About 20 per cent of Singapore’s resident households do not have an air conditioner. What is their life like struggling with heat? The programme Talking Point shares one family’s experience and gets cooling advice from a team of experts.
SINGAPORE: Single mother Fion Lim has been trying to get an air conditioner through her social worker.
Even with the extra fans she bought recently — using the S$300 climate vouchers all Housing and Development Board households can claim for purchases of energy- and water-efficient products — her family has struggled to cope with Singapore’s rising temperatures.“Sometimes my boys will … be topless because of the hot weather,” she said. “They’ll , ‘Mum, I don’t want to wear my shirt. I’m sweating.’”
Chow also took presenter Steven Chia to a neighbourhood in Boon Keng, where they found, using a thermal camera, that the afternoon temperature of the ground was about 50 deg C. Physical exposure to heat is one factor in heat vulnerability. Another is the concentration of the elderly population, who are more at risk of heat stress or heat stroke.
Experts have embarked on the three-year Climate Resilient Citizenry project to study how Singaporean households cope with heat and to develop new, cheaper cooling strategies. And how the researchers helped Lim’s family was instructive. They were also using bed sheets made of synthetic material, “which isn’t that cooling”, said Singapore-ETH Centre postdoctoral researcher Natalia Borzino.
An air cooler is like a fan but blows cooler air because of water evaporation. It can bring down temperatures by at least 2 to 3 deg C, cited Zheng.It need not break the bank either. Digital platform GoodHood.SG helps match people looking for specific items with those looking to give them away, and donors had given it an air cooler, cotton sheets and a new foldable mattress.Most of its requesters, meanwhile, live in rental flats.
The way the blocks were built, the number of trees and where the shade hits the playgrounds — all these were designed with the modelling tool to maximise cooling in the neighbourhood.
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