Effective roof insulation
For anyone who's been sweltering in rooms directly under a roof, it would be worth considering how their roofs are presently insulated and whether that could be changed so as to make them radically more effective at keeping out excessive heat (and, of course, cold during winter).
My attic has 'cold roof' insulation, rolled out between the joists above the ceiling of the rooms below, which is fairly effective.
At the back of the house, however, there are low-ceilinged rooms with no/almost no ceiling void above them, so their slated roofs have never been insulated. Some of my neighbours in identical houses have had 'cold roof' insulation installed when that part of their home was re-roofed, but my excellent roofer tells me that that wouldn't make a great deal of difference in heatwave conditions. So there's no point having the back of the house re-roofed at enormous expense.
When the roofers re-did the flat roof over my stairwell, they installed a 'warm roof' under a felt surface - which they not only guaranteed for ten years but expect should last for 30-40 years. (Apparently those felted flat roofs which notoriously fail within a few years do so because they were badly made - cowboy roofers don't do this properly.) That made a huge difference in terms of insulation against severe heat: I can work on the top landing this morning, while my study (at the back of the house, under an uninsulated slate roof) is already very unpleasantly hot and will become intolerable as the heatwave continues.
So it's well worth considering having these sloping roofs re-done with a felt surface, so as to be able to use the 'warm roof' technique to insulate them. (One can't, apparently, do that under a slate roof because it needs to be well ventilated inside.)
That won't be easy to do legitimately in a conservation area, unless the local planners have already taken account of the effect of climate change to adapt their policies on retrofitting old houses - but some councils may already have begun moving in that direction. This summer's extreme conditions should provide a means of spurring others (and perhaps even central government) into updating their policies so that people can make even protected old buildings resilient enough to remain habitable in much more extreme conditions than those for which they were originally built.
My attic has 'cold roof' insulation, rolled out between the joists above the ceiling of the rooms below, which is fairly effective.
At the back of the house, however, there are low-ceilinged rooms with no/almost no ceiling void above them, so their slated roofs have never been insulated. Some of my neighbours in identical houses have had 'cold roof' insulation installed when that part of their home was re-roofed, but my excellent roofer tells me that that wouldn't make a great deal of difference in heatwave conditions. So there's no point having the back of the house re-roofed at enormous expense.
When the roofers re-did the flat roof over my stairwell, they installed a 'warm roof' under a felt surface - which they not only guaranteed for ten years but expect should last for 30-40 years. (Apparently those felted flat roofs which notoriously fail within a few years do so because they were badly made - cowboy roofers don't do this properly.) That made a huge difference in terms of insulation against severe heat: I can work on the top landing this morning, while my study (at the back of the house, under an uninsulated slate roof) is already very unpleasantly hot and will become intolerable as the heatwave continues.
So it's well worth considering having these sloping roofs re-done with a felt surface, so as to be able to use the 'warm roof' technique to insulate them. (One can't, apparently, do that under a slate roof because it needs to be well ventilated inside.)
That won't be easy to do legitimately in a conservation area, unless the local planners have already taken account of the effect of climate change to adapt their policies on retrofitting old houses - but some councils may already have begun moving in that direction. This summer's extreme conditions should provide a means of spurring others (and perhaps even central government) into updating their policies so that people can make even protected old buildings resilient enough to remain habitable in much more extreme conditions than those for which they were originally built.
