Cool Living
ed. Hot Dry
TECHNICAL
Why focus on this?
WHAT FOR?
This work is to convince people of the importance of passive upgrades to improve thermal comfort. This is a suite of tools to inform prioritised upgrades to community housing to improve thermal comfort in summer. See chapter x for project parts.
For best possible outcomes, in any venture, it is long known that if you involve the people who the outcome is for in the process, you get far better and long term results. It is expected the Community Edition will be used by the professionals to carry out tenant education and community consultation
With climate change, this will become more important because the weather will be hotter for more days a year. When people don’t have power on hot days, they can’t use the air-conditioner to stay cool and their health is at risk. Sub-par houses are a burden to its often already disadvantaged tenants and their hip pocket. When temperatures soar, people’s houses will cost them their lives, or people will have to walk away from their Country, family and identity.
WHY CARE?
IS THERE A NEED?
Working with Healthabitat and collecting both anecdotal and hard data from working in urban and remote Indigenous communities about how houses are performing both for Healthy Living Practises and temperature control, it is obvious there is a gap.
Often, money might become available for housing upgrades. When these upgrades happen it would be useful to have a 'ready-to-go' resource with a developed hierarchy, supporting documentation and research to have a targeted and rigorous approach to improve community houses for thermal performance.
Often community members may not have the knowledge about building science to know what to argue for and why and often don't autonomy to make changes to their homes.
This documentation aims to provide knowledge, examples of options and tools to help fill this gap.
Life in summer in a low functioning community house...
How a house fails to keep people cool in a two bedroom house, serving 2 families with 10 people.
The house is a concrete block house on a concrete slab. There is a fan inside in the ‘living room’ and a window air-conditioner in one of the bedrooms. The front door closes well, but there is an extension cord running outside for the family visiting. The windows don’t close or open very well, some have cracked glass and others a frozen closed or boarded over.
There is a verandah on the south side of the house, facing the street. To the north, east and west the summer sun hits the concrete slab outside and the concrete block walls all day long and heats them up. In the night time, the breeze is cool, but the house radiates heat inside all night long, the air-conditioned makes the inside a bit cooler, but not enough for everyone to sleep well inside.
It is cooler outside under the big tree in the yard. Against the fence the family have built a bough shade to create more shade from the sun so everyone can sit in the shade. The power cord runs a fan to help move air across the people to help keep them cool and the hose helps to water down the ground to grow grass and kids play in it to help keep cool.
Everyone prefers to sleep outside under the tree. Because the ground is in shade through the day, heat doesn’t radiate through the night. The fan is kept going in the night time to help the kids sleep so they can go to school every day and learn without being tired.
Question - How many people in your house were cool enough to sleep all night long?
The BIGGER interconnected picture...
Diagram: Take-2 Housing Design in Indigenous Australia, Geoff Barker article - ‘More than a House: Some Reflections on working with Indigenous Clients on the Housing Process’
The house and home is only one part of a bigger, intertwined relationship of elements that exist in a persons life.
This project is conscious of this web of complexities and tries not to oversimplify or silo the role of the house built fabric & living spaces. The focus here is to understand the parts of Indigenous community housing which need to be targeted to improve thermal comfort in hot periods.
Inevitably, cooling retrofits to housing have broader positive health impacts as explained using Healthabitat's work in the health tab and download.