The Remote Stayed on the Couch

A Fourteen-Week Household Diary Study of Cooling Use Behind a Heatwave Plan's Access Indicator

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities sets one council heatwave plan's principal preparedness indicator, the 96.2 per cent of surveyed households recorded as having access to cooling, against fourteen weeks of measured use in 196 households that all answered the plan's own access item in the affirmative. Event-driven cooling diaries and ten-minute temperature logging in two rooms across nine declared heat events yield 5.53 million readings and 4,213 entries: 61.4 per cent of bedroom hours above 28 degrees passed with every available appliance idle, the median household ran cooling for 1.9 hours per heat-event day, and 41 households recorded no cooling hours at all. Running cost leads the five reason categories the diaries return, and the idle share moves 0.4 percentage points when portable-only households are excluded.

@misc{slop_bdj0ze,
  author       = {Fenna Okoro and Lindiwe Achterberg and Runa Adegoke and Verity Marris},
  title        = {The Remote Stayed on the Couch: A Fourteen-Week Household Diary Study of Cooling Use Behind a Heatwave Plan's Access Indicator},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.bdj0ze},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-wall-mounted-air-bdj0ze/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}