Keep your home cool

During South Africa’s hot summer months keeping your home cool becomes more of a necessity than a luxury.

Knowing what causes heat to build up in your home, and what you can do about it, means you will be able to keep your cool while others lose theirs.

Sources of unwanted heat

The major sources of unwanted heat in your home are:

conducted heat via walls and ceilings,
heat created by lights and appliances, and
sunlight shining through the windows.

Insulation

The best action you can take to ensure that your home stays cool is to increase your home’s insulation – aside from making sure that all your doors and windows are properly sealed, insulating your ceiling can make a big difference. Cellulose fibre ceiling insulation is a very effective, eco-friendly insulation made locally from recycled paper.

Windows

Windows are responsible for approximately 40% of the unwanted heat in your home. Reflective window coatings reflect heat away from your home, cut glare, and reduce fading of furniture, curtains, and carpets. Double-glazed windows with low solar heat gain coefficients are an effective way of controlling heat transfer, with the added bonus of reducing sound transmission. Shade the east- and west-facing windows of your home with tall trees, awnings, vertical blinds or shutters.

Appliances

Household appliances like refrigerators, stoves, washing machines and dishwashers all generate heat. Replacing your older appliances with newer, energy-efficient models will make a noticeable difference in your home’s temperature, and will also reduce your monthly electricity usage.

Change your lighting, as standard incandescent light bulbs emit as much as 90% of their energy as heat, while compact florescent lights produce very little heat.

Roof

Lighter colours generally reflect more heat away from your home. There are also roof tiles and other products on the market that have been designed to conduct less heat than their standard counterparts.

Whole-house fans

A whole-house fan is mounted in a ceiling on the top floor of a house. The fan exhausts warm air from the house into the roof space, and draws cool air into the house from a bottom-floor window, preferably situated on the south side.

Ceiling fans

If your home is sufficiently protected from outside heat, ceiling fans can be very effective. A fan equipped with an anti-clockwise motion and variable speed settings will create a cooling breeze.

Turbine ventilators

Turbine ventilators are mounted to the roof and extract hot, stale indoor air from your home, allowing cool, fresh air to enter from outside. Turbine ventilators keep indoor environments cooler and healthier, use no electricity and operate using the wind and natural convection.

Evaporative cooling

Evaporative cooling is a cost-effective system that allows dry outside air to be drawn through a unit on the roof and to flow through your home and out through open doors and windows. Evaporative coolers filter hot air outside through pads installed in a unit that is kept wet via a built-in water pump. The evaporated water is then forced into ducts and grills running inside the roof space to each room in the house. The fresh, cool air forced into the room pushes out hot air via open windows or doors.

Air conditioning

Air conditioning is still the most effective and reliable way to ensure a comfortable temperature in your home. Newer units, featuring heat pumps or digital inverter technology that adjusts the speed of the unit’s motor according to the energy needed to control the room temperature, are much eco-friendlier and energy-efficient than their conventional counterparts.

The information contained in this article is of a general nature and intended for information purposes only.