Home Improvement

How to keep your bedroom cool during the hot, sticky summer nights and comfortably warm during cold winter nights without affecting the rest of the house.Are you getting hot under the collar about global warming and the increase in extremes of temperature from one day to another? Your home is probably the most valuable asset you possess; wouldn’t it be nice if your bedroom was better equipped to keep you cool during the hot, sticky summer months and cozy in the cold, dark winter season?

With central heating being a most popular feature required by home owners, how much attention do we give to the “comfort factor” during hot summers – especially summer nights? Some of the worse nights of sleep my wife and I have experienced have been through the last few sweltering summers when temperatures have stayed at a heady 22°C – even at 3am in the morning!

How much effort do we, as a nation, put in to ensure we are comfortable through these, ever increasing, periods of hot, sticky nights? The answer for our family was “none” until we started visiting very hot climate countries for our holidays and realised it didn’t have to be like that.

In many apartments and villas in tropical countries the rooms are fitted with air conditioners that cool the temperature down to a thermostatically controlled level. It’s obvious when you think about it, but how often do we think about it in the UK? We only think about it when we are having a terrible night’s sleep because of the balmy temperatures.

We bought a portable electric fan so that we could use it in the living room during the evening and the bedroom at night. This only served to move the warm air around and cause our eyes to water from the sporadic breeze it created.

As the climate scientists have suggested that hot and sticky nights are going to become more of a regular occurrence, my wife and I started looking at what air conditioners were available for the home.

We found the industry to be a bewildering array of technical language for a start. Cooling capacity in BTU per hour; inverter technology; coefficient of performance; the list goes on. How about telling us, “The unit keeps you cool during hot sticky days and nights, and keeps you cozy in the winter.”

We also looked at fully installed household systems that covered every room and we might have been seduced by the sales talk but we remembered the sleepless nights and we agreed that priority should be given to the bedroom. That’s where the most benefit would be felt for us.

There was another benefit to concentrating our efforts on getting the bedroom set up for extremes of temperature. Although we have central heating throughout the house, we only needed one room to be affected by the air conditioning system which is exactly how the unit we installed works. It keeps the bedroom at a constantly comfortable temperature during the summer nights and it is thermostatically controlled to warm the room during cold winter nights.

We might install air conditioners in other rooms later based on how serious the temperature fluctuations become. We have spent the last few years remodeling our garden to be able to use this outside space for living and entertaining activities as opposed to using our garden in a traditional way. Therefore we can be outside quite comfortably on a hot summer evening, sipping our gin and tonics, not worrying about sitting in a more confined and stuffy area, such as the lounge.

Following such a pleasant evening we retire to a temperature controlled environment where a comfortable night’s sleep is ensured.