Hi there, time to share ways to keep your home cool during hot times
So ok, usual ways I use:
- open everything during night
- close everything during day
- external sheets on windows without shutters
- some curtains to prevent heat from going upstairs
I was also wondering if plants could also help inside, any ideas ?
Share your advices !
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I was also wondering if plants could also help inside, any ideas ?
They shouldn’t. Plants can raise humidity, but they have no power to break the the laws of thermodynamics. Once heat is in your house you can only really move it out of your house; there is no destroying it in place. Note this does not apply to plants just on the outside of your home, like on a roof.
Watch your use of appliances carefully. Even a fridge generates heat - it might be better to place it outdoors or semi-outdoors if you’re going to be really hardcore about your approach.
A better insulated house will keep heat out as well as cold, so all usual tips on building or renovating your envelope apply.
Sleep outside, if you have a space. Get a deck umbrella, a mosquito net and a cot and a sleeping bag (actually on super hot days I used to just sleep on a towel). It’s so much cooler than trying to get by indoors with no AC, even with fans. And it’s rather pleasant.
I am fortunate to have moved to a climate where the heat is less severe and when it is hot it tends to be dry-ish. My house does not have AC so we put a big exhaust fan on the top floor and crack a window downstairs. Works so far, but we have some small portable AC units for the bedrooms just in case we need them.
Probably not exactly the answer you’re looking for.
If you have access to sun and are tech savvy, hop on Facebook market place or equivalent. You can probably get very cheap used solar panels that still have plenty of output. Rig up a AC unit in one room and cool just it.
move to Alaska?
Get a box fan and a coil of copper pipe, run the coil all around the front of the box fan like a snake going back and forth, on the top end of the pipe attach a box for icewater, and a bucket to catch the outflow.
Put an adjustable valve at the end going into the drain bucket and let it dribble a bit. You’ll have to adjust it to get the longest cold air time/least having to get up to empty the valve
It’s not super efficient but it’s cheap and can be made with parts in the garage
You’ll need a lot of ice tho
Just get AC, it works so well for de-humidifying too.
But otherwise blackout curtains can help a bit but also radiate heat themselves.
Blackout curtains on the sunny side reduce a lot of daytime heat.
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Pretty much anything on a roof will cool you down. The soil which will contain water is slower to heat while the plants will be be absorbing solar energy and “perspiring” to cool you down.
Locations under large trees can be locally up to 10 degrees colder in the summer and 10 degrees warmer in the winter.
Didn’t say if you own the home or not, but if so:
Mind it’s only hot for 2-4 months out of the year for me, so I have a winterized attic fan. Just means I’m not losing heat in the winter and paid a little more to buy it. You can just get a regular attic fan if it’s never or rarely cold where you live.
You leave windows open, but now there’s negative pressure from pushing air out the attic where a lot of the heat is trapped and sucking in air from outside even if there’s no breeze. I leave the attic access hole open when it’s running. The rare day I still use a Window A/C to sleep.
Drink alot of water, then try to pee in the air and catch it with your mouth, all the sudden the heat is the least of your problems.
If you can afford it, buy a single window AC unit, install it in your bedroom, and then live in there all summer. That’s what my parents did when I was little and we lived in a house with no AC. If you can’t afford that, a box fan in the window once the sun goes down, then shut it off in the early morning and close/black out the window/draw shades as soon as the sun is up to try and keep the cooler air in that one room for as long as possible.
What part of “without AC” did you fail to ducking understand?
I mean, pretty much any person with central AC would read that as “without central AC.” And the answer would be the same: Fucking install AC. Installing central AC is too big of a project for most, so a window unit is a decent stopgap.
Yup. A $100-200 window unit(personally I prefer “portable” units with the exhaust hose to the window - keeps the main unit out of the sun that causes it to work harder) will be your best bet every single time. But sure, go ahead and check the price of tinting every window(about $20 per window) or getting blackout curtains(~$20 per panel in my experience) or any of the myriad of lesser solutions. Then, when you’ve spent as much or more with worse results and finally cave on getting a small unit, you’ll wonder why you ever did anything else before. Nevermind the fact that OP basically said “so aside from all the normal passive options, what else is left?” AC. That’s what’s left. Unless you want to advise them to replace all the insulation/windows/seals in their house.
But sure, go ahead and check the price of tinting every window(about $20 per window) or getting blackout curtains(~$20 per panel in my experience) or any of the myriad of lesser solutions.
tin foil and painters tape $1.50 per window.
Unless you want to advise them to replace all the insulation/windows/seals in their house.
winter blankets and old shirts.
couple with a window fan and a swamp cooler can reduce internal temps 10-15°.
poor af growing up. that’s what we did. bonus points if you’re in a trailer. you can open both ends and have fans blowing from one end to the other.
