Coping with heat

I remembered another thing I do.

I have one of those hot water bottles wearing a sweater. I fill it about 1/3 and freeze it and then sleep snuggled with it on bad nights. It lasts 3-4 hours.

 

This is surprisingly helpful for a wide variety of situations

 

An ice block in a bowl in front of a fan can be effective

 

A portable evaporative cooler fan with ice blocks in it may help. Maybe a Black and Decker on Amazon.

 

Summer is helllll.

Previously houses in NL had traditional double glazing. The glass kept heat out in summer and cold out in winter

Now this has been replaced by hr++ glazing. That keeps heat inside, ok in winter but in summer it is like a sauna.

My dream would be to oversummer in a cooler climate.

I use a spray bottle to spray my clothes or face. A cold towel in the neck. Cold foot baths.

Mostly I hope the summer is over soon haha.

My fan on the lowest setting is pretty quiet.

I also freeze some water bottles and use them in front of the fan or without fan just put them near me, when they melt, they release their cool.

Edit; I prefer to not to have to use the fan, since it still creates noise.

I wish there was a cooling system without noise though. I will try to look for a human doggypad like @jnmaciuch It seems low budget and quiet, ideal.

 

I might try the bottles idea, I get paranoid about mold. I'm not originally from the UK and never had mold growing up. I know it's summer but I don't really get out of the mindset from winter of preventing mold.

 

What makes you worry about mold? The water use?

 

Thanks, they look good. My slight concern is that I know with the types of reflective, tinted film that can be applied directly to windows, the glass needs to be toughened glass as otherwise the increased heat gain can cause the glass to crack, and apparently this is still a risk with reflective panels of the sort shown in the Amazon link. However, I’m very tempted to try them.

 

Yes, I find perfect air flow seems so critical in the UK else problems spiral fast. Also have a bit of a mold allergy

 

I didn't know about that. This is my second year putting them up. We have double glazing.

 

As Braganca said, if you want to block heat from coming in through windows, you need to place the block on the outside of the glass. My cabin has lots of south-facing windows, so I hang white tarps on the outside. No view, and it's dark inside, but it prevents my cabin from becoming an oven. Maybe I'll hang those tarps today.

Where does the heat go when you freeze that water? If your fridge/freezer in inside your home, you're just putting that heat into that room, plus additional heat due to inefficiency of the freezer.

 

I've never lived anywhere else, but nor have I.

When house are well heated, rooms can be ventilated, and there's no water ingress from leaking gutters, damaged flashing, trapped rainwater, or badly-done alterations, mould doesn't tend to be much of a problem. Not even if like me, you air-dry all your laundry indoors.

 

I did hang them. Darkness has fallen indoors. However, given the sunny day, I'm guessing that I've prevented quite a few degrees of temperature rise in my cabin. Solar ovens are fine for food, but not for living in.

Now it's time to start opening windows in the evening and closing them in the morning.

If the heat does start to really bother me, I can upgrade my solar power system and install a small heat pump. Not dependable for winter heating, due to short daylight hours and cold air, but the cooling would be nice in summer.

 

Yes make sure that you have old style double glazing! Hr++ glazing can suffer from heatshock and crack.

I did see some specials hr++ foils.

I did the tin foil on old style double glazing and it really works. I did put it inside, since I can’t put it on the outside.

 

My freezer does not exude any heat luckily. I would recommend to use cold water in the bottle and to not fully fill them, because ice expands.

 

Are the condenser coils outside? Typical freezers these days have the condenser coils bonded to the outer case of the appliance, so the heat is spread out, so it might not feel much warmer than room temperature, but it's still hundreds of watts of heat added to the room.

A refrigeration system is just a heat pump: it pumps thermal energy from one surface at one temperature to another, with additional heat added due to inefficiency. Ideally, fridges and freezers would have external condenser coils to pump heat out of the house, switchable to an internal coil when outdoor temperatures drop below desired level. If appliances (with coils on the unit) were standardized, rooms meant for them could have a pair of vents that could circulate outside air past the coils. I wonder how much energy that fairly cheap and simple change would save worldwide.

Yesterday was my first truly hot day of the year (26C). I'm very glad that I put up the sunblocker.

Solar insolation is about 1 kw/m^2. So, an unshaded window letting sunlight in is like having a 1 kw heater running full blast in that room. Since glass absorbs some of that energy, and even aluminum foil (shiny side) might only be 80+% reflective, putting foil on the inside might still add a few hundred watts of heat to the room. Of course, some windows are just too difficult to access for an outside sunshield.

 

But wouldn't that mean it doesn't matter? Feeling overheated is about perception, not temperature. My little hand-held fan does nothing to cool the room but it makes a big difference to my comfort.

I couldn't feel any temperature difference at all behind my fridge/freezer, so for the heck of it I measured it with an ecology thermometer.

At the warmest part of the day, the space behind the freezer was 0.32º C warmer than the coolest part of the room. It was also 2.16º C cooler than the end of the room where the (shaded) window is.

The problem seems to be that people put windows in houses, not that they put freezers in them.

 

This is the thing that fascinates me about this. I used to live in Singapore. 25-35 and very high dew point all the time. The country depends upon air con but didn’t live in it, I acclimatised. I spent time in places without it. I used to do long hikes, run even (not in the middle of the day) and be dripping with sweat. But fine.

Now I don’t so much feel hot, or even sweat, but when the temp is above 23 my body breaks. So it’s like you say nit the temperature or perhaps even the perception but something even underlying that. I notice feeling ‘weird’ before I notice feeling hot.

 

Thermal energy is thermal energy. If you put 300 watts of heat into a room, it's going to be warmer than if you didn't. It all adds up. Running my PC (60+ watts) for a few hours raises my room's temperature noticeably more than running my Raspberry Pi (20 W). I find that even half a degree makes a difference in comfort level.

Windows can make a bigger difference than low-power computers, so even using white curtains inside might let you avoid a degree or more of temperature rise.