How to beat the summer heat
Damien McGill from the Healthy Home Cooperation looks at ways to prevent our homes from getting too hot this summer.
Your kids are complaining that their bedrooms are too hot. These are the very same bedrooms that barely reach double figures in winter! Stats NZ data from 2018 showed just over a third of our homes regularly went over 25 degrees Celsius over summer.
What’s going on?
You are probably living in a house without eaves, where the bedrooms face north or west with a big window in the middle of each room. The summer sun has been streaming in all day, and when you arrived home you opened the windows to make it feel a little less stuffy.
Unfortunately, it’s just as hot outside and opening the windows has only made the blinds blow around, letting the blowflies in. Sound familiar? It does to me. My first-floor bedrooms are north facing, super warm in winter but horrendously hot in high summer.
So, what can be done?
For a new house, overheating should be considered during the design process. Unfortunately, it’s generally forgotten about, much like healthy heating in winter. Your house should always be between 18 and 24 degrees for optimum comfort, no matter what the weather is outside. Yes, always!
The Healthy Home Design Guide hints that a designer should consider correctly sized eaves and other shading devices. Note that eaves by themselves won’t stop late afternoon sun on western elevations. Consider some summer shading. This could include deciduous trees, awnings, shutters, blinds, pergolas, other buildings and screens. In Europe, external shutters are commonly used.
For renovations, you are forced to work with what you have. There’s no real point in closing thermal curtains or blinds; the sun’s heat has already penetrated the room by the time it starts heating the aluminium blinds!
While upgrading your windows with low-e (low emissivity) glass will help, the trade-off is this can restrict the free warming winter sun, when you need it. The most effective solution for summer comfort is external, moveable shading. This is where blinds or shutters come into their own. Up in winter, down in summer.
What am I looking to do? Upstairs, I’ve ordered PVC Low-E argon-filled triple glazing units and then I am looking to add external automatic roller shutters from Germany down the track. Downstairs, I plan to add a pergola that will block the summer sun but let the winter sun through. I might also do some thermal modelling to see whether there are other workable options too.
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