Beating The Heat On The Cheap
For all my European darlings who are suffering through this horrible heat wave, my American friends who don't always have access to air conditioning, and anyone else who needs it....
Here are some tips on how to survive the heat of summer at home when you have next to no money and only household basics to work with.
(I'd love it if readers would reblog this and add their own ideas - people need all the help they can get right now!)
Stay hydrated. This is the most important thing. You're going to sweat a LOT and your body needs that replenished as often as possible. Drink WATER as much as possible and cold is best. Soda won't cut the mustard and sports drinks may replenish your electrolytes, but they are not meant for subsistence. If you need to flavor your water to make it more palatable, do it. And I know cold tea is anathema to some, but a glass of sweet or citrusy iced tea might be just the thing to get you through.
Wear loose, breezy clothing. I know the instinct is to wear your smallest, briefest summer garments, but sometimes wearing something larger, looser, and flowy helps to cool you down. The movement of the fabric creates a little bit of a breeze to draw heat away from your skin and helps all that sweating actually cool you down.
Draw the shades. If you have curtains or blinds or window shades, cover the windows, especially on the sunny side of your home. Shading the place will help keep the heat out, at least a little.
Use fans and appliances judiciously. Keep the air moving. I know sometimes it's just blowing hot air around, but it's better than stagnating. Also if you have an exhaust fan above your stove, USE IT. Draw off some of that heat from your cooking and for the love of all things holy, try not to use the oven. (Also, if you're not using your desktop computer or gaming system, unplug it for a while - those things generate a lot of heat!)
Eat cool and light. Try to avoid making meals that are going to heat up the house. If you can, make cold meals or use the microwave instead of the stovetop or oven. If you have an outdoor grill, use that for the evening meal instead of the stove. Also, if you have a blender handy, smoothies are a great way to cool down and also get in a few servings of fruit or vegetables.
Swamp coolers are your friend. If you've got a towel, a drink cooler, a bag of ice, and a box fan, you can make a homemade swamp cooler as well. Put the towel on the floor and the drink cooler on top. Fill the cooler with ice and position the fan so that it's blowing over and around the open cooler from less than two feet away. Elevate it on a box or chair if necessary. This isn't going to cool your entire home, but it can cool a small space and provides a little relief. Just be aware that there will be some sweating from the cooler and you'll need to replace the ice after a while. (The meltwater may be good for watering the garden or doing the washing up though.)
Cold showers take the edge off of many things. At the end of the day, take a shower that's a few degrees cooler than body temperature. Even if you don't do a full scrub or wash your hair, get in and sluice down, or use a pitcher of room-temperature water to give yourself a rinse. This helps your whole body cool down, cleans off the sweat of the day so you don't get breakouts, and helps you sleep cooler and less sticky. (Also, try sleeping under the duvet cover without the duvet inside to stay cooler at bedtime. And definitely have a fan in the bedroom.)
Make some homemade cold spray. This is something I used to make for camping trips. In a spray bottle, combine tap water and aloe gel in about equal measure. Then, if you have it, add 2-3 drops of peppermint essential oil. Shake to combine. You can store the bottle in the fridge when you're at home or tuck it into your bag if you're out and about. A few spritzes on the chest or the back of the neck helps immensely. (Don't spray it on your face or near your eyes. If you have any allergy or sensitivity to peppermint, leave the essential oil out.)
Keep reusable ice packs in the freezer. These can be a lifesaver. They're a quick way to cool down during the day, by cuddling or leaning against while sitting. If you can't find ice packs, fill a freezer bag 3/4 full of ice water with half a cup of rubbing alcohol, squeeze out the air before closing, and reinforce the seams and edges with duct tape. In an emergency when nothing else is working, or if someone starts to overheat, take an ice pack and put it under the arm. There's a whole host of major circulatory vessels in that area and it's a fast way to bring down body temp if someone's in trouble or while you're waiting for emergency services.
Please feel free to add your own tips and stay safe out there!
Soda WILL cut the mustard, actually. Yes, water is better. But soda or iced tea or lemonade or fruit juice or Gatorade is all FINE.
Now is not the time to be worried about Healthy Eating (although I don't think that was OP's motive here.) Whatever you are most likely to ACTUALLY DRINK is what you should be trying to drink. As long as it's not alcoholic, it WILL hydrate you.
You may find that soda becomes too sticky/sweet if you get really hot. You may find that sports drinks also become too intense. Sports drinks can be watered down if that happens. Soda is a bit gross if you water it down - maybe try drinking a glass of plain water instead (it might be the one time it tastes good.) Same goes for fruit juice etc - if it starts tasting really sweet or kinda "thick" your body is trying to tell you to WATER IT DOWN.
