The summer is coming soon to the Northern Hemisphere. How do you plan to combat the heat? I live in a regular apartment without air conditioning, and installing a full-scale system is not an option. I wonder what my options are, and how other people are planning to deal with the issue.
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If you have a roof, you can put a sprinkler on it and spray water with a tap timer. Just enough to wet it, so that the water can evaporate and cool the roof.
If you have windows facing the sun, get blockout curtains and close them before the sun hits them.
If your front door has a window, get an expanding shower rail and hang a blockout curtain.
If you have internal doors, keep them closed.
Wear clothes made from natural fibres.
Drink extra water.
Move slower.
Eat cold meals, like salads, rather than cooked meals that heat up your home.
Install a ceiling fan and keep the air moving.
When the sun is off a window, open it to encourage ventilation.
Keep air moving at night.
Put a thin cover on your bed.
Have cold showers.
Source: I live in a hot climate.
First line of defense: blocking out sunlight in all windows during the day
Second line of defense: highly active drafting, creating a cross-breeze when the outdoor temperature is lower than the indoor temperature
Third line of defense: Fan, reduces perceived temperature significantly
Fourth line of defense: Acclimatization, warm showers before bed (supposedly helps)
Fifth line of defense, in case everything else fails - basically a heatwave: portable AC
Basically keeping all the windows open through the night and closing them in the morning. I also sleep upstairs directly below the roof during the colder months, but move to the ground floor in summer, where it gets much less hot.
Yep plus blackout blinds throughout the day, they massively help.
And/or blackout curtains as well. They pull double duty as an insulating layer, not just blocking light.
Get a portable window air conditioner and do your best to insulate the room its in.
This.
Having ONE room that can get cool enough is a game-changer for sleep and daytime respite. Ideally it’s a North window.
The A/C
/thread
Lmao, I know the post is asking for outside A/C in the actual details, but the title… Lol
Haha yes i know. I was jk.
I lived in an apartment without an ac and I also wasn’t allowed to install a window ac.
I ended up buying a portable ac which got the job done well enough. They’re not perfect but they’re miles better than open windows with box fans.
Thankfully I live near the ocean so I’ll be in there a bunch.
It really just depends on your climate, geography, and infrastructure.
Where is I was raised, it would be consistently 90-100 Fahrenheit throughout the summer. And one week that was always up to 110.
I had no ac, but a constant broken swamp cooler. So basically no real ac.
In the mornings and night when it did become cool, you would open all the windows and doors for the air and wind to blow through, and then about 9am you would close the windows and blinds and deal with the heat.
Sleeping through the worst parts of the heat is not a bad idea.
Sleeping through the worst parts of the heat is not a bad idea.
In 2021 when the heat got oppressive here, we couldn’t sleep through any of it. it was 45c in one daytime, and with 90% humidity it was an actual killer. There was no sleep at night, no sleep all day, it was all just counting the hours until it was over – or we had an excuse to go to work where - for me - it was a cool basement attached to a cooler datacenter. We joked we should move desks into there, but our little group may have left a door open to the DC and let the chiller do an extra 10% space on those days!
Fan.
+1
We use that too. It’s less impactful than using a clim and it’s still enough for us.
We open the windows when the temperature dips, especially at night. If the wind is low or dead, we will use a fan to push the hot air out of one window so cool air gets pulled in though the rest of them.
We have a portable AC in the main room and a window AC in the bedroom for when it gets too hot during the day, or doesn’t dip at night.
If you live in a dry climate, a swamp cooler could work.
Uhh, I live in the southern hemisphere and I mostly ate popsicles (not all the time, they are very sugary) and kept my ceiling fan on. I would also recommend colder and more frequent showers and drinking cold water.
Also, I guess you could try getting a fan and putting a bag of ice behind it, I do not know if that would work but someone I know did that during summer.
On an unrelated note, I probably won’t need to do absolutely anything for winter here since it doesn’t get very cold.
How’s the humidity where you live? If you live in a dry climate, a swamp cooler might be a good option.
If you live in a humid climate, window units or portable AC’s are better than nothing. A long time ago, the only AC I had was a window unit in my bedroom. It was miserable overall but at least I had someplace I could go to stay cool and sleep comfortably at night.
Not strictly cooling the apartment, but I keep a large supply of ice cold water ready to drink whenever I start to get too warm—if you can effectively cool yourself throughout the day, it raises the maximum comfortable temperature of the apartment as a whole, and it’s usually easier to cool a single body than a large volume of air.
Open the windows at night. It’s more efficient if you have blinds and can close them to prevent the sun to heat the windows during day
AC mainly. I have a ceiling fan as well.
