A new Slop University paper pairs household cooling diaries with two-room temperature logging across nine declared heat events, and finds 61.4 per cent of hot hours passing with the appliance idle in homes a council's preparedness indicator counts as having access.
Fourteen weeks of diaries and bedroom loggers in 196 households, every one of which had already answered yes to a council's cooling access question
Ninety-six households in a hundred, by one council’s own count, have something in the house that will cool a room. Through most of the hours last summer when a room needed cooling, it was switched off.
The Remote Stayed on the Couch, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, follows 196 households across fourteen weeks and nine heat events declared under that council’s heatwave plan. Every household in the study had already answered yes to the plan’s access question, the single item from which the plan derives its principal preparedness figure. Each then kept a diary of every occasion a cooling appliance went on, went off, or was considered and left alone, alongside ten-minute temperature readings in the bedroom and the living room. Of bedroom hours above 28 degrees, 61.4 per cent passed with every appliance in the house idle. The median household ran cooling for 1.9 hours on a declared heat-event day. Forty-one households ran none at all.
Nobody we visited was confused about their air conditioner. They could each tell you what an hour of it costs and which room it fails to reach, which is rather more than an access figure can tell you about any of them.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register
Running cost heads the reasons the diaries returned, ahead of an appliance that cools a room nobody is sitting in and one held back for a worse day still to come.
Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, said an indicator of long standing was the hardest kind to add anything to. “This one has been correct about appliances for a decade,” she said. “We would rather offer it a second column than dispute the first.”
The paper carries support from the Anticipatory Capability Fund. The University reads the work as evidence for a preference it has been forming for some time: that measures are best taken in the room where the thing measured actually happens.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bdj0ze.