So how can you as an individual (or a household) prepare for the impacts of longer and more intense extreme heat waves? What you do all depends on what kind of home you live in and how heat adapted it already is, but here are some concrete approaches.
If you rent an apartment, there isn’t much you can do to the property itself. But what you should do, if you haven’t already done this, is get one or more air conditioning window units. The kinds of heat waves we will be increasingly experiencing will be dangerous to try to ride out with a fan (as our parents and grandparents were able to do) – electric cooling will be critical.
AC units are relatively inexpensive up front (you can easily get them for $100-$200) and are an important first step to ensure you have access to cool air in a heat wave. However, they are not very efficient and can ramp up your electric bill substantially during heat waves. They also contain refrigerant chemicals that, when they leak, are significant greenhouse gas contributors.
Fortunately, there is a better and far more efficient way to electrically cool (and also heat!) your home using a window unit – it’s with a heat pump window unit. Heat pump window units use highly efficient electric heat pump technology to either heat or cool your home, as needed. Heat pumps are most commonly seen in the form of an outside unit that sends the cool into your home through either a central air system or installed wall units – but window units are starting to come on the market now, with a main focus on apartment buildings. You can read a story about them here. You can also find a link to the Gradient unit that story is about here. The upfront cost of a heat pump window unit is more expensive than an AC unit. Gradient’s unit is currently $2,000, though as the technology and adoption proliferates prices are likely to come down. Furthermore, the Inflation Reduction Act will return you 30% off your total heat pump installation cost up to a maximum of $2,000 at tax time. And the savings (20-40% annually) in both cooling and heating costs will return your money to you in a few years and save you far more over time.
As a renter, that’s pretty much the extent of what you can do to cool your space. As a homeowner, however, there are a number of other options.
The first, and most cost efficient (if you haven’t done it already), is to apply a cool roof coating to your roof. A friend of mine, Rory Stout, runs a company called Cool Roof Coatings and they can apply a high quality, water sealing, and highly sun reflective product from a company called Acrylabs. Many old Philadelphia buildings have dark black roofs, which was the standard procedure a while ago. These roofs, however, absorb the heat of the sun tremendously and turn your home into an oven. White roofs are an ancient practice in heat prone cultures – they passively reflect heat so that your cooling system doesn’t have to work nearly as hard.
Second, if you have AC window units or an AC central air system, replace that system with a heat pump system. If you don’t have central air, your best option will be a ductless mini-split system, which sets the unit outside and installs wall units in the rooms you want heated and cooled. This is an investment upfront, but it will save you money on AC electricity as well as on gas or oil heating. I installed a heat pump system in my home in Philadelphia and I don’t run the gas heating at all in the winter – all heating and cooling is electric and is quite efficient and I’m saving a lot of money. A good company I’ve used, which has an excellent business rating and I’ve found to be substantially less expensive than other options, is New Spirit HVAC.
Third (and finally), install solar on your roof. Solar is an excellent financial investment. With the 30% Federal tax credit on solar installations, the savings generated, and the income produced by Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs), the return on your investment is 300-400% over 25 years. This is like putting your money away into a CD at an unheard of rate of 4-5%. If you can’t pay for solar upfront, there are also good financing options available so you can have your solar savings help pay off the loan right from the start. Still, for many others, the up front cost is too much for solar ownership to be an option for them. That’s still not a problem, however, because there are great solar leasing options available. You have to be careful with these – they can sometimes be predatory – but there are plenty that are not. I would personally recommend Posigen’s 25-year fixed rate solar leasing program. To get solar on your roof through them, you pay $0 up front, get a free home energy efficiency upgrade, get repairs and maintenance covered, are guaranteed savings as compared to your utility’s rates the first year (and are very likely to have those rates increase over time as utilities increase rates and yours remains fixed), and are able to purchase the panels for next to nothing at the end of your lease, when they will still be 85% efficient. Also, if you sign on through the following link, your lease will be credited as a lead for HPCSI and Posigen will donate $400 to our climate justice work in Hunting Park if it goes to contract. Here’s that link: https://bit.ly/posigen-hpcsi-lead
Having solar is a great financial investment and it fights climate change – but it also has a particular value with respect to heat. One of the greatest dangers of the progression of climate-induced heat waves is that if they get too intense, all the extra AC usage in an area can blow out the power grid. Or, if a major storm or hurricane comes through a region and downs a lot of power lines (which is another major aspect of the climate crisis), and this is in turn followed by extreme heat, people can get in real trouble because there is no power to run their cooling systems. These are very real threats, as “wet bulb” 95 F (or 95 F at 100%) is the upper limit of human survival and current heat waves are getting dangerously close to this. As an example, there are currently 300 heat-related deaths under investigation in Phoenix, AZ due to recent extreme heat. With solar – whether you own the panels or are renting them – the power from your panels will always go to meet your home’s needs first, and so it can keep your cooling system running during an extreme heat wave, even if the grid goes down.
Extreme heat waves are already here, and they are going to get steadily stronger during the course of our lifetimes. How strong they get will have everything to do with how quickly we reduce carbon emissions over the next two decades, in particular the next 6 years. Whatever we will be facing in the future, it will be more intense and more dangerous. Because of this we need to start preparing now for a different world. More than that, as Christians we need to be preparing now, so that when the times comes we will be able to offer shelter to other others in need.
RESOURCES:
Be Cool Roof Coatings:
Acrylabs Cool Roof Coatings:
New Spirit HVAC (heat pump installation):
Window Heat Pump Unit Story:
Gradient Window Heat Pump:
Posigen Solar:
Get a free design proposal from Posigen in a way that supports work of HPCSI at no cost to you:
Solar Renewable Energy Credit (SREC) Explanation:
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