Hi, I’m moving from a fifth story apartment unit in an eight story building, to a fifth story unit in a five story building. Which means I’ll be on the top floor at the new building. The unit is not a penthouse, there’s a roof overhead.
Temperatures around here hover around 95°F with high humidity most of the day, so heat is a big deal. Is my new unit likely to be hotter than my old unit due to having less building material above me to guard from the sun?
Could depend on how well insulated the roof over your head is, but I’d guess that you’re going to see a major upgrade of your monthly electric bill.
I lived in a 4-story apartment several years ago. I was on the ground floor. That was generally comfortably cool. But sometimes I walked around the hallways on the other floors. The halls in the top floor had big fans sitting out, at intervals, to move the air around-- and it was still like a sauna up there.
I would expect you’ll probably have higher cooling costs in summer and lower heating costs in winter. I’m not sure that it’s because you’re closer to the sun… I’ve always thought of it as “heat rises,” but I’m not a scientist.
Property manager here - in our units, yes considerably so.
I’ve lived in/visited many apartments and the top floors have always been hotter, much hotter when you get above about 10 floors. I found a paper, online, on convection in tall buildings and it confirmed this.
The best is when you live in the top apartment in a building with a central boiler. That way, your apartment is the hottest in the summer but coldest in the winter because you’re the furthest away from the boiler.
It also depends a bunch on how the building is heated / cooled. Around here, most condo/apartment buildings have individual HVAC units for each unit. So there ought to be little or no difference between the conditions inside any unit due to height. You would get a much larger difference depending on whether your unit faces N, E, S, or W.
In general in large buildings there’s enough structure between the ceiling of your unit and the roof surface that it isn’t proximity to the roof heat which matters. It’s much more a matter of adequate central HVAC provision to the top end of the building. For a central chilled water cooling system the upper floors are usually closest to the chiller & hence get the coldest water.
Regardless of the units’ arrangements, interior hallways are usually centrally heated / cooled and then GreasyJacks’ superb summation applies. Although the impact of that on the interior of your unit could be large or small depending on insulation, exposure, frontage, etc.
You say you’re changing buildings. That alone will far overshadow the difference between being on floor 5 of 5 versus 5 of 8. One building may be well insulated or have sufficient HVAC capacity whereas the other went Cheap Charlie on both insulation & capacity. Etc.
The best advice I can offer would be to compare the temperature of the interior hallways on your floor of each building on a single hot day at nearly the same time. And be sure to understand how your individual unit is heated / cooled. And how that’s paid for.
Another issue is windows. A unit with lots of windows will get much hotter in the summer than one with fewer windows.
My wife and I once had an apartment in a converted attic of a very large older house. In winter we had to block the heat vents entirely because the heat rising from the apartments below us was more than sufficient. Summers were also bad, and we couldn’t get along without a room air conditioner. Of course, there was no insulation to speak of. It was a very nice apartment otherwise, but it convinced us we really needed to buy a house.
We live on the third floor, which is the top floor. It gets very hot, even in the winter. Sometimes in October, when it is in the 60s outside, we still have the AC on, because we don’t get good flow-through from the windows, and the people below us have the heat on. If we had a corner unit, we could probably get better breezes, and cool off with the windows. We hardly ever have the heat on, though. It’ll be 40 degrees outside, and we don’t have the heat on.
But the AC constantly runs May through September. The building doesn’t have AC in the hallways, and they are oppressively hot in the summer.
It depends entirely on the building.
An old building with wood framed floors and no central air will show a much greater increase in the heat of the upper floors than a modern poured concrete building with adequate central AC.
My building is old and it’s noticeable, my parents is new and even on the 20th floor there’s no difference from the lobby.
The office buildings I maintain are 14 stories and 13 stories. On extremely hot days with a lots of direct sun light I have more hot calls on the top floor. I would never rent an office on the top floor of a high rise building unless the rent was less than the lower floors.
I lived in the fourth floor of a four storey building. It may have been a little warmer than the floors below, but the fact that no one was walking on my ceiling made each of those temperature degrees well worth it.
I’m curious about this bit. How does having a roof stop it being a penthouse?
On reflection though maybe I’m reading this wrong. Are those just two separate statements separated by a comma?
I was trying to clarify the layout of the unit but I suppose my semantics were not correct.
A penthouse usually has a roof overhead. A penthouse is when the entire top floor of an apartment building is one unit, big enough to be a large house, usually with two levels, an attic (for storage), and if it’s old, servants’ rooms with a separate entrance. Some older places with penthouses with servants’ quarters allow the primary tenant to sublet them, since practically no one has live-in servants anymore, other than nannies, and families usually want them to have a room by the children.
The fact that they usually have attics, I suppose, could be some people’s idea of not having the roof directly overhead.
Penthouses are usually in the types of high-rises that have flat roofs, and roof access for all tenants.
If you are in the top floor of a small building with a peaked roof, you are not in the kind of building that usually has what is properly called a “penthouse.”
Doesn’t even need to be 10 floors- I think it has more to do with the distance from the top of the building that the distance from the ground.Both my sister and I have two story houses- one a single family and the other a two family. The second floor is much warmer than the first floor in both cases.
OP you need to see if the building allows window AC’s. Just look up and see if any are installed in the other apartments. It’s a simple DIY install that you can remove & take with you. Get a 120V unit unless you want to pay for an electrician to install 220V.