(please end my suffering)
You must log in or register to comment.
Meanwhile I’m living in the basement of a couple who thinks an appropriate temperature is like 65f freezing my nuts off all summer.
~18 degrees Celsius
When can I move in? /s
but seriously that’s my ideal temperature year round, much to the chagrin of anyone else when I get a hotel room with AC
We got Mr blanket-for-skin over here
I’m wearing a hoodie all the time and hearing “aren’t you hot?” every time I walk through the house. No… That would be why I’m wearing a hoodie even though it’s 85 outside…
Tonight it cooled down to 19°C where I live. I opened all windows at about 10pm, when the room thermometer measured 31°C in the living room.
When I woke up at 7 it was still 26°C inside.
This is bullshit
You need a fan to blow the cold outside air into ur apartment
I feel like I’ve seen this headline every year for half a decade.
Time to put those heat pumps to use, we are not doing anything about climate change so it’s the new normal.
get small towel/flannel
soak in water and squeeze out until damp but not dripping
drape over your shoulders close to your neck
this directly cools your carotid and jugular, tricking your brain into thinking it’s colder than it is as well as cooling the rest of your body
I had ordered an airco before this madness started, but unfortunately the had to order it and it hasn’t arrived yet. It has been hot for days already, it’ll be 35 or higher the next 4 days, and I live under an almost flat, black roof with the sun on my the entire day. There will be no eepy sleepy time
Why is this whole thing of Americans thinking Europe doesn’t have AC? Are you guys dumb? Of course we have AC, even in places like Scotland.
Because depending on the country, it is indeed true. Not many houses here in germany have an AC installed. Because it was just fine not having one a decade or two ago.
I just saw a short on YouTube of some Irish guy talking about how he didn’t have or want AC
I live in the UK, and seeing air conditioning in a house is maybe like a 5% probability maximum. The story is pretty similar in places on the continent I have seen, except maybe bits of Spain and France. Sure, commercial buildings, trains (with a notable exception being
hellthe Central Line), and cars have AC, but that’s only for when you go out in the day, except for hotels that more often have AC.
Australians:
Protip: Take a shirt and wet it down, then wear it and sit in front of a fan. It works like an air cooler. The evaporation draws the heat out of your body and the fan turbo-charges this process.
As a Brazilian who’s also experienced with a hot climate, I’d say this would work if anthropogenic climate change weren’t leading to… wet bulb… high temperatures. When current temperatures are 40°C and the air’s relative humidity is practically 100%, no amount of wetting or sweating will get rid of the warmth, because evaporation can’t happen when the air is already saturated.
Good point, I suppose the Aussie solution works best in a hot and DRY climate.
When my wife and I were looking for a home, our main priority was actually that it’s “climate proof”.
We found a souterrain apartment facing east, on top of a hill, far from any rivers or forest.
So it stays cool in the summer even without A/C, and is unlikely to flood or get caught in a forest fire.I have a dislike souterrain flats, because while they keep cool in summer, in winter it’s a heatsink radiating away all the heat you pay for, even with modern insulation. At least my experience.
Heating costs are divided equally among all tenants, we only have one meter :)
Ah, if you have district heating that’s nice.
Doesn’t that depend on the relative temperatures? Surely the ground is warmer than a typical winter day.
My experience is, while that is true, problem is, if you want to move away from the ground temperature, which is, let’s just say, 9°C experience-wise, then you will need to have your heating running 24-7 to move it to a liveable temperature, even if that temp is just 16°C. My perspective is insofar biased that it comes from gas heating, and I had no control over that place’s heating. So in short: fuck gas. My current living situation is as follows. I live on the second floor. Left of me, there’s a flat that’s heating. Right of me, there’s a flat that’s heating. On top of me, there’s a flat that’s heating. Below me, there’s a flat that’s heating and behind me is the hallway, which has 20°C for the entire year. Basically, I have my heating turned to frost protection and I get 25°C, no joke. Plus I have district heating now. So that’s a massive improvement.
What is souterraine?
A fancy French word for basement.
Actually a floor that’s halfway between street level and basement.
So it’s possible to build normal windows into it, but they’re very low to (or slightly below) the ground outside.A fancy French word for basement. It’s just a regular french word.
Cul-de-basse-fausse, that would be a fancy french word !
The only issue you can have is high humidity/mold due to the high temperature difference in summer but that can usually be adressed with proper ventilation at night.
For anyone looking for some cheap help tips:
-
Block the sun from comming in, by hanging a curtain or bed sheets on the outside of the window. Of course real shutters would be even better, but price and time wise this gets you there.
-
Close your windows in the morning BEFORE 8:30 or so. Open then after 20:00 BUT ONLY iit’s colder outside. Keep them open during the night. You can not cool a house down with warm air. Yes it’s warm inside, but it’s even hotter outside so opening a window during the day does not help you. If you like a breeze, buy a fan
We do nr 2 (we have a store for nr 1 + sort of blinders), we got the temp at only 28-29°C.
Outside:
Holy fucksticks, 47… Good luck out there
Yes, this exactly! This works especially well if you have temperature sensors in your house, since then you can know when exactly to open and close based on the difference between internal and external temperatures (or at least that’s what I say to myself to justify my Home Assistant setup). Extra effective if you put a fan in the window during the cooler night.
Sensor? Home Assistant? Howmuch is good enough…
BTW just in case, I think it was TechnologyConnections who did a video of a fan. But the air from a fan creates friction with more air, and you can get way more out of a fan when it’s surrounded by more air (so don’t stuff it in a carton window hole)
For 1 these metallized emergency blankets work much better. Aluminum foil also works but it’s not as durable when put outside
I’m in the attic so all heat goes to my room; I need to keep the shades down 95% but leave the window open so the heat can escape and air can circulate.
