Cool Homes in a Heatwave

Mon 5 Jun 2023, 7:00pm – 8:30pm

How to prepare your home to stay cool in heatwaves

With 40°C last summer and more climate change coming, we must expect more frequent and severe heatwaves, that will be very serious for some people.

This free online talk and discussion, was to help you get ready and stay comfortable in heatwaves, with lots of practical details.
See:
Video of the Zoom Talk, with sections marked in the timeline
Slides from the talk as a PDF, with working links
Keeping Cool in a Heatwave, a detailed 3-page resource, with lots more links

• improve the shading of your home
• control the ventilation to keep it cooler
• avoid numerous ways of accidentally heating it
• Keep yourself cool … and more.
  –  many of the improvements suggested are low/no cost

Tom Bragg, an experienced expert on this subject, and
Margaret Reynolds, green architect, are the presenters.
They’ve both been Open Eco Homes hosts, when they showed their own ways of avoiding overheating.

This 42 sec video shows how to make awnings which can be deployed from upstairs windows.

“A very high proportion of existing homes already overheat in a normal summer, never mind ones like the summer of 2020 which caused around 2,300 deaths in England. There’s now a real prospect we’ll have more and more of these events, but we are not doing anything like enough to tackle the threat.”  Julia King,  UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC).