Overheating in residential buildings
All Residential Buildings can suffer from overheating. Even the new environmental movement for Passive (Passiv) house design tends to focus mainly on heat-retention, totally understandable for winter months, without then considering the massive problem of overheating experienced between April – September in the UK. It’s a tricky one.
The Ultimate Guide to High-Performance Building Design even goes so far as to state that ‘due to the low level of the sun during sunrise and sunset, an overhang or shading device will be relatively ineffective on an east or west-facing window. Passive solar design aims to minimise south, east, and west-facing windows if cooling is a particular concern. In other words, avoid having windows on your south, east, and west-facing elevations and have your windows facing north! Well, that’s one solution but it doesn’t do much for all of those vital environmentally healthy criteria such as natural daylighting, visual contact with the outside, and all those views but - we have the solution.
Combating overheating
To combat overheating, humans still rely heavily on mechanical cooling to reduce the massive solar gains affecting our over-glazed living environments. Air-con demands for both energy used and manufacturing equipment are one of the major threats to our overheating climate. Ask Homer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioyU_sZufC8
A leading expert, Professor Brian Stone at the Georgia Institute of Technology states that the combination of blackouts and extreme heat “may be the deadliest climate-related event we can imagine.”
Major city power failures or outages have increased by more than 60 percent since 2015, even as climate change has made heat waves worse, according to the new research published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Using computer models to study three large U.S. cities, the authors estimated that a combined blackout and heatwave would expose at least two-thirds of residents in those cities to heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
How does MicroLouvre® help with this dilemma?
So how do we combat these risks? What is the single most comprehensive solution that ticks more performance boxes than any other product? For America, it’s coming back home to where it was invented by John Grebe one of America’s great inventors and for the rest of us, it’s being manufactured only in the UK – it’s MicroLouvre®Koolshade®
MicroLouvre® Koolshade® employs a totally unique, 3D, angular selective solar heat-protecting and shading solution specifically designed for high-performance sun and light control.
MicroLouvre® on residential buildings, provides numerous unbeatable benefits. First, it can reduce solar heat gain overheating by 100% with internal temperature reduced by over 20 degrees or more, leaving residents staying comfortably indoors. One Passive House was uninhabitable in March until MicroLouvre® was installed.
Second, MicroLouvre® has an unmatchable 80% clear open area which allows optimum pure unfiltered daylight into the building. The angled micro louvres create the perfect upward laminar fresh airflow ventilation.
Moving on to energy saving. Top LBNL Laboratory testing has proven that MicroLouvre® can reduce the HVAC load by at least 68%, better than the best solar glasses and other forms of shading, leading to big energy savings plus a big win for planet earth. It also means that you can use much smaller, less costly, more efficient air-conditioning equipment saving more production energy, and material costs, and a better ROI for both your money and your climate.
Also, MicroLouvre® provides directional privacy to block the view into the building without interrupting views out as the micro-fine louvres disappear from your eye line, allowing full vision out throughout the day.
For safety purposes, our screens conform to A1/A2 fire performance rating. MicroLouvre® is light, quick, and easy to install – moveable where required – and all with minimal structural loading.
And to compliment the residential building’s external appearance, our screens can be custom made from a wide range of materials to suit any shape or size of window with any colour possible. MicroLouvre® is also, by far, the easiest and simplest external shading system to be retrofitted.
