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Sustainability expert on solar panels, heat pumps and home batteries to make your home more comfortable
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With another heatwave on the way amid a summer of record-breaking temperatures, it’s likely you’ve considered investing in a longer-term cooling solution as opposed to a quick fix.
According to Simon Bones, a leading sustainability expert and founder of Genous, a company helping homeowners retrofit their homes for a greener future, there’s been renewed interest in the matter, particularly this summer.
“Dramatically so… either for air conditioning on its own (which we actually don’t do), or in combination with other kinds of renewables, where people are thinking about things like heat pumps.
“They’re increasingly asking, ‘can it cool too?’. So I would say it’s been dramatically different from what we would be getting any other time of year.”
In answer to the question, Bones says some heat pumps can cool, if configured correctly. “It can get quite complicated, but you’ve got various options.”
When it comes to electricity-consuming items such as fans or air-conditioning, Bones says these can be effective, but use a lot of power.
As an alternative, he suggests installing an air-to-water heat pump with underfloor heating which provides mild cooling by flowing cooler water through the heating circuits.
Moreover, he says any cooling takes a lot of energy, so integrating with solar panels is smart. “Generating electricity from solar panels, storing it and then reusing it from home batteries to heat your home from a heat pump.”
“And because you can buy it, store it, use it at a different time and generate it yourself, it means you’ve got more control over it. And it’s much lower carbon because heat pumps in particular, are four times plus more efficient than even the best gas or oil boiler.
“And solar panels as well,” he adds. “They don’t consume anything apart from sunlight, so they’re fully green once they’re in.”
Bones also suggests thinking about cooling as part of a holistic renewable strategy. “It’s really about the financial,” he highlights. “Running air conditioning, they’re powerful units and reasonably expensive.
“And if you’re thinking about using solar panels, they generate power more when it’s hot and sunny, and therefore you’re aligning your production with your demand.”
He says they also deflect some of the heat from the roof as a side-benefit, “but on a day like today, the sun is shining and people have air conditioning”.
This means they can help power those active cooling technologies, and reduce the cost of the electricity they need to buy.
Other practical tips for staying cool include insulating lofts, and reducing solar gain from windows.
Bones says to make sure your loft is well insulated (if you have one), to reduce heat coming in. “If you’ve got poor insulation, most people think that’s about heat oil escaping in the winter.
“But the opposite is true. So the loft space will typically, in a normal house, be really hot in the summer. And if you’ve got poor insulation between the loft and your ceiling, that heat comes down through the ceiling as well.”
He also suggests reducing solar gain from windows. Think triple-glazed windows or those with coatings, though Bones says even normal double-glazing lets in less heat and sunshine energy – helping to keep heat in during the winter.
“If you’ve got windows that face into the sun, the more layers of glazing you have, the less that sunlight comes in. So single glazed windows, you’ll get a lot of heat transfer through from what we call solar gain from the sunshine; triple glazing less so.
“Triple glazing is also a better insulator for different reasons in the winter,” highlights Bones. “So performance glazing generally keeps your house a little cooler in the summer, and warmer in the winter.
“Probably not something most people do purely for that reason,” he underlines. “Financially, glazing is expensive, whereas loft insulation, which we’ve just talked about, is much cheaper.”
And while it feels like the longest heatwave on record, there are still some weeks to go…
“It certainly feels quite long, but I’m sure we’ll all be complaining about the cold weather in a couple of months’ time,” quips Bones.
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