At least 18 people died in France, including two children left in a hot car, as a heat wave gripped Europe and smashed temperature records in several cities Monday.
As schools in France closed or modified their schedules, forecasters in Britain predicted temperatures could break June records this week.
The temperature in Bordeaux in France’s western wine country rose to 41.9 C, breaking a record set last August. In Poitiers, in central France, it reached 41.2 C, surpassing a previous high set in 1947.
That sounds like a nightmare. I live in Australia and used to work in a 2nd floor office with very weak vented AC. In summer afternoons the sun would beat down on the one exterior wall, and it would heat up like a radiator. On hot days the wall and window glass became too hot to touch from the inside. You could feel the radiated heat when you walked in the room, like walking past a pizza oven.
Modem building codes require some sort of weird looking air-gapped cladding on the sunward side of buildings, steel, aluminium or concrete panels suspended 100mm away from the wall on pegs, and gridded awnings over windows so that the sunlight isn’t beating directly against the wall, otherwise the buildings are basically unsurvivable.
Technology Connections did a video on awnings and how much they were useful before AC, and how they’ve fallen out of fashion despite being needed more than ever
Yeah, that sounds similar to my situation. I have blackout curtains, but they don’t really help since they like you say, just heat up and radiate that out into the room. The best room is the living room/office since there’s a fully enclosed balcony that kind of acts as an airgap. I can just close the balcony door and it’ll trap most of the heat outside.
I’ve seen the TC video in question. My old workplace actually had awnings. It was fantastic, since they were cloth we could adjust them as needed. It still got really warm because the building was flat and so the roof also absorbed a lot of heat that then made it into the building, but despite that the awnings made a noticeable difference.
Honestly, given how the Australian sun is, I couldn’t imagine dealing with this over there. I’d actually just pop off from heatstroke.