My husband and I live in Wisconsin in a small, single story home (500 sqft, with a semi-finished basement adding another 150 sqft living space) with two children. We have two window AC units, one in our bedroom, and one in the living room, that we only use when the weather is +90F/32C. Last year, that was 14 days. Our hottest month is in July, with an average high of 84F/29C, and average low is 63F/17C. Our summer prevailing winds come from the South (this matters for later). We also live in a relatively safe area.
Some more data: Our house faces South-North. We do have a large tree in the front, but it doesn't fully shade the west side of the house. We have another large tree in the back and, aside from the three hours flanking solar noon, our backyard is almost entirely shaded. Also, our house was built in the 1950s and the walls/siding hasn't been updated (on our to-do). The attic, has, however. We also have not been able to update our windows, so those are single pane, with storm windows/screens.
Okay, so while these are in no particular order after this one, I'd say the number one way to avoid using AC in your home is to be a weather-watcher. Every single day, the last thing we do before bed, and the first thing we do in the morning, is check the weather. That determines everything that's going to happen that day. Pretty much every tip below is predicated on you knowing the day's, tomorrow's and the rest of the week's weather.
Oh! One more! Understanding how heat works. Now, I'm not a physicist, so any and all errors are mine, but heat moves to cool, not the other way around. It continues to do so until the temperature is the same. Heat also moves upward, with the coolest temperatures closer to the ground and warmer temperatures rising. Understanding that will help you find problems and solutions in your own home.
-
Ok, third thing: know about thermal mass. Your house is absorbing heat from the sun and ambient temperature all day. At night, as the sun goes down and the air starts to cool, it's still holding on to a ton of heat. Your job is to get the house as cool as possible so you can start the next day as cool as possible. There's not a lot that you can do (which is why preventing your house from getting hot is so important), but one of the things you can do is direct airflow.
-
Put a fan in every window against and before your prevailing winds. Put a thermometer outside (or, if it's accurate to your home, use a weather app), and a thermometer inside. When the temperature outside is cooler than the temperature inside, turn on the fan. When it's hotter (or almost as hot, but the sun is shining on the windows), turn the fan off and shut the window, close the curtains. This means we're pretty much running fans all night long.
-
Use your ceiling fans. Some notes on those switches: counterclockwise pushes air down. Clockwise draws air up. Normally, you'd hear the advice to leave it counterclockwise in the summer to blow wind down on you, and clockwise in the winter to draw the cool air up. But this is advice assumes you're using HVAC systems that are transporting hot/cool air and is intended to regulate the temperatures of the entire room. Think for a second about how heat moves: toward cool and upwards. If you have a fan running counterclockwise in the summer, it's pushing the rising hot air back down and you're heating the lower half of the room... which is where you are. Likewise, switching a fan to clockwise to draw the air from the floor up to the ceiling isn't going to work; the room is only going to get hotter during the day, and you're forcing the temperature in that room to average out. We turn the ceiling fans off during the day and move those box fans from our windows to the floor. But, we fan the people, not the room. If we're not in a bedroom, we leave the fans off altogether. The lower half of the room will be much cooler that way when we do decide to use that room. My kids can nap on the floor if they're hot in their beds. At night, when the windows are open and cool air is being drawn into the house, we have the ceiling fans going as fast as possible in counterclockwise to push as much of that hot air down and out of the house as fast as we can with the box fans in the windows. When we redo our windows, it's my plan to get double-hung windows. Then, I'll open the top window a couple inches to let hot air out during this time. I'll have to experiment to see if it'd work during the day.
-
Use landscaping to shield your house from the sun's rays. Especially in the south and west. We planted rose bushes right in front of our foundation to keep the sun off the side of our house. And they eventually grew up to our first floor windows. If it were possible for us to plant a tall shade tree in our front yard to do the job, we would. But alas! as the one we have is old, we have to deal with it being improperly placed.
-
Failing that, look into installing an awning on your south/east/west facing windows. That would keep the sun off your glass.
-
Failing that, if you have any sewing ability at all (or know anyone), sandwich a mylar blanket between your curtain and lining. I made roman curtains for all four of our front windows with mylar blankets sewn on the inside with the shiny side facing out the window. When I lower the shade, the sun's radiation is turned back outside. While, again, I'm not a physicist, and I didn't come up with the tip, I have noticed it works! You can also use heat blocking film, but I have no experience with that.
-
No carpeting! We were super-lucky when we pulled up our nasty, decades old carpeting to find oak hardwood floors. While we put down rugs during the winter to keep our feet warm, every rug gets pulled up in the summer and stored away (except in the kids' room, because they're young and accident prone). Surprisingly, the floor feels cool, and on hot days, laying down on the floor with a fan blowing feels just fine.
-
Keep the house dark during the day. Maybe you're like me and you're still in the process of switching over from heat-generating lights and appliances to their cooler counterparts. Either prioritize the newer LEDs to the rooms you use during the day, or avoid using them altogether. We have an old plasma TV in our living room that we don't use on extremely hot days. Other appliances that generate heat would be dehumidifiers, dishwashers, printers, computers, washers, dryers, and irons - even vacuum cleaners. Try to keep these things off - at the very least during the worst heat of the day. Also, on that note, we have a tankless, on-demand hot water heater, so we don't have 40 gallons of water sitting at 120F/49C somewhere in our home.
-
You can't turn your refrigerator off (or, at least, I can't), so keep it clean, in the proper position, and properly maintained so it doesn't put out more heat than necessary. Vacuum your refrigerator coils before the heat of summer, learn how to pack your refrigerator so your food is cooled, and stays cool, efficiently. Make sure your fridge is far enough away from the walls so the heat it does produce is able to circulate away from the cooling unit.
-
Cook outside. We have many, many small appliances: rice cooker, slow cooker, pressure cooker, toaster oven, hot plate, hot water kettle, even an electric water bath canner (we have a huge garden). In addition to that, we have a propane grill with a side burner outside. Whenever I have to cook, I'll bring everything outside and cook it there so I don't heat up my house.
-
Meal Plan/Prep, so you don't have to cook at all on any given day, just one specific day. So many of the cool, summery meals you can find all require cooking! Either pasta or a grain needs to be boiled, or a protein needs to be fried up, or a vegetable needs to be steamed. Plan your meals for the week with this in mind, and try to collate your menu so you can cook individual ingredients at one time and store until necessary. Things like chicken breast can be cooked and cubed for pasta salads, regular salads, sandwich salads (any kind of salad), fried onions can be done in one go for slow cooker casseroles, soups, or beans in the InstaPot. Beans like chickpeas can be cooked together divided up and allocated for hummus, sauces, and cold salad recipes. A dozen eggs can be boiled at a time for breakfast. Make some of them soft-boiled eggs for a textural difference, if you want. I bake all my breads, even in the summer. I tend to switch to flat breads that can be cooked in a pan on the hot plate, or in the toaster oven outside, but when I absolutely have to make sandwich bread, I'll make four of them on the coolest night of the week, and then freeze three for the weeks where turning on the oven isn't going to happen at all.
-
Snack for meals. Many of my meals in the summer are cheese, tinned fish, and crackers. Or crudite platter. Or fruit with peanut butter. Or yogurt smoothies. Or sandwiches up to your ears. Or cottage cheese and chips. Or, and my favorite, going out into the garden and eating your salad standing up.
-
When you cook these items, especially if you have to cook them in your home, time them so the ambient weather cools your house down. Basically, cook at night, then cool the appliance, your food, and your kitchen as fast as possible.
-
Plan for the coolest/least-cooked meals for the hottest of days of the week. Not only so you don't have to stand in the heat of the day to cook, not only so you consume something cool to keep you cool, but because on those very hot days, you're not going to want to move very much at all.
-
Don't give into the allure of turning on your AC in May/June. These months are the tempering months. Your body (especially in climates that go from winter to 90 in a few, short weeks) will get used to the heat. If women in 19th century Florida could wear long hair, corsets, petticoats and skirts down to the floor and not die of heat exhaustion, you can live in the high 70s/low 80s for a few weeks until you acclimate.
-
On that note, don't let yourself get too cold in the winter. I admit, we keep our house cool in the winter - low to mid 60s. But, we are fully dressed with socks, long pants, wool sweaters, and sometimes even hats and blankets. The warmer you can keep your body "used to", the less of a struggle you'll have getting used to the summer heat.
-
No matter the time of year, don't stop being active. You may have to cross country ski over the noon hour in January, and go for a run at dawn in July, but physical activity gets your body used to a spike and fall in temperature. It also keeps your body sweating effectively.
