We’ve all endured a summer night where it’s so hot we can’t sleep. With climate change bringing hotter summers whilst we strive to build better insulated homes, it’s a problem that’s only going to get worse. Enter Part O!
The principle of Part O is to reduce excessive heat from the sun entering a building, and therefore avoiding internal temperatures rising to uncomfortable levels. A secondary but very important issue it addresses, is the need to reduce our use of (energy guzzling) mechanical cooling (aka air conditioning).
Part O is a brand-new addition to UK Building Regs, which came into effect on 15th June 2022. It affects only newly built residential and institutional residential buildings (such as care homes, hospitals, student accommodation etc.) and is another step towards the Government’s targets to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions. Because what’s the point of saving energy through not needing to heat our well insulated homes in the winter, when we then have to use energy to mechanically cool them in the summer?
Part O promotes limiting the amount of sun and therefore heat, that enters a ‘dwelling’ (an individual home or apartment) through its design, orientation and amount of glazing, and it encourages natural ventilation and passive methods of lowering internal temperatures before considering mechanical (or active) cooling systems as a last resort.
However, there are and always will be instances, in built up areas for example, where despite best efforts, mechanical cooling of some kind will be necessary to keep the building occupants from overheating.
It will need to be demonstrated to the building control body that all practicable passive means of limiting unwanted solar gains and removing excess heat have been used first, before adopting mechanical cooling.
The focus then, should be on low carbon technologies such as Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR), they could be with summer bypass modes, or automated and manual purge ventilation could be connected with BMS or more simply, with local controls.
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