Well, it took some time but I’ve finally got the puffer jacket out. The Antarctic winds have hit, dropping the morning temperature in my house down to “uggboots essential in the morning” degrees. Whilst it might be a struggle to get out of the doona in the mornings, I do love this time of year. It brings people together around a fire, around a winter stew and a glass of mulled wine or a chocolatey stout. Never mind that beach bod, embrace the winter coat, I say!
And whilst there’s plenty of ways we can keep warm with our clothing, it’s not so easy to dress up our homes. If you’ve ever lived in a cold climate country like Canada or Denmark, you’d know that the only time you put your jacket on is to go outside. Not so much in Australia. I’m currently wearing my ugg boots, a jumper and a puffy jacket as I write this article at a poorly insulated holiday house. In general, Australian homes don’t winter well. That’s why we had to invent the oodie and the ugg boot! It costs seven times more to heat a 2-star versus a 10-star rated house in Sydney. The average home in Australia sits at just 1.8 stars.
The general feeling of the past has been to just bear and grin it through our relatively short winter. I recall in my uni days, putting up curtains over the living room doorways and just heating that one space to save on our power bill. And that was when electricity cost a lot less. This is just one example of how we’ve learned to adapt to our poor standard of housing. There are many out there at the moment struggling to keep warm due to the inflation dragon remaining unslayed. A combination of poorly designed buildings and higher energy costs are forcing some people to take drastic measures.
So outside of rugging ourselves up in the latest Aldi snow sports range and duct taping uggies to the feet, what kind of things can we do to our homes to help insulate ourselves from the winter chills?
If you don’t own the home you’re in, then outside of lobbying the landlord for some much needed upgrades, or hoping for some governmental assistance, there are a limited number of things you can do. Certainly, heating only one room of the house and closing it off with curtains is one way to reduce your energy consumption.
Another one is to close up any draughts you can find in and around doors and windows. Again, this should really be one of those things the landlord does on a regular basis. There’s a range of fairly inexpensive foam or rubber draught stopper strips that can be installed into these gaps. To find the gaps, light an incense stick and pass it along the edges of the doors and windows to see where your precious heat is leaking out.
Once the leaks have been blocked, it’s all about tackling the weak spots and for the most part, that’s the windows. Some form of insulating window treatments like curtains or insulated blinds should help here. Curtains need to be heavy and cover the entire window and a bit beyond on all sides. Blinds should be tight to the window reveal and ideally be insulated like honeycomb style blinds.
Finally comes the floor. If there’s no carpet, then find some large rugs to put down in the most used spaces. Timber floors can also suffer from leaks, so a leak test around any cracks might reveal draughts between boards. If you can access the subfloor, take a flashlight down and shine it up with a friend above to mark out spots they can see the light.
Unfortunately, it's much more difficult to improve a house if you don’t own it. You’re limited to what you can do within the space. If you do own a home (and that includes you landlords!), then it’s time to insulate. Whether it's for the comfort of yourself, your tenants or your desire to reduce our collective reliance on fossil fuels, there’s really no reason not to improve the thermal performance of your house.
In general, it’s most effective top to bottom, so ceilings first. Thick and fluffy as possible with full coverage across all the ceiling – don’t skimp and miss the bathrooms. Do all of it – don’t let Jack Frost have even the smallest of gaps to get in!
Walls are a bit harder if you’re not in a position to remove the internal or external lining but there are pump-in options available that only require a 20cm hole cut through the internal lining to pump the insulation in. Again, sealing draughts around all openings is essential.
Floors can be an easy one if you have subfloor access. There are many insulation options to put on the underside of floors, whether they be timber or concrete. If you don’t have subfloor access, then as much as possible you want to insulate the edges or close off any low clearance subfloor areas (make sure there is some ventilation – you just don’t want the roaring forties getting under there). If your floor is slab on ground this may require a bit of digging down so that there’s proper full coverage along the perimeter of the house.
Of course, there are many other things one can do to improve the thermal performance of their home. Most of the above are bandaid measures at best and will likely still have people struggling through winter.
To really tackle the poor housing component of our energy poverty crisis, we need to start back at the beginning. This should be at the initial design phase and site placement (houses should address winter solar access not the street!). Poor building standards in the past have meant we’ll be bare and grinning it for sometime in the future. That is unless someone invents an oodie and uggboots for a house – any entrepreneurs out there?
