15/09/2020 Homes Designed to Keep Heat In Are Now Struggling to Cool Down

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Homes Designed to Keep Heat In Are

Now Struggling to Cool Down
JESS SHANKLEMAN SEPTEMBER ,

When it was completed in  for the Summer Olympics, Lydia Yuzva’s
housing complex in East London was hailed as a beacon of green design and
energy efficiency. e , units, a mix of apartments and town houses,
have floor-to-ceiling windows, lots of insulation, and environmentally
friendly heating systems that use waste heat from a nearby power plant
fueled with biomass and gas. ey were designed for the U.K.’s cold winters,
trapping heat to reduce energy bills.

But what the designers of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park didn’t consider
was the steadily rising average temperature. All  of the U.K.’s hottest years
since record keeping began in  have occurred in the last  years,
according to the U.K.’s Met Office. Yuzva’s apartment lacks air conditioning,
and it’s become unbearably hot during the summer months. When she gave
birth four years ago to a daughter with severe jaundice, she faced a dilemma:
keep the curtains open to allow sun to reach the baby’s skin and help clear
the condition more quickly or close them to keep the apartment cooler. On
some of the hottest days, she says, she couldn’t even be in the flat with her
baby. “For us it’s terrible to be too hot, but for a child it’s dangerous.”

Housing in northern European countries including the U.K. and Germany

has long been built with one purpose in mind: keep people warm in the
winter. Air conditioning was almost never included because the summers
were temperate. But climate change has upended that calculus.

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Already in the U.K., a fifth of all homes are said to overheat in the summer,
meaning indoor temperatures exceed C (F) more than  of the time
the space is occupied, or C in bedrooms. With people stuck at home
because of Covid- containment orders, many more residents will fall into
the category. Since the Olympics, London’s high temperatures have averaged
.C, a jump from .C in the years from  through . By the
s, according to government projections, London could be experiencing
heat waves every summer, with temperatures exceeding C for three or
more consecutive days.

“We can’t build those boxes anymore that rely purely on air conditioning,
because of climate change”

Overheating can have profound effects on health and well-being and is

particularly dangerous for vulnerable groups such as babies and the elderly.
Extremely high temperatures can cause heatstroke, organ failure, and
sometimes death. Even for healthy people it can cause sleep deprivation,
which in turn can lead to sluggishness and accidents. As much as  of a
country’s gross domestic product is lost because of lack of sleep, according to
research organization Rand Corp.

e hot-house problem is partly an unintended consequence of tougher

energy-efficiency building requirements. After the s oil crisis,
homebuilders started focusing more on making them airtight, sealing them
up to stop heat from escaping to reduce consumption of heating oil in cold
weather. at meant retrofitting old buildings and stuffing lots of insulation
into new ones.

But as temperatures increased, experts understood that sealing buildings

comes with a downside—reduced airflow. It’s a particular problem in cities,

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where newer buildings tend to have fixed, sealed windows. Also, the
concrete outside absorbs heat throughout the day and radiates it at night, a
phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. “Insulation without
changing the ventilation can bring some disastrous effects,” says Dame Julia
King, deputy chair of the U.K. Committee on Climate Change.

Other heat research blames poor design, often motivated by cost

considerations. e size of dwellings is also shrinking, yet they’re occupied
by the same number of people and more appliances emitting heat. e
arrival of air conditioning didn’t help, either. Architects and designers no
longer had to think hard about traditional cooling techniques such as cross
ventilation, says Illya Azaroff, who specializes in disaster planning for the
American Institute of Architects. And now, he adds, we’re paying the price,
because even air conditioning is becoming inadequate for temperatures.
“We’ve now started to come full circle,” Azaroff says. “We realize we can’t
build those boxes anymore that rely purely on air conditioning, because of
climate change.”

“e entire problem with this issue is it’s all very simple stuff”

What’s most frustrating for green building experts is that overheating can be
ameliorated through relatively simple tweaks in the early design stage. One
key is to ensure that apartments have windows on opposite sides, allowing
the breeze to flow through. Yet modern apartments often have windows only
on one side, making it difficult to generate a through-draft. Of course, that’s
if the window can even open.

Better ventilation systems that can provide adequate fresh air are also
important. ose systems might circulate new air into a room more
frequently, say eight times an hour rather than once, as is typical now,

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according to bio Simon Wyatt, a sustainability partner at consultant Cundall

Johnston & Partners LLP.

More efficient materials can have a big impact, too. Because of cost
considerations, apartments are frequently built using lightweight materials
that have a lower thermal mass, meaning they can’t absorb heat in the day
and release it at night, says Masoud Tabatabaei, a building performance
specialist with Monodraught Ltd., a low-energy ventilation company.
Alnatura, a design sustainability lab in Darmstadt, Germany, developed
walls made of loam, a kind of sandy clay, that have an evaporative cooling
effect that prevents heat pockets from forming.

Many other improvements can be made by any homeowner. ese include

using ceiling fans; attaching shutters, balconies, and shading to the outside
of a building; or planting trees to shield windows. Other changes are more
expensive, such as redesigning layouts for better ventilation or adding
additional external vents. What’s required varies from home to home, but
regardless, the principles are easy to grasp. “e entire problem with this
issue is it’s all very simple stuff,” Wyatt says. “It’s always amazing to see the
lack of common sense that has gone into the build or design.”

While the fixes may be simple, only a few developers incorporate them in
their designs. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has proposed a plan that requires
building developers to carry out overheating modeling against extreme
weather scenarios. It says air conditioning should be a last resort, with
developers prioritizing building design and passive ventilation.

e U.K. as a whole is considering similar rules, but those would apply only
to new construction, unlike London’s. Some  of the buildings people
will be living in by  are already built, according to Khan’s office.

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It may be left to the courts to push reforms. Wyatt says he’s increasingly
hired by developers worried that overheating issues will turn into litigation.
At a new building in central London, he says, contractors were forced to
replace at their own cost fixed windows with ones that can be opened after
indoor temperatures reached C in the summer of . In another
situation that summer, a developer was stuck with uninhabitable rental units
because they hit C, so the contractor needed to foot the bill for each 
() per-week room.

ose cases say a lot about the trend of climate change. “is kind of work
didn’t exist a few years ago,” Wyatt says.

Meanwhile, Yuzva decided to move out of Olympic Park, in part because of

the heat. It’s a relief to be in a more temperate property outside of the city,
she says. “e last week, during those hot days, I felt my heart was going to
jump out. I just couldn’t wait to go out. I felt I couldn’t breathe.”

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