The mulberry tree provides dappled shade from the low morning sun in the summer

Throughout the blog are entries about the way this house becomes an oven during the summer months. It has taken a while but a number of simple steps seem to have alleviated the worst of the heat. The problem was that there is no insulation in the walls and the sun bakes them on three sides (one side is the wall of a neighbour’s flat. The place was built as two units) as the day progresses. Some summers have seen the house as hot and hotter than 45C and never below 30C or 90F for the entire season.

The Mulberry tree at the front was always going to be a part of the solution. The problem was the tree refused to hold a leafy canopy over the summer and was just skeletal branches. Around three years of treating the soil to enrich and feed it have brought the leaves back and now there is dappled shade across the front walls of the house instead of a bloom of heat as the sun gathers power in the morning.

The second change to be made was a matter of sheer desperation. The worst culprit in causing the house to gather and retain heat was the rear wall where the afternoon sun would simply cook the back walls and then leave the walls and their air-gaps to radiate heat all night

The shade cloth at the rear of the house

It was obvious that the rear wall had to be protected from the direct sun. There were a number of very complex and good-looking options I had come up with but no matter how hard I tried was unable to get assistance to put them into play. I bought the shade cloth anyway and one stinking hot day last summer gave in a simply whacked the thing up by hanging it from the wall. This system actually works quite well and appears to have cooled the house by several degrees. I believe the thing that causes it to work is the airflow. As the sun hits the shade-cloth it heats it and causes the air to rise. That air evacuates the space behind the cloth and is replaced by cooler air. There are several non-conventional houses that use an open wall plan like this to cool their summer walls. In the winter the walls are warmed by stopping the airflow and sealing the air into the wall to be heated and then to radiate back into the house. That had been the effect of the uninsulated walls on my house and will be the effect in winter when the shade cloth can be taken down.

It has been a very cool summer and with only a few really scorching days to test the theory I cannot say it is conclusively proven but the fact is that sunny days were making the house quite toasty even on cool days and it has remained cool enough so far to be considered “fresh” and very comfortable.

This scheme came about from sheer desperation and I think many of the people who raised eyebrows instead of helping me out thought I needed one of the high-cost commercial options and was destined to fail. I do not think you have to be desperate to do simple things like this to lower your electricity costs or even just to make a hot-box of a house bearable again. It cost all of ninety dollars for shade cloth and eyelets and some screw fixtures and I am a cripple and did it entirely on my own and it is not really so ugly or as make-do as some outcomes.

Things to remember are to get the cloth tight so that you do not find yourself having to fix it in a gale or alternately it does not batter a hole in the wall as it flaps about. I used big screw hooks to hold it all in place as this actually causes the cloth to sit away from the wall and leaves the air space to give air flow extra cooling action

The shade cloth at the side is similar enough to the house color to be unnoticed by the casual passer bye

You can see in the final image that the window is partially covered by the cloth. That happened because I am lazy and after putting that cloth up was totally worn out and shaking like a leaf. It is a fair trade for the cooling of the house. There is one more shade cloth to put up along the rear of the side wall and I will get to it.