To ask how are people not dying in new builds with the heat?

[icantbreathehelp]

Our new build is a fu..ing joke!! We are actually going to have to sell our house before next year or live downstairs because it is so hot upstairs at night that a newborn baby would over heat and end up in hospital without a doubt!

How the hell are people coping with the heat in new builds? We live in a redrow house, we have to shut all the blackout blinds at the back and open all the windows at the front and even with 2 metal fans on its still like sitting in a sauna! I don't want to go to sleep because I am scared DC is going to over heat.

I cant cope 🥵🥵🥵

400 yr old house, thick walls and very cool indoors in the heat.

Well will depends if Timber frame or masonry for s start but NHBC etc specify insulation and it is a lot to do with building regulations and sustainability, environment factors.

England is on the whole a cooler country so makes sense to be more insulated for cooler weather or everyone would be moaning about heating bills in the winter!

It’s a lot cheaper and environmentally better to have a fan (which are cheap) for the few weeks actually gets hot, than to have heating on full for months.

Buy a fan!

Dyson Purifier ? Makes the air really cool, but would work well in one room, so perhaps the living space? Expensive but worst the investment

Our house is old too hot in summer and too cold in winter. I had thought new builds would benefit from modern materials and not be as annoying as our house

Buy a 24000 btu, split wall air conditioner/heater for about £700.00 -£800.00 which will keep a small house cold. Fitting is easy for a good DIY fanatic or if done professionally it may add about another £500.00 the cost.
My 6kw unit leaves my house at a pleasant 18 degrees and in winter it heats the house. Small ones around the house are better than radiators.

If you are going to use an air con unit, it makes sense to use it as efficiently as possible.

The first year we lived in South Germany we had a tiny flat up in the eaves, it was roasting in there. After a couple of days of everyone having at least 3-4 cold baths/showers a day, hiding in the basement for hours "doing laundry", ice bowls in front of fans which melted in minutes, everyone wearing just pants and all of us still snapping at each other regularly, DH disappeared one day and came back with an air con unit. Which he carried, somehow, up the three flights of stairs on his own.

Still, we didn't quite get it right at first. We tried minimising the amount we ran it by only turning it on when the heat was unbearable, but what we found was that in that particular environment there was just far too much heat coming in and it couldn't cope. It didn't help at all - gave out a lovely cool stream of air but did nothing for the overall room temp! If you put your hands on the ceiling, it was like touching a warm radiator - there was that much heat coming through. It was weird. So we found that for it to be the most effective we had to start the air con fairly early in the morning to prevent the house from heating up to that degree in the first place. That way we could get it to stay under 27ish. And once the heat stopped coming in quite so aggressively (which for us unfortunately was about 7/8pm) we could turn it off and it wouldn't get any hotter. But we were stuck with a crap situation really - three people in a mainly open plan, single room which was all exposed to that hot roof. The bedrooms weren't much better TBH.

Thank your stars you dpnt jabe a frickin Aga!!!

My house is 150 years old with 3 foot thick walls. Lovely and cool in summer but a bugger to keep warm in winter. Looks like none of us have the ideal house!

Well, this thread has made me delighted with my 1930's semi, which is cool in summer and warm in winter. They knew how to build em then!

I have the ideal house now :o Massively solid German 60s tower block. Made of concrete, walls are about a foot thick. It's warm in winter, cool (OK, comfortable) in summer. OK the heating is shitty and expensive but we got plug in ones, and it's impossible to drill into any of the walls or ceilings so half the light fittings are hanging by a thread, but we're grand

OP till you get an aircon, sleep with wet towel around your legs or if you can bear it, use it as your blanket. You will cool off and be dry in the morning.

jamon
You are lucky.
My last 1930's house was certainly cool in summer, but was only warm in winter if I put the heat in.
I recall my central heating broke down in January one year and took 3 days to get the Brit Gas to come out due to high demand - thought we'd freeze to death - 3 hastily bought fan heaters didn't cut it! House suddenly felt damp and walls were cold to the touch. Took days to get it back to comfort level after the repair. To be honest it's what made us move to a quality new build this time.

Houses have to be well insulated now and a consequence of this is that they don’t lose heat easily - great in the winter when you want to keep cosy but hell in a heatwave! What took me a long time to figure out is that when it is hot you need to keep the windows shut, not follow your instincts and fling them open! Keep the curtains closed, ideally black out or thermal. When the temperature outside drops lower than inside (this could be quite late in the evening) then open all windows and curtains to max. Plants can help too - something like a Virginia creeper that covers the whole wall of the house, especially a south facing wall , will keep the inside a degree or two cooler. Also think about planting trees / shrubs outside to help shade the house. In the case of young babies you can drape a wet sheet over the top of their cot to help create a cooler micro climate. But, as a doctor pointed out to my worried friend, babies in hot countries don’t all die if the temperature tops 25C so there’s really no reason to believe ours will either.

