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Beyond Cooling
As overheating becomes a housing issue, landlords must rethink how homes perform across every season
This summer England and Wales experienced the driest July since records began almost two centuries ago. As a nation, we have spent the past few months improvising. From taping tin foil and cardboard over windows to sleeping on kitchen floors and in gardens, close to nine million people took drastic action of some kind to get through this summer. None of this is a solution, it is what people resort to when the buildings around them cannot do the job.
The instinct now will be to bolt cooling onto homes that were never designed to shed heat. Derek Horrocks, owner and chair at Sustainable Building Services( UK) Ltd and chairperson of the National Home Decarbonisation Group( NHDG), explains why this is not just a weather story but a housing story, and it needs to be treated as such.
The market has already moved
Rightmove recently reported that buyer searches for homes with air conditioning rose by 104 per cent between May and July this year, compared with the same period last year. This is becoming more of a priority to homebuyers, as almost nine in ten also said that a home’ s ability to stay cool matters
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