Coping with heat

Running a desktop PC really heats up my room. This year I moved to a laptop without a graphics card (less power) and a mini PC with an N100 CPU that draws 10W.

 

White fully light-blocking curtains have been brilliant for me so far.

 

I bought a cooling towel for the neck on Amazon. I'm not sure why having something cool on the neck helps so much, but it works for me.

 

I know, but I was talking about temperature perception. That is a very different thing, as people who've been through the menopause will tell you. Possibly in more detail and at greater length than seems necessary.

Besides which, even non-menopausal humans aren't great at sensing tiny temperature changes, so even if the fridge/freezer raised the temperature in the whole kitchen by a third of a degree (which it doesn't), it'd make no difference to my comfort.

The small patch of air warmed by the fridge/freezer isn't the cause of the uncomfortable temperature in the kitchen anyway, as evidenced by the drop in the thermometer reading as soon as the real problem dips below the horizon.

So it does make sense to freeze ice packs if heat from the sun's making me feel unwell and overheated. The net gain in comfort is substantial, and that's without taking into account that 90% of the time I'm not even in the same room as the freezer.

If you were talking about the problem of superfluous heat generated by cats, I'd be with you all the way. They're ridiculously hot and they keep trying to sit on you.

 

Cats. They’ll happily leave an air conditioned room to find someone to sit on, no matter how hot it is. If they can complain at that person about the weather, all the better.

 

Yes, but the thermal energy added to a room adds to the perception. Localized cooling (ice pack on your skin) definitely overrides a fractional degree of room temperature. However, without that localized cooling, half a degree might make the difference between feeling too hot or too cold. My 60W miniPC does noticeably raise the temperature in my (small) room. Refrigerators use a few hundred watts for roughly 8 hrs a day, so if I had a fridge in my room, it would significantly reduce my comfort level in the warm season.

For the previous example, putting ice in front of a fan does increase comfort level if the fan is blowing the cooled air directly on the person. For cooling the house, it fails miserably, since it adds heat.

 

I don’t think that freezing water bottles is contributing that much to the heat of the house considering that most people are keeping the freezer running anyways on account of the food inside of it.

 

How does this work?