We moved into a 3 story new build earlier this year and find it much cooler than our old house.

With the windows/doors open we get a fantastic through breeze that makes the whole place feel cool. The only room a bit warmer is our bedroom - on the top floor - but even there we have only needed one fan on at night to be comfortable instead of the three we needed in our old house just to get the temp somewhere near to an environment we could actually sleep in.

Guess it depends on the construction of the building as it’s definitely not a given that ever new build will be too hot/insulated

I'm using freezer blocks as cold water bottles.

I wish I were an engineer - it must be possible to use the heat to generate electricity and heat the water.

I've opened my loft hatch to let the heat out through the loft. So far it has made a massive difference, the heat isn't 'sitting' upstairs anymore.

Which way the house faces makes a big difference.
In the summer when the sun doesn't go down until late, if your house faces that late sun you will probably have a hot house at bedtime, or at least a hot house on that side of the building.
If the house faces south, which you might expect to be hot, the sun is high in the sky during the summer, so overhead at mid day, and shines down on the roof rather than into the rooms and onto the walls.
As the sun drops towards evening the house walls it hits will get hot.
In the morning the sun will shine in in the same way but the air and the house is still cool from the night.
So it isn't necessarily the type of building that makes the difference, it can be position too. Also shade from trees or other buildings will make a difference. Whether surrounded by tarmac or grass too.

I’m in a new build, no advice, I’m cold showering twice a day just so people don’t think my personal hygiene is appalling, it’s sweat city in here

I don't understand this. Loads of insulation should mean warmer on winter AND cooler in summer. It should insulate the interior from the surrounding weather, whatever that weather is. We increased our loft insulation last year after a couple of hot summers and the temperature in the bedrooms in summer has dropped considerably. The temp in the loft itself can get very high where the sun warms the roof but the insulation blocks it warming the lower floors of the house.

The only way I can imagine this not working is in those new builds with loft bedrooms where there is basically no loft space and the insulation is in walls not roof or something. I suspect a lot of newbuilds claim to be well insulated but aren't.

IME the real killers for houses & heat is big windows (those huge trendy bifold doors, big julienne balcony doors in bedrooms) and big velux windows.

Shutters on the outside of windows work better than curtains on inside where glass has already let heat through.

Has anyone tried the heat reflecting films thar are applied to the exterior of windows? I like the concept....

I tried the doors and windows shut, curtains shut method, but it didn't make a massive difference (maybe 2°) compared with doors and windows open, fans on.
Ours is a late 80s house with solid internal walls though, not a new build.
I agree with the person who said the position of the house makes a difference.

Ours is the same OP - on the plus side we only need heating on about 2 hours a day November til March, so it makes up for it in winter.
I had newborn DS in the 2016 heatwave and I was so worried he would overheat when the gro-egg in his room was saying 29.5 degrees at night, I ended up moving a mattress into the living room and sleeping down there with him with the patio doors wide open, although I still couldn't sleep because I was worried a cat or squirrel or fox might come in and attack us. I was so glad when the weather got cooler.

Our house is a new build and it's like an oven. Our house get sun from all angles all day so it just gets hotter and hotter.

It can get up to 30c upstairs and nothing helps. We keep the blinds closed, windows closed, Dyson fans in all rooms, loft hatch open (supposedly meant to help). We also open all the windows wide when it gets dark to try and get a breeze though but as soon as the windows are closed, it gets hot again.

We have now purchased a portable air con unit!

We have a new build masionette and it's soooo lovely and cool in the summer yet so warm in the winter

Our 1930’s ex council house has been ok. We have air conditioning fitted in the large conservatory which cools all of downstairs if internal doors are open. It has a heat pump too so it’s not a complete waste of money for the rest of the year.

In the evenings keeping all windows open and propping internal doors open creates a lovely breeze through the house. I close the window and 2x black out blinds in my bedroom and put a fan on to be able to sleep between night shifts in this heat. I have a lukewarm shower then lie on the bed with a giant muslin over me .

ladymargaret you have to leave all the doors and at least some upstairs windows open all night, curtains open and blinds open, until dawn to really get the benefit. Dh gets up and closes curtains and blinds and doors against the sun at dawn in bedrooms, but leaves windows open and ventilating and unobstructed on side without sun (ie in our house west) until 9am.

It is a bit like airconditioning a car, you have to get the hot air out before you can really get the system working properly and efficiently.

We've experimented with other arrangments, keeping downstairs on upstairs on separate convection systems, no air conditioning you understand, just air flow from windows in and out. this was by shutting door to our loft bedroom so that the hot air from downstairs didn't excacerbate heat in the loft but flowed out first floor windows instead at night.