-
Dress for the weather. And by that, I mean cover up when you go outside. I have a skin condition where I break out in hives when my skin is exposed to the sun (I'm a vampire, I know). Sunscreen doesn't always work to prevent it, and I've found that wearing long sleeves, long pants, and a hat when I'm outside is much more effective. I've also found that, when I get back inside, take off my hat and my long shirt (I wear layers, so it's usually a button down over a tee shirt), I'm much cooler than I was before I went outside.
-
Stop wearing plastic. Just stop. Anything with polyester, nylon, and acrylic is going to be hotter than hell. Don't even bother with blends. Companies make those because they're cheap, not because they keep you cool. Moisture wicking polyester athletic shirts? Forget about it. Also, try not to wear a lot of knit fabrics on the hottest days. I'd be lost without tee shirts, but knit fabrics cling to your skin in a way that reduces airflow, and (especially with cotton) can make you feel clammy. Think linen, think open weaves. Light clothing, light colors.
-
One step further: go naked! Seriously. In the heat of the summer, forget about your physical imperfections, and just wear as little as possible. If you're in your home, no one should be looking at you anyway (and if they do, they're the creep). Embrace mowing your lawn in your sports bra, ladies! If men can go topless while doing yard work, you can too! I don't care if you still have baby fat or stretch marks! It's freakin' hot! Let your kids run around naked. They're kids, who cares! Now, going 100% nudist colony might be a little much for you, your kids, and your neighbors, but in July I'm basically wearing shorts and a sports bra unless I'm going to be out in the sun.
-
Bonus tip: if you don't have already have a privacy fence between you and your neighbors, go naked outside for a few years, and you'll get one for free! It's like magic!
-
Get outside, just stay out of the sun during the worst of the day. Often our house can get stuffy and humid with three to four bodies putting off heat and just... breathing. Going outside, where there's a little bit of a breeze, can feel cooler than staying in the house, even when the thermometer outside is higher than the one inside. We're fortunate enough to have a big maple tree casting shade over our entire backyard, so we'll also go outside and run in the sprinkler, or fill a kiddie pool (oh, nota bena - water is plentiful and cheap here, but we also have three rain barrels we keep full for the garden and the pool, and we leave the pool filled for around a week at a time, when I don't have a toddler who can drown in 2 inches of water.)
-
Avoid AC as much as you can while out in public. We don't go to the mall to wile our weekends away. We don't hang out at friends' houses just for the AC. My husband does work in an office, and after May, he has the hardest time in the heat (although I take longer to acclimate than he does). Have you ever seen someone in August at the grocery store wearing a sweater buttoned up to her chin? That person is probably me. When I have to shop, I bundle up. Partly because I'm cold, and partly because I don't want to be hot when I leave the store!
-
Jump in the shower. Douse your head in a bucket. Keep your hair wet. Get a spray bottle and mist the air. In any moment where you feel the heat is excruciating, try doing any one of these things before turning on the AC. Are you cool enough after? You might have just been overheated. If you're not, it might be time for the AC. That's how I discovered anything over 90F was unbearable. My husband insists that scalding-hot showers, even in the heat of summer, is the perfect way to feel cool. I don't get it, don't like it, and insist he not do it in the mornings so as not to heat up the house, but there you go. Try it and see.
-
Some people just don't sweat. It's difficult for me to sweat; I really have to work at it. Same with one of my kids. The other one and my husband can think about the sun and start looking dewy. Guess which half of the family does better in the heat? The sweaters. If you're the lone hold-out in a family that's just fine at 85F, you simply might not sweat as much as them. The misting trick might work for you to get you through. Exercise also helps (see note above).
-
If worst comes to worse, we hide out in our basement. The temperature of our basement stays pretty stable at around, 72F during the summer... it's humid, though. We don't have a bathroom down there, and only part of it is finished, so the only thing to do is watch TV (and my kids are so used to being active, they grow feral and destructive after a few hours of that). And, just like leaving a grocery store, the transition to going upstairs can feel worse. I usually only do this on a day where it unexpectedly got to +90F, and turning on the AC is just not going to cut through the heat already in the house.
Okay. All done. I think I got them all. Anyone else with tips to stay cool over the summer without AC? Especially for those who have a different summer than we do?
May 28, 2020 at 10:20PM