-
Houses that trap heat also trap cool air.
People who say their well-insulated house “traps heat” are probably keeping their windows open in the hottest part of the day.
Cold places usually have giant windows to let more sunlight in. You can definitely optimize for heating or cooling efficiency
This is simply not true. Many Europeans have windows specifically designed to let infrared radiation in, but block it on the way out. So as soon as any sun hits any window, that’s a lot of heat coming in and not going out. Very nice when it’s cold, but not as good when it’s hot. Most people have blinds and curtains on the inside, which doesn’t help. I have blinds on the south side which are closed, but the rest of the house only has blinds on the inside. So for a lot of hours in the day heat does get in.
Well, those are windows with glass in. I don’t think there are many places which have windowless houses, and since windows leak more heat than walls in winter, you typically have smaller windows in very cold places.
Blinds on the inside do help, because they trap a layer of hot air next to the windows rather than letting it further into the house. It’s better to keep it all outside, of course, but it’s better than nothing.
Modern windows can give oldskool walls a run for their money in terms of insulation. Although a proper designed and insulated wall can do better. It’s not just the glass, but also the gasses used in between the panes and special coatings applied.
Even with all the windows and blinds closed, the temperature of the house still gets warm. Then it’s hard to expel that heat before the next day, so it gets even warmer.
A poorly insulated house would heat up quicker, and so have a higher peak indoor temperature. They will lose heat faster at night, yes, but if you ran a comparison with each house starting at the same temperature and allowing them both to equalise at the end, the average temperature of both would be the same.
The key insight is that insulation makes it slower for the outside temperature to heat the house up as well as to cool it down, so in a heatwave, insulation blunts the worst of it. Also you can actively reduce the insulative properties of a house by opening all the windows, so that it actually cools down much faster at night. This means that, in practice, the average temperature of the well-insulated house will be lower than that of the poorly one.
This kind of conversation (which occurs repeatedly whenever the weather gets hot in the UK) makes me despair, because we all need to be insulating our houses better, both to reduce our energy usage in the winter, and to protect against extreme heat.
The only way you are cooling these houses down at night is if there’s a mighty breeze and cool outdoor temperatures… or if you took the entire roof off.
Your theory might sound good, but in reality it doesnt work that way. Temperatures during this heatwave wont even drop below 20-25c at night, opening the windows doesnt magically mean that the inside drops to match outside as well. It takes hours and hours to do so, and by then the sun is back up, heating the houses up again.
Running a dehumidifier can also help lower the temperature. Water takes a much longer time to heat up/cool down than air does. If you remove the warm moisture from the air and then open the windows and let the cooler 20-25 degree air inside, it should cool the house faster.
Dehumidifyers produce a lot of heat though
Let’s take everything you said as true.
You’re still worse off if you have a poorly insulated house.
At my place that trick works the first day, but after that it’s over. The house always heats the same under this sunshine, slowly rising to 28-30 at the end of the day with everything closed and down from like 22-24 in the morning. The only question is whether that’s better than a higher temperature with a slight breeze and fresh air. Today, it won’t be higher than 30, so I’d rather have wind. The next 4 days, it’ll be 35 or higher, so everything will get closed down during the day
I’d keep things battened down so you’re starting from a lower base.
A breeze can be provided by a fan. (And it makes a huge difference - bigger than the breeze through a window)
Holy shit, is this the moment where our balkan mud and straw houses just win? Finally, the punishment of our oppressors that was promised to us at battle of kosovo has come!! (/j ofc)
We have bought reconstructed late 19th century house - all ground floor, with 1m thick stone/brick walls - here in Czechia. Even without air conditioning the temperature inside never gets above 23 degrees C even in the middle of summer. Its great. Bitch to heat though.
How do you keep the temps that low after months of continental summer? Is it drawing cold from the ground?
33c in sweden where i live which is a very nice temp but the people melting arround me. Also where i used to live in hungary will have 41c which is somehow almost a record but it never goes above that. I dont understand how the weather works there, last summer we had like ten days with 40+ but the all time record for all of hungary is sonehow only 41.9 at the same time even tho there are hotter cities than where i lived. Kinda shit to have almost record breaking weather every year cause youre like “ahh but serbia and bosnia have it worse” but in actuality its almost always hotter in hungary. My guess would be that hungary always has been very continental and that the recent heatwaves mainly come from some sweeping effect in europe which the carpatgians and alps block for hungary?
Blackout blinds and fans are more than enough.
Maybe if the blinds are on the outside of the window, but IME that’s not the norm north of the alps. And you can’t blind+fan your way out of 40°C heatwaves, the nights get warm too and then you can’t properly cool down your place at night anymore.
If it’s a couple days maybe, but in a heatwave everything will heat up eventually.
you can open windows during night, as long as night air temperature is tolerable
Night air in a 40°C heatwave isn’t going to be particularly cold, especially when you just passed the longest day in the year.
True, but we’re at the time of year when there’s way more daylight than night, so it’s a war of attrition with the hot day winning no matter what you do.
That’s your lower bound, but you need to have fans everywhere to replace all air and cool down your walls to the air temperature.
Not sure how true that is, although I don’t understand how, one side of my house is noticeably cooler than the rest and it has stayed like that throughout the heatwave even without turning on the ac
Is it the North side? Maybe painted a different color?
maybe you have some kind of natural evaporative heatsink nearby (trees) or perhaps inside
Can’t confirm. Especially if you live directly below a roof.
Is Big Roof to blame? Find out more at 9.
Said the British, living right at the edge of the heat dome
