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As the UK prepares for the third heatwave of 2026, most people will be hoping to try and keep cool at home.
to protect homes from were introduced in 2022. These require all new homes to be at the design stage to see if they might be at risk of overheating. If the overheating risk is high, the architect has to make changes to the design.
Given that the UK government plans to build and the climate is predicted to continue to , reducing overheating in new homes is essential. Around bedrooms (19% of the stock) and 3.6 million living rooms (15%) in homes in England were found to have overheated during the summer of 2018.
At 色狗导航 we have been experimenting with a pair of semi-detached houses, each fitted with different shading devices, to see what might work to reduce overheating. A lot more needs to be done to make sure UK homes are able to cope with the high temperatures they are likely to experience more often in the future.
External shading
If you live in the UK, count the number of window shades you can see on a street. While these were , for instance, most new homes don’t have external shading. But they are one of the passive cooling measures (methods to lower indoor temperatures without air conditioning), as well as being relatively cheap to install.
Ongoing experiments in our pair of test houses have shown that external shading can reduce indoor temperatures by over 6°C, which can make a meaningful improvement to people’s health and wellbeing at home. is looking at how acceptable and affordable shading devices, like awnings, are to householders.
If included at design-stage, some form of external window shading could be applied to almost any new home – even high-rise flats, which are at . Tall blocks of flats in countries like France and Italy often incorporate shading on balconies.
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