The Challenges of Retrofitting Cooling to Homes
Recent media reports have highlighted how residents are required to use mechanical cooling to be comfortable. To date, most are achieving this with portable, heavy and noisy AC units ducted through windows.
Overheating mitigation for new homes must, and should, maximise passive measures. This leaves two further questions:
- Whether occupants can reasonably enjoy their homes without mechanical cooling?
- What should be done for existing homes which did not prioritise passive measures and which may have had no suitable overheating assessment conducted?
As temperatures continue to increase there could be a customer shift for cooling as a minimum service, potentially further increased by the prevalence of home working space following the pandemic. This is somewhat compounded through compliance checks today which use weather data that no longer reflects, recent temperatures, or future conditions as intended.
Most occupied homes would have been built without considering overheating while many being built today were designed when cooling was seen as a premium feature and market expectations were different. As views on cooling change, it may be necessary to assess whether some form of cooling could be added later where it is not already provided.