It got hot here in North Missouri this week, and our air conditioner is dead. We actually have a new one, ready to install, but the job hasn’t gotten finished.
It’s not that big of a deal today because it’s still cooling off at night, and we can draw the cool air in with a high-volume window fan… but in the heart of the summer, it gets really hot here… especially if the power is out.
Spice and I have plans on what to do in the heat of the summer if we have no power. Do you?
Here’s a few of our thoughts on when it gets hot:
Make sure that the windows have screens, and that they can be opened. We’ve got a few windows to work on this year (it’s an old house) but we regularly open up the front of the house, our sleeping area and the kitchen, three places that heat gathers (human bodies will heat up the house)
We have left shade trees around our house, even though a couple of them are not particularly attractive.
We also have access to screened in tents, in case it’s so hot inside the house that sleeping there is impractical.
Make sure your screens are in good repair. Even fairly new screens can have holes in them, our cabin isn’t 5 years old and we have one screen out for replacement because some annoying bug decided it was going to chew holes through our screen. NOTE: We will have an article about screen repairs, how to do them and what supplies to prep for them in the near future.
It’s probably a good idea to buy some spare slide-in screens to replace once permanently installed on your house if they are damaged in a storm. They cost about $6, and look like this:
Spice took a look at one way of creating shade last year, and here’s an excerpt of that article describes a lattice system that we have in place on one of our porches:
Spice spills the beans:
If you make air move faster, some of its heat energy is converted into the energy of motion, so it cools. This natural law has being put to work on the porches of warmer climates for decades at least. Have you ever seen this kind of construction on the side of a porch?
You can use more decorative patterns, but this is the traditional. Light colors absorb less heat. You want the spaces fairly small to break up the breeze and make it speed up, but not ultrafine as that can discourage air movement.
Our back porch, built before air conditioning was a thing, has one side covered in this kind of construction; and it was common on porches in Missouri and points south. When the weather got so hot sleeping in the bedrooms was too stifling, people would set up cots on these back porches (screened, thankfully, to discourage mosquitoes) and sleep much more comfortably.
Now it seems people don’t like the look of them and how they block the view; they’ve gone out of fashion. Wouldn’t it be a nice prep though, to have some suitable panels (perhaps screened as well) ready to set up during power outages in the summer?
The benefit of this approach to a prepper is that you can build them to the size of the windows in the house you intend to shelter in, costing you zero cash, and just set them aside somewhere. The storage spot doesn’t even need to be temperature controlled as so many of our preps demand. Then when they’re needed, you just haul them out and set them up. There’s no reason they wouldn’t work with security bars as well if you like to go that route.
Plants are cool. Really.
News flash: Plants absorb solar energy and use it to build their molecules! Yah, you knew that. But if the plants absorb the solar energy before that energy reaches the walls of your home, the house heats up less. Yah, you could’ve figured that out on your own too. Less often considered biological fact: When plants lose water, that evaporation takes away heat; just as our sweat evaporation cools us. Plants doing photosynthesis evaporate a lot of water. That’s why it really is cooler under tree cover than under non-living shade. Why not make use of these facts? Place trellises on the sunny side(s) of the house. Plant some lovely flowering plants that like to climb trellises at their base.
The Hot Test
One thing you can do to give yourself a bit of a test is on a warm afternoon, turn off every cooling device you have and open the windows. See how well the house cools with no electric circulation whatever.
Depending upon your windows size, the level of shade your house is in, the wind speed as it hits your window, you might be surprised how well or how poorly your humble abode does.
If it does well? Great.
If not? It’s time to take some remedial action and come up with a solution… before the power fails and you are left stewing in your own sweat. It’s not merely a matter of comfort. Excess heat spoils sleep, impairing health, immune function, and ability to think and decide well. In the very young or very old, excess heat is often fatal.
My home was built in 1904, so I wanted to share some features that helped them cool it before air conditioners were widely available. The house has two living levels, plus a basement and an attic. A whole house fan was installed between the upper living level and the attic, so that overnight you could open all the windows (basement, living levels and attic) and run the fan to draw cooler air in and exhaust the warm air out through the attic. In the morning (best, just before dawn), you shut off the fan and close all the windows. Then you keep the shades drawn on the sunny side of the house (which obviously changes during the day…)
In a grid down situation, I can take advantage of the chimney effect by opening just the basement and attic windows and letting that draw the warm air out of the house overnight, then closing up in the morning.
One other grid-down prep I have for dealing with the heat are those high tech cool cloths. They cool you down by evaporation – you moisten them, then put them on your pressure points to help cool yourself. Obviously in very high humidity they won’t be as effective, but in my area that doesn’t happen too often.
And don’t neglect proper hydration. If you’re sweating a lot to keep cool, you need to keep hydrated and keep your electrolytes in balance too. I stock the supplies to make oral rehydration solution in case one of us needs assistance.
Thanks for the idea on shade plants – they are a great idea that I’ll have to look into.
In the subtropical South we have shade
but it is too humid so no sweat evaporates. I do have battery power fans for each of us. Other than showers, we stay hot.