: Free, Innovative Sustainable Techniques are Cooling Houses with Tin Roofs by 10°C #IndiaNEWS #Architecture This article is part of a deep dive to celebrate Environment Day by highlighting individual

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Free, Innovative Sustainable Techniques are Cooling Houses with Tin Roofs by 10°C #IndiaNEWS #Architecture
This article is part of a deep dive to celebrate Environment Day by highlighting individual and community action that leads to large scale impact on the planet. ItStartsWithMe is the second chapter of ‘Shaping Sustainability’, an exclusive series by The Better India, to give our readers an in-depth understanding of how Indians are making sustainability a priority in all walks of life. Find more stories from the series here
“It is difficult to sleep due to the heat, which gets worse during power cuts. I also have a blood pressure problem which gets difficult to manage during summers due to the discomfort caused by the lack of ventilation in my house,� says Vijayalaxmi from Bengaluru.
She is one of the innumerable people battling heat stress under poorly ventilated, heat-absorbing tin-roofed house structures of India’s marginalised urban settlements. Homes in these settlements mostly have ceiling fans which support thermal comfort needs in a minimal capacity. These houses are also susceptible to frequent power cuts.
At the other end of the spectrum are residents of affluent urban neighbourhoods who live in relatively well-ventilated houses in addition to owning Air Conditioners. They also have backup power sources to support them during rare instances of power cuts. This glaring energy inequity in urban areas demands scrutiny, given the fact that a typical one-tonne, split-AC in India consumes as much power as 25 ceiling fans.
Rising temperatures fuelled by the escalating climate crisis and the energy inequity scenario warrants moving towards a diversity of thermal comfort interventions which are both sustainable and affordable.
While there have been interventions—such as ‘cool roofs’, which involve painting roofs white to reflect heat, and those such as the ‘dormer window’, which support creating a gateway for hot indoor air to escape outdoors—cooling mechanisms that focus on creating a barrier between the suns radiation and a tin-roofed house are rare. Recognising the need to work on experimenting with such mechanisms and some already existing ones with inhabitants of informal settlements, our team at cBalance curated the ‘Informal Housing Thermal Comfort’ project.
Most thermal cooling techniques as part of this endeavour focus on experimenting with such mechanisms. A vital element of this experimentation was to build on internal research findings and ‘co-create’ contextualised techniques with informal housing communities.
Initial exploratory data collected on thermal conditions in a few informal structures in Mumbai and Pune indicated roof surface temperatures above 50°C even when air temperatures were a moderate 30°C.

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