To protect your home from floods and fires, you can lift it or create a protection zone around the house. However, how can you protect your home from excessive heat, an increasingly frequent climate threat that now affects areas with a historical temperate climate?

“Even here, it’s definitely one of the main problems”Says Chris Magwood, an Ontari -based Sustainable Construction Expert for RMI, a non -profit organization that promotes decline.

If you are building a new house, you can incorporate heat resistance into the structure, while existing houses can be renovated with temperature -lowering characteristics. Here are some of the most effective measures you can take to keep your home cool.

Cool the roofs and walls

Light colors are better for roofs and walls of houses. The material doesn’t matter – a “cool roof” (1) can be made of asphalt or metal boards or tiles – as long as it is light colored to reflect sunlight away from the house. According to the US Environmental Protection Service, such roofs can lower the temperature inside the house from 2.2 ° F to 5.9 ° F (1.2–3.3 ° C).

Cool walls (2) are painted in light color or covered with light lining. Some dyes contain ingredients that reflect non -visible infrared radiation, which allows homeowners to use darker or more intense colors.

“A wall that reflects solar radiation can make a significant contribution to preventing heat entry into the building”Says Audrey McGarrell, Communications Director of Cool Roof Rating Council, a non -profit organization in Portland, Oregon. “Cool roofs and cool exterior surfaces of buildings are really easy to achieve measures you can take to immediately improve the durability of your home.”

Insulate the walls

Magwood lives in a house of straw bundles he built himself. “At the moment it has 38 degrees Celsius, but I am very comfortable and cool,” he says from Ontario. Traditional straw houses (3) are manufactured with a coating of stacked straw parcels. However, today it is more common for the straw to be used as insulating material in prefabricated wall panels.

The thick straw and the plaster keep the heat away. “In fact, enough thermal energy is needed to warm the plaster to the point where heat begins to be transported through insulation and inside the building, and until then it is night.”says Magwood. On very hot days, the Magwood heat pump, which also cools the house, is put into operation, but not before the afternoon, as the house remains at a “comfortable” temperature for most of the day.

Throw a little shadow

New constructions must have large eaves (4) to protect windows that see south and west of the sun in the summer. Installation of double or triple glazing and reducing the size of the windows (5) seeing the afternoon sun will also help reduce temperatures.

Adding a simple awning over the windows exposed to the sun is also effective, according to Magwood. “The house where I grew up in New Hampshire was very bad and the windows were awful, but thanks to a awning we managed to keep the rooms much cooler”he says. The new windows are expensive, so adding a solar reflecting coating to existing ones can help reduce internal temperature.

While trees offering shade and other landscape elements (10) surrounding a home have a refreshing effect, in areas prone to fires, there may be restrictions on vegetation near a home.

Have a backup plan

Heat pumps (6) are high -performance electrical appliances that reduce demand in the electricity grid. However, in the case of extensive heat, power outages may occur. A domestic battery (7) connected to solar panels on the roof can maintain the supply of electricity to the heat pumps and air conditioners. If you do not have solar panels or a fixed energy storage system, portable lithium -ion batteries can supply fans and other devices.

Don’t forget the interior of your house

Placing curtains (8) or blinds on the sides of the house exposed to the sun can reduce the interior temperature. Ceiling fans (9) maintain air circulation and reduce the stress of air conditioners and heat pumps.