Londoners will find working from home increasingly difficult without AC | Today’s news

(Bloomberg) — For many Londoners trying to work from home a day or two a week, the latest heatwave is turning into a major headache.

On Monday, Britain had its first ever tropical night of the season, defined as a temperature above 20°C (68°F). On Tuesday, the daytime temperature soared above 35°C, a record for the season. Both extremes were registered in the country’s capital.

Gary Woodward, chief executive of North London-based air conditioning installer Airconco, says his company is now booked until the end of the summer.

“Even if people only work two or three days a week from home, they’re still sitting in a converted bedroom, a spare room,” Woodward said. All it takes is “two or three days of extremely hot weather where people start to feel uncomfortable and unable to work, unable to sleep” for demand to increase, he said.

With the UK experiencing a faster rate of warming than the global average, access to efficient cooling systems is increasingly becoming a necessity. For now, however, air conditioning remains a luxury enjoyed by a minority of Britons. Although the use of air conditioning units has doubled in the last three years, they are still only installed in 7% of UK homes. Another 8% have portable units that are cheaper to buy but less efficient and more expensive to run.

“Much of the country was designed for a climate that no longer exists,” says Andy Love, founder and chief executive of Shade the UK, a community interest company that works with government and authorities to manage the risk of buildings overheating. “We have spent decades prioritizing warmth, airtightness and winter performance, often without fully considering how buildings would behave during prolonged hot weather.”

The failure of British buildings to protect people from extreme heat now represents an “architectural crisis”, he says.

Vanessa Chan, who moved to London from Hong Kong three years ago, was amazed by the extreme heat she experienced in the UK capital.

When it gets too hot in her apartment, Chan says she “does more work in the office than staying at home because our policy is that we can stay at home for about two days, but I’ll try to go back to the office and enjoy the air conditioning.”

The 34-year-old, who lives with her husband in a modern block of flats in south-east London, says her rent does not allow for proper air conditioning. And even if she were allowed to install an AC unit, she says she could afford it.

Chan’s is a familiar story as Britain’s heatwaves become hotter and more frequent. April Richardson, a writer who grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, says her duplex apartment in an older building in Brighton, a coastal town south of London, is like living “inside a brick pizza oven”.

Richardson, 47, says she tried to keep cool with a regular fan and resorted to sleeping on the floor in her downstairs living room, which is slightly cooler than the bedroom.

“It’s hard to do anything,” she said. “It just feels like you’re walking through soup. And in the current heatwave, Richardson says the last thing he wants is to be near a hot laptop battery.

“No one is trying to,” she said. “I mean, it’s annoying. It’s hard to focus.”

Although the offices are mostly air-conditioned, the journey there can still be hot. More than half of the trains that make up London’s famous underground network – known as the Underground – are not air-conditioned.

London local government has long opposed the introduction of air conditioning, citing the higher energy consumption such units bring and their impact on carbon emissions. It also warns that the widespread use of AC units will worsen urban heat islands, as hot air drawn from buildings reaches city streets.

And in some of London’s most expensive boroughs, residents looking to install air conditioning also face barriers. For example, in Kensington & Chelsea – where the average house costs about £1.3 million ($1.7 million) – air conditioning units usually require special permission and are sometimes effectively banned due to concerns that they would clash with the historic facades common to the area.

But as Londoners like Chan struggle to cope with rising temperatures, those running the city are now under increasing pressure to rethink. This month the Climate Change Committee (CCC) – the body that advises the UK government – said it was no longer acceptable to reject air conditioning as a key tool to help Britons cope with the increasingly dangerous levels of heat they face.

“Air conditioning will be essential, especially in places where we have vulnerable people such as hospitals and care homes,” said Julia King, CCC adaptation chair.

On Thursday, the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee said it was calling a meeting on June 3 to discuss how the country “should adapt to a rapidly warming climate after the UK recorded its highest May temperature this week”. The meeting will discuss the findings recently published by the Committee on Climate Change, he said.

Meanwhile, early-season heatwaves like the one now gripping Britain and other parts of Europe are particularly dangerous because people haven’t had time to acclimatise, says Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, a lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London. The institute says England and Wales could see another 250 deaths as a result of the current heat wave.

Love of Shade the UK says there should be more focus on making sure UK buildings are built to not trap heat. That way, people stay cool even if there’s a power outage that renders AC units useless, he says.

London planning policy requires developers and home owners to demonstrate that they have tried passive cooling measures such as shading. Only then can they add air conditioning.

But the CCC says solutions such as shading may no longer be enough in warmer Britain, particularly London. It now advises that air conditioning should be part of a “more active cooling plan.” This means investing in air conditioning in public buildings, implementing maximum temperature controls in workplaces, and subsidizing air conditioning for people who can’t afford it.

Last year, the UK government announced £2,500 in subsidies for air-to-air heat pumps, a type of home heating that can also provide cooling. However, these resources are not yet available because the certification standards for installers and equipment are not ready.

The Mayor of London’s office has launched a consultation to update the city’s development strategy, including cooling solutions. At the same time, recent proposals by the national government to standardize planning rules across the country are being resisted, fearing that such a measure would remove London’s ability to set stricter environmental requirements in the capital.

A spokesman for the Mayor of London said the current policy “does not rule out air conditioning, encouraging new developers to consider passive measures in new homes in the first instance, such as external screening and glazing, to minimize the need for householders to use air conditioning, helping to reduce their energy costs”.

–With assistance from Eamon Akil Farhat and Joe Wertz.

(Updated with the announcement of the Environmental Audit Committee in paragraph 20.)

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