As summer temperatures climb, heat stress is a health and safety issue for installers not just a comfort one. Installer spoke to Carhartt about what to wear to manage the risk and keep your cool.
Ask a heating engineer where they feel the summer heat most and the answer isn’t always outside under the sun. A loft space with no airflow, a plant room next to a running boiler, the inside of a van that’s been sitting in the sun all day. These are typical conditions and places for installers, and they can push body temperature up just as much as a heatwave on a building site. Add in roof work, flue terminations and solar installations carried out in direct sun and installers are dealing with a lot of heat stress.
It isn’t just about discomfort. When you’re overheated, concentration drops, reaction times slow and the risk of mistakes rises. For anyone working with gas, electrics or pressurised systems, that’s a genuine safety concern not just an annoyance. The instinct is often to strip back to a T-shirt and shorts, but that isn’t necessarily the answer. What you wear, and what it’s made from, has a bigger effect on how your body copes with heat than most people realise.
Fabric first
Cotton feels like the obvious choice for a hot day: soft, familiar, breathable. But cotton absorbs sweat and holds onto it so once it’s wet, it stays wet, and you’re left carrying extra weight and a clammy feeling for the rest of the shift. Cotton/polyester blends behave very differently. They pull moisture away from the skin so it can evaporate rather than sit there, which is a big part of how the body cools itself down. Carhartt’s Force® range is built around this principle, using FastDry™ technology alongside mesh ventilation panels to improve air flow and dry quickly and flat seams that reduce chafing over a long day. Force® also has antimicrobial properties to reduce smells.
Tencel™ is another ideal fabric for summer. Derived from wood pulp and fully biodegradable, Tencel pulls sweat away from your skin and releases it into the air, drying up to twice as fast as cotton. It is lightweight and drapes more loosely than most workwear fabrics too so air moves more freely but it’s also surprisingly durable so makes for excellent workwear. Carhartt’s Tencel™ Fibre range is designed specifically for women and includes T-shirts, joggers and sweatshirts built for the worksite in summer.
Sun exposure
Roof work, external unit installations and van-to-site trips all add up to plenty of UV exposure, even for a trade that’s often thought of as indoor work. Research shows that working under the UK sun potentially causes one skin cancer death and five new melanoma cases every week, with construction and trade workers among the highest-risk groups. Sunscreen helps (the HSE recommends SPF30 as a minimum on all exposed skin), but it needs reapplying throughout the day which is easy to forget on a busy site.
Clothing also protects the skin by covering it up, but not all material is the same. UPF (Ultraviolet Protection Factor) is the clothing equivalent of an SPF rating and measures how much UV actually gets through a fabric to the skin. An ordinary cotton T-shirt rates around UPF 5, letting through roughly 20 per cent of the sun’s UV and even more once the fabric is stretched or damp with sweat. Opting for purpose-designed clothing with high rated UPF to protect from the sun is a much better choice. Carhartt’s Sun Defender™ range for example, is rated UPF 40+, blocking over 97% of UV, and is light enough that it doesn’t feel like an extra layer in warm conditions. The range includes both short and long sleeve t-shirts and trousers and is a straightforward workwear addition for anyone doing regular rooftop or outdoor work through the summer months.
Don’t overlook the details
Safety glasses matter even more in summer than the rest of the year. Polycarbonate lenses naturally block 100% of UV, are around 10 times more impact-resistant than standard plastic and if you choose options with ventilated frames these will stop heat building up around the temples on a long, bright day.
Feet swell in the heat too, which is why Carhartt boots are built half a size larger than standard fit. Boots with fibreglass safety toes instead of steel will reduce weight and foot fatigue but still keep the same 200-joule impact protection and moisture-wicking insoles will deal with the inevitable sweat build-up inside the boot.
None of this means replacing a kit list overnight. It means treating summer as a season that genuinely changes the demands on workwear, in the same way installers already plan around winter cold or wet weather. For a trade that moves between direct sun and unventilated, hot indoor spaces in the same day, the heat is worth planning for not just putting up with.
To view the Carhartt range visit www.carhartt.com
