A large majority of Malaysian homes and buildings have air-conditioning these days. The behaviour of using air-conditioning has changed dramatically. In the old days, a family would only switch on the air-con for sleep, and most probably the whole family would cramp into the one room that had the air-con.

Nowadays it is not uncommon for middle-class families to have the air-con on almost the whole day and to air-condition the whole apartment or house.

So this begs the observation -the tropical design of Malaysian houses has now become more of a liability for this modern behaviour. We still build houses with plenty of large windows for ventilation, which ironically are not used for that purpose anymore.

The air-well is just a waste of space that most homeowners spend extra money to make into another room. Worst of all, the windows have now become the major source of heat gain in an air-conditioned interior.

In temperate territories, architects are obsessed with minimising heat loss because the interior of the home has a large temperature differential with the exterior. The same nowadays is true for modern Malaysian homes.

We try to keep the interior at more than a 10 degrees Celcius (target 23C vs 33C outside) difference from the exterior. The air-conditioners have to work very hard here due to the humidity and our homes are badly insulated.

Air-cons have their compressors on throughout their duty cycle. Doors have large slits, the windows don't seal properly, roofs are not insulated and normal bricks are really not good insulators.

Think about it. Nowadays we, too, need good insulated homes just as much as those living in Scandinavia, albeit we want to keep heat out. Like a cave, a well-insulated home equals a cool home.

We can start by having more affordable double-glazed windows. Double-glazed windows also keep the noise out. We should deploy better roof insulation. Most new houses don't even put the fibre-cotton insulation in anymore.

Unfortunately, there is no incentive for developers to shoulder these extra costs. On the whole, we lose out as we waste massive amounts of energy to keep our buildings cool. So the more we can save in this area, the better it is on our pockets and environment.

Architects, developers, legislators and environmental action groups should look into this issue of more energy efficient building codes and practices.

Instead of developers offering their low-quality fittings as standard, why not sell the houses bare? Most homeowners will rip out half their houses to put in quality fittings anyway. Why waste?

Besides money, it costs a lot of energy and environmental damage to manufacture building materials. Giving a choice to sell a bare house, in fact, should increase the developers’ profit since they will probably sell the property at almost the same price as fitted.

The homeowner saves by not having to destroy first, then rebuild.