New research shows Tasmanian home temperatures fall below international standard

Freya Su, a PhD student in Architectural Science at the University of Tasmania, said that the homes in our state tend be older and therefore less efficient in keeping us warmer.

Ms Su also runs a consultancy called Snug House and gives advice to people across the state on how to keep their homes warmer and keep out mould and condensation.

Fifty per cent of her clients hire her services because they want their homes to be warmer and they're concerned about how much money they're spending on heating, she said.

Another 20 per cent are concerned about mould.

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Ms Su said part of the reason why our homes are so inefficient in winter was because the building code did not required buildings to be insulated until as late as 2003.

Houses were built without insulation and also without considering how tightly they would preserve warm air.

"So there's a double whammy there - you're losing heat through the gaps in your building and also it's not insulated," Ms Su said.

New research from the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia shows that the internal temperatures of Tasmanian homes were the coldest on average of all temperate Australian states.

Dr Cynthia Barlow, one of the researchers on the team, said that the study was prompted by the health consequences of living in a cold house.

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Australia has high winter death rates compared to much colder countries and the team decided to work backwards to determine the causes and who is most at risk, she said.

The team measured the internal temperatures of 100 Australian homes - 20 of which were in Tasmania.

Participants placed a temperature and humidity sensor in their homes from May to October 2022 and completed a survey about what their house was like.

The data looked at internal temperatures during occupied hours and found that the average temperature of homes across Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia was 16.5 degrees.

Dr Barlow said for Tasmania, the average internal temperature was 15.7 degrees.

The international standard set by the World Health Organisation is 18 degrees.

It's a metric that's not based on comfort but on respiratory and cardiac health, Dr Barlow said.

Eighty-five per cent of Tasmanian homes in the study were below 18 degrees.

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And in Tasmania, 77 per cent of the data hours that the study recorded were below 18 degrees.

Dr Barlow said that was quite high and a long time to remain cold.

While climate plays a huge role as well, Tasmania's cold temperatures aren't just due to its geographic position and other colder places have much higher interior temperatures.

Homes in Greenland were an average of 22 degrees, Dr Barlow said.

Homes in the UK over winter were 18.5 degrees.

"We're cold in Australia in general, especially in Tasmania," she said.

Dr Barlow said considering that Australia was settled by Europeans, there's always been the perception that Australia is a hot place and that we don't need to worry about winter so much.

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Additionally, a lot of our homes were built at a time when gas and energy were a lot cheaper, she said.

There was a really big push to put people into homes and drive home ownership during the 1950s and 1960s and little consideration for the thermal properties of those homes.

We haven't learnt to build our homes to be thermally efficient like they have in other parts of the world with features like double glazing and insulative properties, Dr Barlow said.

Ms Su agreed, saying that what differentiates Australia is that we don't have any national standard or regulation for indoor air quality and temperatures.

This also has huge monetary costs for people during winter.

Dr Su said what also impacted rising costs was air-tightness.

The average Australian home has 15 air changes an hour which is the equivalent to a light breeze, she said.

What these means is that you have to heat volume of air 15 times an hour.

Older homes can experience 30 air changes an hour, Ms Su said.

All of this also has a health cost and there's definite health impacts especially for people with existing health conditions.

Winter death rates in Australia were 20 per cent higher than our summer death rates, Dr Barlow said.

It's not unusual to have more deaths in winter but our numbers are far higher than parts of the world, she said.

Dr Barlow said that she hoped the research would provide a foundation for policymakers the tools to improve people's living conditions

Tenants are particular vulnerable, she said, as they don't have control over the properties they rent.

A lot of our policy has been based on assuming that people are warm enough in their homes," Dr Barlow said.

"I think the first step would be to question that and so we need to really be looking at winter more in our housing design."

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