The unbearable summer in a "kettle" accommodation

It is not yet 9 o'clock in the morning, the sun is already penetrating through the windows of the charming apartment. The indoor thermometer reads 25 degrees while it is 16 outside. For the afternoon, the weather forecast predicts up to 32 degrees.

The apartment that this 35-year-old psychologist occupies with her companion, Theo, ticks all the boxes of the "energy kettle": under the roof, facing south, small, without shutters and in the middle of town.

She still remembers the heat wave of summer 2019, when the thermometer rose to 42 degrees in the capital, and 46 at home.

"I had asked for a day of teleworking, precisely so as not to be in transport during the hot weather... Very badly I took it!", She laughs.

"Everything was hot, burning, the sofa, the walls..."

For the past two years, in addition to the usual gestures against the heat - opening at night, closing during the day - she has found a solution to the absence of shutters: sticking emergency blankets to the windows.

This keeps the temperature 4 to 5 degrees below the outside.

Public health

But all it takes is one oversight for the heat to become unbearable again.

"Once the temperature has risen in the apartment, there is not much to do. When there are several days of heat waves in a row and there is not necessarily wind and of air circulating outside, we have the impression of being locked in, of suffocating."

"It's much more difficult to sleep when you're very hot and it can take several hours to fall asleep, or even have a fairly restless sleep."

"The simple fact of moving or doing things, we find ourselves swimming, and then everything is hot. We want to be cool and everything we touch is hot. It's a daily stress, a stress of knowing that we are going to go to a place that is possibly warmer than outside, these are things that we think about during the day, a bit at what temperature we are going to be eaten this evening?

"You have to take it with humor, because symbolically, putting emergency blankets on your windows is not nothing," she says.

Because "energy kettles", as the Abbé Pierre Foundation called them in a study published at the end of June, are a public health issue.

“The high temperatures in housing also impact the sleep of the inhabitants, favoring the development or aggravation of pathologies (cardiac and renal in particular), blood circulation problems, loss of autonomy in the elderly, dehydration. .”, underlines the NGO.

Insulate, repaint, renovate

It calls on public authorities to take a series of measures to limit energy poverty in summer, the consequences of which will worsen with global warming, which increases the intensity and frequency of heat waves.

"We have to move quickly and put in place simple actions that really have an effect and that are not very expensive," explains the Foundation's director of studies, Manuel Domergue. "Install shutters everywhere, install awnings, paint the roofs white..."

One way to limit the installation of air conditioners, the proliferation of which aggravates the problem on a city scale.

In the longer term, the Foundation recommends, among other things, integrating summer comfort into the energy performance criteria for housing, which is not the case for buildings built before 2021.

The advantage, notes Manuel Domergue, is that we are not starting from scratch: the home renovation policy, hitherto focused exclusively on insulation against the cold, often provides solutions against the heat as well. .

"Roughly speaking, colanders and energy kettles are the same: housing that is poorly insulated. As a result, the solutions are the same: carrying out an efficient renovation, it works for winter and for summer."

It is also necessary, claims the Foundation, to help more low-income households to renovate their homes, as they more often live in apartments that are vulnerable to heat... and do not have the means to remedy this.

Illustrative image of the article via Depositphotos.com.