Homes Designed to Keep Heat In Are Now Struggling to Cool Down
In many parts of the world, ‘too hot’ was never a concern before now.
When it was completed in 2012 for the Summer Olympics, Lydia Yuzva’s housing complex in East London was hailed as a beacon of green design and energy efficiency. The 2,800 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. They 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 10 of the U.K.’s hottest years since record keeping began in 1882 have occurred in the last 18 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.”