Cooling your home: Home retrofits, appliances and adaptions for a hotter future

Practical advice to improve your home's comfort and safety

October 2021

Simple DIY measures to improve your home

Most Australian homes perform poorly in hot and cold weather and require much energy to remain comfortable. As climate change worsens, the Hunter region is increasingly affected by heatwaves and bushfires. And, so our our homes. Cooling Your Home is a practical guide for how residents - owners, landlords and renters - can maximise comfort and save money on energy bills.

Stay cool, cut costs

Cooling Your Home contains practical advice on home retrofits, appliance choices and cost-effective strategies. Find out how you can create an efficient one-room 'cool retreat', update appliances and how to use them strategically, take bushfire precautions at home, and install retrofits in critical areas such as gaps, ceilings and external shading.

Stay cool, cut costs

Download the report

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Well-designed homes do not require much energy and have passive features, such as:

Oriented with the living spaces facing north (in the Southern hemisphere) to catch the sun in winter and the shade from the eaves in summer
Shading the windows and walls to reduce unwanted heat (e.g. adjustable shades)

Appropriate ceiling, wall and floor insulation
Sealing gaps in the home
User-controllable ventilation and fans for air movement
Thermal mass
Window treatments (e.g. glazing systems, curtains and tints)

About the project and report author:

Cooling Your Home is proudly funded by the NSW Government's Increasing Resilience to Climate Change community grant program.

Report author‍ Dr John J. Shiel is principal of EnviroSustain, a consultancy for low carbon buildings and precincts based on the Central Coast. John's research areas are in adapting buildings to climate change and extreme weather events, residential comfort, zero embodied carbon materials, smart comfort technology, and food security. He is also chairman of Permaculture Hunter, a member of both the Narara Ecovillage Co-operative and the International Initiative of Sustainable Built Environment (iiSBE).