An estimated 4m homes in the UK now have air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago as Britons complain of “unliveable” conditions during high temperatures.
Portable units with power ratings around 1kW are slightly more common than the more powerful built-in versions that can guzzle 2.7kW of power – more than an electric oven.
Experts suggest the increase in ownership is the result of more people working from home and rising summer temperatures. Some of the UK’s warmest summers have been in recent years, and the UK’s hottest day was in July 2022, when temperatures hit 40C.
Aria Toupchi, who runs London air conditioning specialists Debonair Cooling, said demand for its cooling systems, which cost about £2,500 per room, was coming from owners of both period and new-build properties. “They are struggling to sleep at night, or have children with breathing problems,” he said, adding that loft conversions were also posing problems. “I’ve seen loft rooms go up to 50C. It’s unliveable.”
The government’s climate advisers said in a report this week that British homes would need air conditioning to survive predicted levels of global heating, as measures such as drawing curtains, opening windows and growing trees for shade were unlikely to be enough.
Air conditioning should be installed in all care homes and hospitals within the next 10 years, the Climate Change Committee said in its findings on adapting to the impacts of global heating. With heatwaves expected to exceed 40C in all parts of the UK by 2050 and about nine in 10 UK homes were likely to overheat.
Air conditioning is energy intensive, accounting for about 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. More efficient modern systems can use heat pumps, the purchase of which is already subsidised by the government to replace gas boilers, but these are rarely installed at present.
Britons have traditionally reached for fans to cope with high temperatures but a bigger range of portable air conditioning units is now available on the high street.
“We’re seeing a clear shift in how people in the UK think about indoor comfort,” said Ciaran Murphy, the chief executive at Dimplex Consumer Products, which sells cooling gadgets, including a £440 portable air conditioner and dehumidifier unit. “Air conditioning was once viewed as a luxury for a few hot days a year, but cooling solutions are increasingly being considered essential in the home.”
Murphy said market data showed demand for both portable electric fans and air conditioning was up 79% year-on-year. The company had seen “unprecedented growth in sales across the cooling category and expects this trend to continue long into the future”, he said.
Of the 4m households with air conditioning, nearly 1.9m have built-in units with power ratings of up to 2.7kW. In a typical week, households use their units for about four hours, but when temperatures are high, they use them for just over nine hours a day, sending the cost up from about £3 a week to £42 a week, according to price comparison site Uswitch which provided the data.
The 2.2 m homes with portable air conditioning units – which use 1kW of power – typically use them for about three hours a week at a cost of 83p. During hot spells, when they are used for more than nine hours a day, this bill rises to £15.71 a week.
It is hard for air conditioning to compete with fans on cost alone, as a 40W fan may cost less than 1p an hour to run, compared with 66p for a 2.7kW air con system. However, the Uswitch energy expert Natalie Mathie said that because fans do not actually lower the room temperature, “they just move the air around, it’s not really comparing like with like”.
Mathie said air conditioning that ran purely on grid electricity would not be truly “green” until the entire grid ran on renewable energy, but there was hope for heat pumps being used for cooling. “Heat pumps move heat around rather than generating it and can produce about three units of cooling output for every unit of electricity they use. Pairing a heat pump with solar panels means that the cooling effect can be produced with near-zero emissions.”
