How to keep your home cool (without reaching for the air con)

Another heatwave, another week of closed curtains and warm bedrooms. If you're currently living with a house that turns into a greenhouse every time the sun comes out, you're not alone, and you're not stuck with it either. Some of this is about what you do today. Some of it is about what you plan for next year. Here's both.

Design it out, if you're at that stage

If you're renovating, extending, or specifying new windows and doors, this is where to put your attention first.

External shading beats internal shading, every time. Shutters, louvres, brise-soleil, anything that sits outside the glass, stops heat before it ever reaches the room. Internal blinds are managing heat that's already inside your home. Whether external shading is possible for you depends on your location, any planning constraints, and cost, but it's a conversation worth having with your architect or designer at an early stage, not an afterthought once the windows are already in.

If you're replacing windows or doors anyway, ask about solar control or low-e glass specified into the unit itself. It performs better than anything applied afterwards. If you're not replacing glazing, a solar control film can be applied directly to your existing windows as a retrofit, a much smaller job, and a sensible middle step.

Insulation works both ways. It's easy to think of it as a winter job, but a well-insulated home stays cooler in summer as well as warmer in winter.

Flooring matters more than people expect. Stone, tile, or a concrete floor in your main living spaces will hold a cooler temperature underfoot than carpet, and it's worth factoring into any decision about where wood flooring makes sense and where it doesn't.

Air source heat pumps can heat and cool, but check which kind. Reversible heat pumps are capable of both, and air-to-air systems cool most effectively, working in a similar way to a split air conditioning unit. Air-to-water systems, the kind most UK homes have, usually need to be a specifically reversible model, and radiators can't deliver cooling at all. That means fan coil units or underfloor pipework instead. If you're already reinsulating or replacing a heating system, this is the moment to ask the question, because it's far simpler to design in from the start than to retrofit once everything else is finished.

Think about which rooms run hot. Orientation and use matter. Bedrooms in particular tend to overheat, so it's worth planning which rooms serve which purpose with that in mind, and keeping curtains or blinds closed in the rooms that need it most during the day.

Manage it day to day

However well a home is designed, the daily rhythm still matters.

Close blinds and curtains during the day, before the heat builds, and open them again once it's cooled. Reflective internal blinds are the better choice here over anything that absorbs heat. They bounce it back rather than holding onto it.

Open windows for cross-ventilation once the temperature drops, rather than leaving them shut all day out of habit. A house that's been sealed up since morning needs that airflow overnight to actually cool down.

Add planting where you can. Trees and pergolas that shade a room in summer and let light through once the leaves drop in winter do a surprising amount of quiet, unglamorous work.

Getting through the heat wave today

And if none of the above is where you are right now, here's what actually helps in the meantime:

• Freezer socks, or a hot water bottle filled with cold water, to cool your feet at night

• A block of ice in front of a fan for an instant, if short-lived, cool breeze

• Timing your window opening around the temperature outside rather than the clock
  

Most of this comes down to one idea: cooling a home well is mostly about decisions made early, not equipment bought in a panic. If you're planning a renovation and want the summer heat considered from the start rather than patched over afterwards, it's a conversation worth having before the design is finished, not after.

No Ordinary House is BIID registered and SBID accredited. If you're planning a renovation we'd love to have that conversation book a discovery call now