I mean, sure, if you want to look like you live in a meth lab. Or you could spend a little bit and have something 100x better and actually functional and not be miserable. This is like that whole boot problem: you can only afford $20 boots so you buy them and they wear out in 6 months. Over 5 years you spend $200 when a nice pair that would’ve lasted as long or longer would cost you $100.
You can get an ac for like $60 new, like $20 on Facebook. Walmart has Artic Kings on sale every year for that much. But yeah, spend hours of your time Macgyvering a makeshift solution that maybe drops you 10°. You know what “10° degrees cooler” is where I am? 100°. You’d still be plenty miserable.
yeah sure. the costs stop after you buy it. not like you have to pay to run it or anything.
I think you underestimate how poor some families are.
Energy star sticker on mine says $46 a year to run it. $3.84 a month. If you can’t plan for that then you have bigger issues than AC.
Look, I’ve been poor. What do you think happens when something major like your car breaks down? You figure it out. You don’t really have a choice so you do whatever you can to make it happen. You have to take that same determined energy and go “this is what’s important right now, how do I make this a priority?”. Is it easy, no. But it’s not gonna happen if you just throw your hands up and give up. And sure, if you want to get stuck in that boot paradox of constantly replacing lesser solutions and eventually spending more than the right one in the first place, be my guest.
The main problem with swamp coolers is they don’t work very well or at all in high humidity climates due to the way in which they cool air. I’m from East Coast US and it gets pretty damn humid in the summer, which is honestly worse than the heat some days. AC is honestly the best solution if dealing with heat and humidity because it combats both issues even if it can’t fully cool a space.
Dryer climates though? Wet towel over a box fan all the way baby!
Window units are the best bang for the buck. Don’t worry about expensive ones, $100 goes a LONG way to cooling one bedroom. And it’s cheaper than doing the whole house.
We have a big in wall unit in our apartment that can do the whole living space, but we hardly ever run it. We just run the bedroom one, set to like 70-75f, just to take the humidity out and chill it down a bit. A nice place to go cool down if you get hot while doing things around the house. We don’t run it when we’re not home, because even the cheapest Menards special can cool the room down in minutes, and it’s cheaper to not run it when we don’t need it.
Beware of the units with the hose… You’re paying more, and trading the convenience of not lugging a big unit into the window (small ones really aren’t that bad), for the inconvenience of having to dump the water (unless you pay more for one that can pump it out the window).
But by far the worst thing about the hose units, if they only have one exhaust hose, and no return hose? They are less efficient, because they create negative pressure in your house that sucks hot air in through every crack.
For more information see here.
Upvoted for Technology Connections. If you didn’t link that video I was going to. Window units, if you can mount them or get help mounting them, are superior in every way.
My method is “live in Alaska.”
Something I haven’t seen mentioned is an attic fan. They’re mounted on the ceiling of your highest floor. These used to be common before AC became so widespread. Basically, you open your windows, and the fan sucks air in through the windows, through the house and up into the attic, where an exhaust fan can push it out.
They were mostly had such poor insulation as to be not worth having because of the losses in winter. There is a good reason most people hove tore them out when they get ac.
Second this but wanted to add that a remotely mounted fan (one that’s connected to the intake vent through a duct rather than being mounted directly in the ceiling) significantly improves the experience because it cuts down on the noise and minimizes heat losses in winter.
We have a gable mounted attic fan that draws air through the house. 5000 cfm makes for a nice breeze.
Gable-mounted still incurs direct vibration into the structure. I have a QuietCool whole house fan that is suspended in midair from the gables, to reduce that vibration and noise, while being ducted from a framed opening in the hallway ceiling.
Whole house fans are pretty great during the right season, but you need to be aware of the humidity level outside or you can make things worse even if seems cooler at the moment. I also have central AC that gets run either when it’s too humid or too hot at night. But overall I’m very happy with the whole house fan and only having moderate insulation - the house resists heat incursion during the day and then we can quickly cool things down in the evening without using too much electricity.
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If you live in a humid area, AC will become more and more valuable. Wet bulb temperature. At some point your sweat will no longer evaporate and you’ll die. Climate change cometh.
Thanks, I went down a rabbit hole reading about wet bulb temperature.
Yeah, this recent heat is expected to cause deaths. Not only because of the heat itself, but because of the humidity. Humans can tolerate extremely high +100°F temps when it’s dry… But when you start cranking up the humidity, that tolerable temperature quickly begins to drop. At 100% humidity, that tolerable temperature is only in the mid 80’s. Above that point, even the best fans won’t help cool you. Because fans only work by evaporating sweat, and in high humidity that sweat doesn’t evaporate.
