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A town planner has exposed the hidden dangers lurking in newly built homes in Australian suburbs.
Samuel Austin warned that outdated building codes meant houses were built to retain heat rather than stay cool.
Common features of the houses are dark roofs and walls, little or no backyard, and limited space in the front for grass or trees.
Austin warned that poor design caused temperatures to rise in the area with parts of western Sydney reaching up to 50C in 2020.
‘And the worst part? It’s completely 100 percent legal,” she wrote in a yahoo column.
Dark ceilings, dark walls and little vegetation are the recipe for rising temperatures (photos from Sydney’s Marsden Park)
Outdated law never took climate change into account, making new homes already unsafe
‘This is alarming. And it’s not just a small stretch of houses either.
Mr Austin said a whopping 36,000 homes had been built to outdated codes in Sydney in the last five years.
Remarkably, it is anticipated that another 35,000 homes will be built using the same housing codes in the next five years.
Most have little or no backyard or front spaces for trees to help cool the temperature and the roads are dark asphalt that absorbs heat.
M Austin said there was a joint report led by the Western Sydney Regional Organization of Councils (WSROC), investigating home heat.
Their study tested a new single-story house against a 2017 heat wave.
“It was found that even with the air conditioning running, the indoor temperature during the day exceeded 28.5 degrees, well above the maximum range for a safe work environment,” Mr. Austin wrote.
‘And what happens during a power outage when residents cannot run their air conditioning, which is common and regular during extreme hot days in Western Sydney?
“Indoor temperatures peaked at 37.6 degrees, exceeding 30 degrees for seven hours.”
In New South Wales, new homes must be considered “thermally comfortable” under a law called “BASIX”.
The urban planner stated that this law guarantees that the temperature of a house should not reach extremes: neither too hot nor too cold, since both can endanger lives.
‘But there is something very backwards in this law. In practice, climate change is being ignored,” Mr. Austin wrote.
‘Currently, the law requires that houses be built to be “thermally comfortable” in the historical climate of 1990 to 2015.
‘And this is causing big problems. Historically, Western Sydney had a longer “cold period” than a “warm period”. But that is no longer the case.’
36,000 “dark” homes have already been built in western Sydney, with another 35,000 to be built over the next five years.
When WSROC compared the homes to data and forecasts for the period 2010 – 2029, it found that the new homes were already outdated and could not meet “thermally comfortable” standards.
‘And when it is modeled based on the climate predicted for 2050? “The study found that these new houses could endanger human lives,” Mr. Austin wrote.
Austin said WSROC has low-cost solutions to help address the problem.
‘Installing ceiling fans in living rooms and bedrooms can greatly improve internal thermal comfort. Adding external protective devices to windows can prevent heat gain,” she wrote.
‘And most importantly, changing exterior walls and roofs to lighter colors will result in a significant reduction in heat generation.
‘It is not impossible to address this issue. “We have the experience and the knowledge to solve it, we just have to make sure it is implemented.”