are only going to get hotter and more extreme. Really this needs to be taken into account in how we build homes… but that doesn’t help the existing houses and flats.
I’d strongly recommend at least a small portable AC for the bedroom. Worth every penny.
I live in a block of flats (on the top) and the temperature is fucking insane.
My previous house was like that. Top floor flat, western facing, drowned in sunlight 14 hours a day. Nice and bright but during moderately sunny and warm weather it was minimum 28°C all day long.
Never again.
As soon as people come in here they always ask why I’ve got the heating on. I’ve never got it on.
On the plus side my clothes dry quicker than ever before! I nearly got one of those weird air heating pod things to dry them before I moved in but they get crispy just on the clothes horse.
Same here, it gets unbearable - I sympathise with you. We have roof windows and last summer during the heatwave I think we touched 36°c inside. I’m dreading what might be to come this year. On the flip side in winter it was 8°c at times…Swings and roundabouts, right?
You beat my score! It got up to 33 in here last year. At my previous house I almost always managed to keep it around 20ish and had the thermostat set to 18 in the winter, so it was a bit of a fucking shock to the system.
As someone who isn’t made for the heat, I am finding the past couple of summers horrendous. Having good blinds and the windows shut helps, but for how long? Things just keep getting hotter.
I know but living in a dark cave is so depressing. I love having my curtains open to see the world…but that lets heat in
We just can’t win!
I see lots of folks round our way with the windows open on hot days. I’ve been keeping all the windows closed and blinds down during the day, open it all up in the evening and morning to get the heat right down for the next day, works like a charm. If it does ramp up from this over the next few decades, we’re definitely going to have to put the infrastructure in place for the AC load and decent insulation.
When you need ACs, there is lots of sun, so lots of solar. So maybe not extra grid load if houses have their own solar.
I also close windows and curtains in the sun. Thinking of adding shutters.
Interestingly enough, solar panels work much better when it’s cold. There are a lot of improvements the UK could make to mitigate this problem for winter and summer. Solar panels are a must, followed by good insulation and subsidies for heat pumps ac pumps.
The people I know with solar do get less power from it in winter just because there is less light for less time. But it’s certainly worth doing!
Thought for a while i need some kind of window shutters. Seems obvious to stop the sun getting to the windows keeps house cooler
Really good white-coloured blackout blinds will get you most of the benefits with a much lower outlay. Well worth sticking a cheap roller blind on pretty much every window that gets the sun.
Interesting. You have any data on that?
Trying to Google the question gives about a thousand links to very mediocre sources (mostly companies selling blinds), so I won’t arbitrarily link you to one. But it’s exactly the same mechanism as exterior shutters, just less effective.
Ultimately it’s all about reflecting solar energy away. Some is reflected away by the white colour, while some is inevitably absorbed by the blind making the material hot to touch. The advantage of an exterior shutter is that all the energy it absorbs instead of reflecting is still outside your house, and the window glass should keep it out. Wheras the heat absorbed by interior blinds or shutters is now on the wrong side of your window glass and can warm up the room.
So in order to get the best of the effect, you need nice highly reflective blinds. White is better than darker colours for obvious reasons; you can also get slightly more expensive “thermal” blackout blinds which are coated with pigment that reflects a greater proportion of the non-visible sunlight too.
Also worth pointing out that it’s not binary, and that non blackout blinds and curtains will help too, just not as much.
I don’t doubt it’s true. I was just hoping you had a numbers source to hand to save me looking.
Yes! I visit almost every year and coming from America with constant A/C and newer houses it’s very jarring. But the brits I’ve asked about it have been (characteristically) very stubborn about this.
I’ve got an old old house (1790 I think) I’m thinking of adding shutters. In summer, it makes a huge difference to shut windows and curtains for the day time, and open in cool of the evening. But shutters would be even better than curtains.
I’ve never understood why we don’t build more houses from timber.
I wouldn’t call the UK “a hot country”, outside of maybe 2-3 months of the year at most. Having said that, we do need more thought given to how to deal with the heat, There are a couple of issues with widespread AC though. 1) Electricity prices and 2) environmental impact of increased pressure on the grid when it’s hot (i/e needing coal or gas power plants more).