Also, with this specific coming heatwave, the humidity is going to be intense. Swamp coolers aren't going to work as well in this kind of weather. If you feel like your DIY swamp cooler isn't giving you much relief, that's why. They work much better in dryer conditions. Fans and cold showers are your best friends in this kind of humidity. Laying in a cool bath also works well. Yeah, obviously it's inconvenient, but it's better than heatstroke.
This kind of heat plus humidity isn't just dangerous to old people, it's dangerous to everybody. Please take it easy out there.
Can't make ice packs? freeze some damp washcloths w some parchment paper between
Get some peppermint or eucalyptus Dr bronners and use that for washing up, don't towel off, just lay a towel down and air dry
Make or buy pedialyte ice pops
Also learn to recognize the signs of heat stroke and if suspected Call 911 and use cold compress on head neck armpits and groin while waiting for the ambulance
Keeping the sun off your windows will actually cool things down in your home dramatically; if you can get some sun shades or even tarps to put over your windows on the outside should reduce the indoor temperature.
Peppermint essential oil is very powerful and efficient but also dangerous. Don't use excessively, don't use on children, pregnant people, or people with neurological problems or epilepsy, or on/near any pets.
I think peppermint hydrolat (the essential oil's byproduct) is probably also efficient to cool off and it's mild enough to not have all the above contraindication.
A good place to put a (well-wrapped, not too icy) cold item to cool off, besides the armpit, is between the legs (this is for comfort, I know nothing about heatstroke prevention). It's also a very hot place with a lot of blood vessels, and it cools me off efficaciously, and it's convenient when I'm sitting at a desk using my hands.
Also yes, cannot stress enough the efficiency of keeping the sun out, and off your walls/windows if at all possible. I used to tape sheets of paper or cardboard on my windows when I didn't have shutters, it was better than nothing. I tried to choose light-coloured material to reflect the heat.
Peppermint does not actually cool you down.
Menthol tricks your cold receptors into firing, in the same way capsaicin tricks your heat receptors. But in the same way that hot peppers don't actually raise your body temperature, peppermint oil won't bring it down. Mint will feel very very nice when you are hot! But! Be careful with it in extreme heat and humidity; masking the early warning/discomfort of heat exhaustion is going to go worse for you in the long run.
I’m going to go a step further and add that, while there is growing evidence to show that the connection is not as strong as it once was, we still have a pretty high correlation between cultures that have very spicy foods and live in a very hot climate.
One reason for this is that it helps you cool down a bit.
Well, capsaicin among other things, increase your body’s tendency to sweat, which as long as you’re at adequate humidity and have good airflow, will only further serve to bring your temperature down.
It will also possibly make your body respond by, trying to react further in the other ways it tries to cool the body down. What all mechanisms those are? I dunno. That’s beyond my area of expertise.
But what it definitely will do is alter your perception of the heat, and possibly make the warmth on the outside seem comparably tame— kind of like how when you walk into the shade on an extremely hot day. The temperature in the shade MAY still be quite warm overall, but the radical difference between the two makes the difference feel very substantial.
Put these things together and, you have both physiological and psychological reasons that will help keep you comfortable and safer in warm weather.
This advice of course means nothing if you don’t have proper access to electrolytes and hydration, and in terms of safety, won’t help too much if you’re in literally 99% humidity with no airflow. But even in higher humidities, more sweat will still cool you off, because you’re removing a substance with an extremely high thermal mass from your body and replacing it with, substantially cooler water, which your body then has to dump heat into to warm up.
@thepioden — any corrections you’d issue to this?
Capsaicin, in high enough doses, can make you flush and sweat since your body is getting 'HOT' signals and is trying to dump that excess heat. This will work to cool you down if!! The ambient temperature is lower than your body temperature and/or the humidity is low enough for evaporative cooling to work. If it's 100f with high humidity, it doesn't matter how much blood you're sending to the skin to cool off, or how much you're sweating, there's nowhere for your body heat to GO, and at that point your only recourse is to put yourself in something cool to shed heat.
If you're in the northern 2/3s of the U.S. and your pipes are underground, your best bet is that cold water. It'll be between 40 and 60f for anyone north of about Oklahoma, and running that cold water over your pulse point can force that heat transference that your body is trying to achieve with sweat. Water can absorb a lot of heat, but your body produces a lot of heat; running water or a LOT of water are needed to chill your toasty mammal physiology out.
