Hot Times Ahead

(Image from European Environmental Agency, observed temperature trends from 1960 to 2021 on left, then 21st century projections)

People are talking online about getting ready for summer. It doesn’t sound much like it did when I was young.

I haven’t seen anything about losing weight or getting a new swimsuit. Of course, many people in the UK don’t swim much. The sea is cold here. Our rivers are polluted and the notion of swimming in water coming from the nearest river isn’t appealing. Most of us go to the beach to look at, hear and be close to the water more than to be in the water.

But the online conversations are by people all over the world. The dominant topic right now seems to be preparing for more heat than people are accustomed to. Thailand recently had a heat wave of up to 43° Celsius (107° Fahrenheit). Delhi in India recently hit a record 49.2° Celsius (120.5° Fahrenheit). People in such places as Italy and Spain are asking for ideas about how to cope if they reach similar temperatures.

Last year Heathrow airport in the UK topped 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit) for the first time ever recorded. We don’t build for that here. Our buildings are more oriented toward keeping heat in, not getting rid of it. Air conditioning is uncommon even in commercial buildings unless you’re in a big-city skyscraper. In hot weather our homes easily become ovens.

Britons aren’t made for heat, either. They start to wilt before Texans even start to use the word hot.

Much of Europe isn’t in the habit of coping with heat like what I grew up with in Texas.

Of course there are simple things people can do to combat summer heat. Being in the shade helps. Breezes outdoors help. Getting wet and letting evaporation cool your skin directly helps. Sipping cold drinks helps. But most people can’t do such things all the time during a heat wave.

It’s good to see some people not waiting until a heatwave is upon us. Some people are trying to get ready ahead of time.

Not having much experience of high summer heat and mostly being too young to remember life before air conditioning, conversations usually go to air conditioning first. Air conditioning is expensive to buy and heavily draws on power. Not everyone can afford to buy or run it. Not everyone is situated to be able to install it. What can they do if A/C is not possible?

Here are a few alternatives. They may not produce as much comfort as air conditioning in seriously hot weather, but they can be enough to survive. We didn’t have air conditioning in public schools when I went through them. My grandparents didn’t have it when I was a kid. We didn’t have it when our house was first built.

Ceiling versus Box or Pedestal Fans

Ceiling fans are wonderful. They are quiet, unobtrusive, only sip electricity and make a room feel a few degrees cooler than it actually is. (They can also allow you to reverse their direction to keep heat from pooling at the ceiling in winter.) My wife and I put good ones in the living room, bedroom and my office because those rooms get full sun all afternoon. The fans keep those rooms usable on all but the hottest of days. We did that before Brexit kicked in because we anticipated stronger heat waves, couldn’t find ceiling fans to meet our specifications in the UK and wanted some we found in Germany.

Most Britons get a pedestal fan or box fan. It needs to be stashed somewhere when not in use and most of us don’t have a lot of storage space. It’s loud. It only cools whoever is sitting in front of it. Ceiling fans do more and are nicer about how they do it.

Whole-House Fans

Typical British homes aren’t laid out in a way that allows for a whole-house fan, but if you can have one, it’s the next step. It’s a big fan mounted in a central place and blowing up into the attic (loft in British English). When I say it’s big, I mean it. You put it above a hallway? Make the fan almost as wide as the hallway.

In the opening where you mount the fan, you’ll need louvers that open whenever the fan runs and close when the fan is not running. That keeps you from losing heat in winter and keeps any critter in the attic from coming down into living space. Open some windows before turning on a whole-house fan. It pulls outside air through the house and pushes that air out through the attic.

This keeps a breeze flowing through the house. You don’t have air pooling inside, getting hotter and hotter. Discharging through the attic also cools the roof. If your roof is something like tile or metal, this may not mean much to you. If your roof has asphalt or composite shingles, ventilating the attic is essential to keep the shingles from being damaged by excessive heat buildup, which is what would happen if your attic acted like a nearly closed oven. No matter what type of roof you have, ventilating the attic minimizes the amount of heat that accumulates there to radiate down through the ceiling.

If you can’t mount a whole-house fan the way I described, you can mount it outside a window. My grandparents had two houses with fans mounted like this. The fan needs a box built around it on four sides, partly to seal it to the window frame so it will pull all its airflow through the window and partly to shield it from the weather. The box needs to be open on the window side and the side opposite from the window.

This won’t do anything for attic temperature, but it will move air through the house. It’s loud, but unlike a box or pedestal fan, it moves air through the entire house, depending on which windows you open to feed it. You can have the fan in one room and sit in a breeze it creates in another room where the noise isn’t right there beside you.

Swamp Coolers

If fans aren’t enough, air conditioning isn’t realistically feasible and the climate isn’t too humid, you can use a swamp cooler (evaporative cooler in British English). It does exactly what its name implies. It runs air through a porous material that is kept damp so that evaporation reduces the temperature of the air.

You can buy one, or you can make one yourself with materials easily obtained at a hardware store. You’ll need a five gallon bucket, a small fan you can mount in a hole you cut into the lid of the bucket, a hole cutting attachment for your electric drill and some filter material that can wick moisture up from the bottom of the bucket. YouTube has plenty of videos about how to build a cooler with such supplies.

It won’t make the room as cool as an air conditioner, but it will take a few degrees off the temperature and that may be all you need to avoid roasting. We couldn’t have used one where I grew up because the air was too humid for much evaporation to occur. In a less soggy climate, it works well.

A ceiling fan wasn’t quite enough for my office last summer. I added a small desktop evaporative cooler to get me through the hottest days.

Preparing Ahead of Time

Aside from sitting in breezy shade, getting splashed with water occasionally and sipping cold drinks, you may have noticed everything else takes some effort to set up. Even if all you want is a box or pedestal fan, you’ve got to get one. If you wait until a heatwave hits, everyone else who waited too is also shopping for a fan. There may not be enough fans to go around.

It’s best to prepare ahead of time.

That can only happen when people aren’t in denial about what’s coming. They anticipate it and start looking for ways to get ready.

In conversations online, I see people recognizing that climate change is upon us. They see hot times ahead and are preparing as best they can.