The Senate wants to simplify the installation of air conditioning systems in condominiums. At the risk of seeing exterior split units and their inconveniences flourish, as in China, on facades.
Faced with repeated heatwavesTHE Senate wants to facilitate the installation of air conditioners in condominiums. A development welcomed by some, but which worries renovation specialists, for whom the air conditioning should only take place after insulation and improvement of the building.
Air conditioning: the Senate wants to lift the brakes on co-ownership
On July 8, in the middle of third heatwave of 2026the passage in the Senate of the “Housing Recovery” bill pushed senators to react to the historic intensity of the second. We are not at final reading, but it could be that:
– THE “summer comfort” enters into the legal definition of efficient energy renovation and in the multi-year work plans (PPT) of the co-ownerships;
– In the event of refusal at the general meeting, a new general assembly may decide by simple majority to authorize the installation of an air conditioning system modifying the exterior appearance of the building ;
– L’opinion of the Architects of Buildings of France on exterior solar protection (shutters, sunshades) becomes simple and no longer restrictive.
Mathieu Gilli, the Energy Business Director of the Acceo building design office. © Accéo
This summary is distributed by the Acceo design office and by its subsidiary Alber, which specializes in small condominiums (less than 20 lots), which are sounding the alarm because as it stands, the “Senate text does not at any time say that air conditioning must come after the diagnosis of the building“. According to them, theinstallation of air conditioning in condominium should only intervene as a last resort, after having exhausted all possibilities for improving the envelope.
For Marilyne Lacaze, the director of Alber, the “small co-ownerships, often the most vulnerable to heat, today have access to financing – MaPrimeRénov’ Copropriété, collective eco-PTZ – which makes it possible to deal with insulation, ventilation and solar protection before sizing a much smaller and much less expensive air conditioning. It is this path that must be secured, not shortened“.
We understand that the facilitation of air conditioning could ensure that co-ownerships opt for such a measure without worrying about others. It would be cheaper, faster, but would amount to a sort of plaster comfort.
Marilyne Lacaze, the director of Alber. © Accéo
Air-conditioned kettle strainers?
In their press release, they do not mention one of the issues of the bill, which aims put back on the market the approximately 700,000 housing units known as category F or G thermal sievesprovided that the owner undertakes to carry out “renovation work to bring it back into decency standards” – according to Mayor Info. Let’s imagine a thermal strainer also thermal kettlerenovated cheaply to be brought back into the “standards of decency“, by air conditioning. Carbon footprint in winter, carbon footprint in summer, in a context where the French carbon objectives for 2030 seem never to have been stated.
Accéo illustrates its remarks with an image of wood fiber insulation and pleads for air conditioning on insulation with a strong phase shift. © Accéo
The situation becomes more complex when we take into account the great teaching of first three heatwaves of 2026 : A good DPE classification does not guarantee good performance in terms of summer comfort. Clearly, virtuous housing in terms of energy, according to the DPE classification, can at the same time be a thermal kettle. There too, adding air conditioning becomes an ecological crime.
Acceo and Alber however, stick to discussing housing in general, and Mathieu Gilli, the Energy Business Director of the Acceo building design office, discusses the priority work to be carried out before air conditioningin all cases: insulate and ventilate well.
Insulate and ventilate well
It would be essential to favor dense insulating materials, such as wood fiber or cellulose wadding, rather than glass wool. “With wood fiber, we delay the arrival of heat under a roof by 12 hours, while glass wool, particularly thin, only offers 4 hours of thermal phase shift“.
Furthermore, he ventilation should not be neglected, the first lever for cooling a building. Upgrading it would require two simple actions: installing air fans in the common areas and securing the nighttime opening of the windows so thathot air accumulated during the day can be evacuated at night. On walls, the same principle applies: installing ventilated cladding, with an air gap between the insulation and the covering, allows the heat to escape by convection before even reaching the insulation.
Without these two steps, air conditioning only compensates, at great expense, for what the building should have stopped on its own.
View of Paris from the 6th floor of a copro in the 1960s. The parking lot is in the process of being revegetated, the Parisian zinc, one of the worst heatwave solutions, is never repainted white, and for players as it stands there is only one exterior split, but that could change very quickly! © Jonas Tophoven
The biogeosourced option
Biogeosourced construction, whether new or renovated, drastically reduces carbon emissions in construction for high-performance solutions in winter and summer comfort. Air fans, night openings, ventilated cladding, all of this is commonly applied in schools where new climatic construction benefits from a clear lead over the rest of French buildings. Reports on site during the heatwave showed that the overheating lasted so long that it was no longer possible to stick to the organization of controversies surrounding air conditioning hampered and nasty ecologists.
That said, theextent of heatwaves and their duration was such that it pushed all constructive systems to their limits. L’air conditioning option on biogeosourced is not aberrant in the long term, and this is why we are starting to study the effect of air conditioning vibrations on light frames, in the same way as the effects of washing machines. Likewise, the questions of thermal phase shift of biosourced insulators must be rethought in the light of heatwave episodes of permanent warming, where the low inertia of wooden structures sometimes becomes an advantage.
A plaster building policy
The evolution of the “Relaunch of housing” law does not result so much in introduce air conditioning as a sticking plasterbut rather reveals the immense current impasse in the policy of renovation of the built stock in France, in the face of a new climate expected and largely produced by Building activities around the world.
It seems that by using the very questionable “Housing Recovery” law as a sort of legislative rider, the government and its supporters are reacting with a sort of populist panic by seeking the quickest response, in a context of profound questioning of the foundations of thermal regulation since the first oil shock.
Source: batirama.com / Jonas Tophoven / © Laure Pophillat / IA
