BC Housing 'looking into' whether residential cooling systems disabled
CTV
The provincial housing agency is keeping tight-lipped in the wake of troubling questions around whether some of the most vulnerable people in British Columbia are unauthorized to use cooling systems already installed in their homes.
The provincial housing agency is keeping tight-lipped in the wake of troubling questions around whether some of the most vulnerable people in British Columbia are unauthorized to use cooling systems already installed in their homes.
A newly-unearthed 2017 report examining the efficiency and carbon emissions of heat pumps in multi-unit residential units cites BC Housing officials saying “heat pumps at (one Vancouver seniors complex) are set to only provide heating, not cooling” and that “BC Housing has disabled the cooling function at other heat pump retrofit sites” to save money.The study was co-sponsored by the City of Vancouver, UBC and the Greenest City Initiative
Given that the “Documentation of heat-pump retrofits in multi-unit residential buildings” analysis is several years old, CTV News asked to interview someone with the provincial crown corporation to find out whether the cooling function was disabled during last year’s fatal heat dome and whether the function continues to be restricted at this time.
Three days after several requests, a spokesperson emailed to say: "Thank you for bringing this to our attention. BC Housing will be looking into these assertions." https://www.bchousing.org/
The BC Coroners’ report into the 2021 heat dome found 98 per cent of the 619 deaths happened indoors, most of them in seniors and people with chronic health issues “without adequate cooling systems.”
Robyn Chan, the chair of the city of Vancouver’s planning commission, discovered the document while doing research and is alarmed at the guidelines discussed in the report, which used three BC Housing properties and several strata complexes as case studies.
“It's so frustrating to think that these are vulnerable people who are living in this housing -- they identify many of them are new immigrants, they are living below the poverty line, in many cases,” she noted. “The government is then policing how they're able to keep themselves comfortable and what those levels should be.”
