Residential wintertime comfort in a temperate Australian climate

Abstract

There is a growing realisation among policy-makers and researchers that Australia has a vastly underrecognised cold housing phenomenon. Overshadowed by the dominance of concern for summer heatwaves and cooling, to date little Australian work has been undertaken on winter housing conditions. In responding to this research and evidence gap, this paper presents the findings from a wintertime thermal comfort field study in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia between July and October 2017. Participant households were selected from a larger random sample of 4,500 Australian households in the Australian Housing Conditions Dataset (AHCD). Data for this field study was collected from 19 households in the AHCD who self-identified as unable to keep warm in cold weather in their homes. On average, internal temperatures in the sample dwellings were well below standard thermal comfort levels. Interestingly, findings also indicate that residents reported being comfortable at temperatures much lower than accepted norms. Overall however, they reported very low satisfaction with their indoor thermal environment. Several hypotheses are put forward as possible explanations of these findings but will need to be subject to further research. Nevertheless, the findings from this paper position indoor cold as a forefront concern for Australian housing research and policy development.