Practical weather knowledge: Embodied experience, comfort practices and household energy management in a changing climate

Climate change is causing more frequent and extreme weather. Among other consequences, this presents challenges for how people maintain comfortable and healthy indoor environments. Household management of energy consumption – increasingly important in grids reliant on weather-dependent generation like wind and solar – is also complicated by a changing climate. Weather is thus of growing importance to both human comfort and health, and the transition to renewable energy. Yet much remains to be understood about the intersection of weather (extreme or mundane), people's sensory experiences and embodied knowledge of weather, and everyday comfort practices like heating and cooling that both consume energy and mitigate climatic extremes.

Drawing on ethnographic research with 30 Australian households using solar PV and battery storage, this paper explores the role of sensory experience and embodied knowledge in comfort practices. Through illustrative ethnographic examples of what I term practical weather knowledge, I show how people combine embodied understanding with experiential, social, and formal knowledge – such as meteorological data – to navigate (sometimes competing) priorities around indoor comfort and energy management. For example, I demonstrate how embodied knowledge shapes people's sense of when their solar systems are generating energy. I also show how diverse sensory experiences among household members can create challenges for maintaining comfort. I argue that practical weather knowledge will become increasingly important as weather extremes intensify, sitting at the nexus of people's local experiences of a changing global climate, the management of indoor climates, and the negotiation of social dynamics within the home.