It’s blisteringly hot and the background noise in your home changes. You pause and realize the worst has happened: your AC has died. You race to the phone, you call the techs but nothing can be done for a week. No one is available to help you. What do you do?
Other than running out and grabbing a few window AC units, you do have a couple of options. If you cannot afford a window unit or two, or simply cannot find them (sometimes they aren’t all that common when they’re needed most), we’re here today to help you try to keep cool until your AC can be fixed.
Just How Hot Can You Stand?
Set your guidelines immediately: If you need your house to be under 80 degrees and you live in Florida, friend, this probably isn’t happening unless you’ve built your house into the side of a small hill (we’ll talk about underground houses in another article down the line). Even a well-equipped air conditioner can only reduce the temperature of a home by 20-30 F degrees versus what is happening outside. That means if you’re experiencing some of the nightmarish 115 F degree days that we get here and it’s only 75 F in your house, your AC is doing an incredible job.
Please just try to remember that there are cooling stations set up, that there is plentiful shade out there, and to find good cooling areas to shake off the worst heat of the day. Heat exhaustion is real. It can occur in lower temperatures than you may imagine (85 F and up) under certain conditions. Don’t die because you’re too stubborn to seek shelter, regardless of the situation.
Ice and a Fan
For the vast majority of history, we fanned ourselves to keep cool when the heat got to an unbearable level. Or, well, some of us had others to do it for us. But we aren’t going to stray too far into that territory.
If you have the electricity to run fans but not a full air conditioning unit, you may consider putting wet towels or bricks of ice in front of them. This will help cool the air that is being circulated. Whole house evaporative cooling units (this is a type of evaporative cooling) exist on the market and are frequently used in homes in the southwest rather than traditional air conditioning, for instance. This will not work as well if you live in a very humid area, but it will provide a small amount of relief.
Tinfoil Windows
If you’re from the southeast and grew up in the 1980s or prior to them, you saw a lot of tinfoil lining the windows of homes. Why? What does it do?
This is using reflective measures to try to keep the heat out of your house. Though this will not cool air temperature directly, it will help to do so by keeping UV and hot light out of your home. Doing this is simple. Just take the aluminum foil from your pantry and cover the interior of your windows with it. If necessary, feel free to tape it in place. Though usually, it stays just fine if you’re going to pinch it around the sills.
If your electricity is operational, you can also do things like suck on popsicles and freeze towels in your freezer. You don’t even have to wet them first: just put them in and let them rest on your body (preferably your abdomen and chest) to help cool you off. This is not a long-term solution, but it does help briefly.
Cool Showers and Swimming
We strongly recommend a good, cool (not cold) shower when the temperature starts peaking. Not only does this help to cool you down quickly, but it’s also a great way to get rid of the layer of dead skin and sweat that will quickly accumulate and choke off your skin’s natural ability to regulate your body temperature.
Better yet, if you can afford a pool and have a place that is shaded to put it (not indoors!), do it. A large, cool pool can be an asset over the years, and keeping them clean takes a little skill, but nothing that you can’t handle.
Please do not climb into your freezer. I’m only joking a little bit here. Though people do not die at the rate they once did due to climbing into fridges and freezers, there is still a significant risk to climbing into either of these no matter how desperate you are to escape the heat. Please, seek other assistance if this is the case. Do not risk getting into something that you cannot get back out of no matter how hot you are.
Related: How to Survive a Summer Power Outage
We recommend using old 2- and 3-liter water bottles. Place them in your normal or deep freezer full of water (with a small gap to allow for expansion) and let them freeze overnight. Then, wrap lightly in a kitchen towel so you are not directly contacting the frozen bottle. Place a thin blanket (ideally a cotton quilt or flat sheet) over yourself and your new personal space cooler. The sheet or quilt will help insulate you so you keep the cold in and the water bottle will stay frozen for several hours.
These water bottles also work very well to help keep rabbits and poultry cool, too, if the weather becomes too much outside. I’ve kept rabbits alive outside through the worst heat with shade cloth, fans, and frozen water bottles like this for years. I highly recommend it.
We hope this has been a good list of suggestions to help you cool off. Are you still feeling the heat? Or do you have another way that you beat being covered in sweat and boiling in the worst part of the summer? Comment down below; we’d love to hear from you. And remember friends, fall is just around the corner. It will cool down again. I promise.
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