We don’t have to have double glazed windows in Australia. The energy rating is often sold as 5 star! But, the scale is out of 10 🙄.

We’re a dumb country when it comes to building houses. I’m not an architect, or an engineer, but, out summers reach 40°C+ in summer, yet our modern houses have dark grey roof’s made of colorbond steel. Too hot outside, let me crank my air con…there goes that 5 star rating of my barely energy efficient home

My house gets below 16 in Winter. The bank owns it and we are barely hanging on so it will stay that way. It’s a full reno to undo the mistakes of the 90s (and dodgy building). Slab isn’t insulated, clay bricks aren’t insulated, louvres leak, no roof insulation. It’s not your standard house so it’s difficult to fix up as well.

Oh well. Such is life.

I work for a global company headquartered in Europe, and we regularly have visitors from the mothership come to Sydney. Every year, without fail, they will all regularly comment on how they’ve never been so cold indoors. They also come from countries where it snows regularly.

If I could afford to, my house would be colder than 18 C or 64.5 F. I have my thermostat set at 68 and is still hot AF in my bedroom and living room.

Edit: I live in a place where the absolute lowest the temperature gets is 18-25 C, I used to live where the lowest it got was -51 C. Not everyone is acclimatized to that kind of cold, but I like it, especially when I’m sleeping.

Edit 2: my most controversial comment is expressing my opinion to a bunch of freezing Aussies that I prefer to be cold. Make sure you waste more of your effort downvoting me, and less effort figuring out how to use space heaters, put plastic up on the outside and inside of your windows, and hang up blankets to keep warmth in your critical areas. Y’all wouldn’t have survived a Minnesota winter. Just be grateful they didn’t sentence your ancestors to exile in Canada I guess 🤷‍♂️

Some possibilities for windows. The windows in my place are wafer thin, and I suspect one of the main ways weather is getting in and out.

• Magnetic double glazing. A way to add removable double glazing to windows
• Bubble wrap is a good insulator! Spray water and it sticks to the window!

Now, I’ve just done an experiment with bubble wrap. I had 2 rooms basically facing the same way that got morning sun from about 7am to noon, and measured temperature differences between them.

It does help with reducing temperature movement. That’s on the way up as well as on the way down. From 10am to 5pm it’s colder in the insulated room as it doesn’t heat up as fast. Then from 6pm to 10am the insulated room is warmer, as it doesn’t cool down as fast. The difference wasn’t huge; only about 1C max.

This was without any active heating/cooling. I suspect insulating would be a much better advantage if you were pumping warm/cool air into the room and maintaining it.

External temperature ranges over a 3 day period were from a 17.8C max to a 5C min. Wider/faster temperature fluctuations would also see a benefit to insulation. The biggest difference (advantage bubble wrap!) was on the coldest day when external temperatures were always below the internal temperatures. It stayed warmer than the non insulated room.

I’ll give it a go in summer to see what will happen as well…

could the issue be that homes are built with lighter materials?

I’m from Europe, and we get really cold winters. My apartment never drops below 17°C even without heating on. Even individual homes, I know are insulated so it never is too cold.