Page 879 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 March 2019
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to make the bedroom cool enough to sleep in. However, many of the cases I have heard about this summer are far worse than the situation I was in a few years ago.
The first example for this year that I heard about was of a man living in a brand-new public housing apartment. At 1 am it was 33 degrees inside his apartment, despite it being down to a quite pleasant 24 degrees outside. His apartment was less than one year old. In another case, I have seen photos from the apartment of an elderly owner-occupier in a five-year-old apartment where it got so hot that the wall cracked in the heat and the front door to her apartment would not open. She needed her son to let her out. It was not a cheap little door; it was a fire-resistant door in a fire-resistant wall.
Another owner-occupier couple told me:
We bought a high end apartment off the plan three years ago. We do have ducted air-conditioning throughout our apartment, but it struggled to cope despite being run 24/7 through the worst of the heat-wave.
They said:
The heat problem was so severe that we even started actively looking to move (despite loving most other aspects of our apartment).
They also said:
At least two large windows in our building have spontaneously shattered due, presumably, to the heat.
This is from another older couple who own their apartment:
In our 100.6m2, we have two air-conditioners … During the hot summer months, we set the temperature at 20 degrees, maximum fan force, with the oscillators directed towards our master bedroom, we could not reduce the temperature in our bedroom to below 31 degrees.
This is from a renter on social media:
I’m in a big apartment block … west facing, no protection. It gets SOOOOOO hot inside … much hotter than outside (so often above 40). Plus my whole building holds onto the heat and takes about a week of cool weather to cool down.
Further on in the message she said:
I have to sleep on the couch for the whole of summer (there is aircon in the lounge room). It’s so uncomfortable and miserable. I just want to go to bed!
All of these apartments are new or near new. They were all, at worst, built in the last 10 years. Actually, all of them might be in the last five years. The point is that we are building brand-new apartments that are unlivable in hot weather without air conditioning, and in some cases even with it. This is not just a livability issue; it is
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