Status: In Progress
Home 2 Hot
Helping people prepare their homes for a hotter, changing climate
Summary
Home2Hot is an experiment I’m building with a friend to help ordinary homeowners understand why their homes get too hot, and what they can practically do about it.As the UK gets hotter, our houses aren’t necessarily well prepared for it. Home2Hot aims to turn the increasingly complicated world of insulation, shading, ventilation, glazing, cooling, materials and building science into straightforward, evidence-led advice for homeowners.
Why Home2Hot?
British houses have traditionally been designed around the problem of keeping heat in.
Increasingly, we also need to think about keeping heat out.
That sounds simple, but once you start researching how to cool a house, things become complicated surprisingly quickly. Should you open the windows? Close them? Add insulation? External blinds? Window film? Fans? Air conditioning? A heat pump? Does something that helps in winter make overheating worse in summer?
And, as usual with the internet, there’s a mixture of good advice, product marketing, received wisdom and conflicting opinions.
We’re building Home2Hot to try to make that decision-making process easier.
The basic idea is to catalogue common household heat problems, the solutions available to them, the materials and professional services involved, and, importantly, the scientific evidence behind them.
Rather than immediately suggesting that everyone installs air conditioning, the aim is to work through the least resource-intensive interventions that can realistically solve the problem: understand what’s happening, reduce unwanted heat gain, improve ventilation, measure the results, and use active cooling where it actually makes sense.
The Home Heat Check
A central part of the first version is a simple interactive assessment we’re calling the Home Heat Check.
Instead of expecting someone to understand building physics, it’ll ask straightforward questions about their home and the problem they’re experiencing.
Things like:
- Is the house too hot during the day or at night?
- Is it the whole house or one particular room?
- Which floor is affected?
- Which direction do the windows face?
- What shading and ventilation are available?
- How hot does it actually get?
- Where in the UK is the property?
From those answers, Home2Hot will suggest a small number of things worth investigating or trying.
The first version will intentionally be fairly simple. I’m much more interested in getting something useful online and learning from real usage than spending six months attempting to build the world’s greatest thermal modelling engine before anybody has used it.
An experiment
There’s another side to the project which makes it particularly interesting to me.
Home overheating produces lots of very specific questions:
Why is my bedroom still hot at midnight?
Why is upstairs so much hotter than downstairs?
Should I open my windows during a heatwave?
Does insulation make a house hotter in summer?
How do I cool a south-facing room?
Those questions make this an interesting long-tail SEO problem.
We’re structuring the underlying information around Problems, Solutions, Materials, Services and Evidence, with relationships between them. The hope is that this produces genuinely useful pages for specific homeowner problems while gradually building a structured knowledge base underneath the site.
Where does Home 2 Hot lead?
There are several obvious directions it could go.
It might work primarily as an SEO/affiliate business. There may be an opportunity around finding and referring people to installers. The assessment itself could become substantially more sophisticated. Or the aggregated data about overheating in UK homes could turn out to be interesting in its own right.
For now, we’re deliberately not deciding.
First we’ll put something useful on the internet, point it at a real and growing problem, and see what happens.