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Slashdot Asks: Beating the Summer Heat?
July is always one of the hottest months in the U.S., but this year the heat got an early start. Sustained hot weather has slammed huge parts of the country, and led to some serious consequences. All those AC units employed to bring some relief to homes have contributed to the extended post-storm power outage in the eastern part of the country; five days in, the count is still over a million customers in the dark. (I'm writing from Austin; this year Texas's famously warm weather is a little less impressive by comparison to the midwest, the Carolinas, and many other places; temperatures are expected to remain under 100 until Saturday.) If you're in one of the severely affected areas, how has it affected you? More importantly, what strategies have you used to beat the heat in the absence of (or simply unreliable) electricity? Details help. In particular, how are you keeping the human and animal members of your household safe from overheating? Read on below for an extended set of questions on dealing with the ongoing heat wave of 2012's early summer, and respond to any of them that make sense in your situation. Note, answers are of course encouraged from people who aren't in the worst-hit areas, too! Though you're free to respond however you'd like, it would be useful if you start with your location right at the top of (or in the title of) your comment, so others can scan them easily.
- How hot is hot for you, locally? What temperature extremes have you seen in your own dwelling or neighborhood in recent weeks? (Also, how are you measuring them, if in any way more specific than reading local weather reports? Do you have a home weather station, and is it hooked to an upstream data feed like The Weather Underground?)
- Have local power systems failed, and if so for how long? Do you have a generator, and do you have any advice for others who are considering one?
- Some people (especially kids) face greater risks than others in sustained heat, and some types of medicine require refrigeration. What are the consequences for you and your household of extreme heat?
- If air conditioning is part of your strategy for keeping cool, what do you do to maximize its effectiveness? (Insulate or cover windows? Run it at certain times of day? Raise the thermostat and rethink your idea of "room temperature"?)
- If your power goes out, how prepared are you for a one-hour blackout? What about a day, or a week? Have you taken any measures to keep your life sane if a storm (or just a glitch in the grid) robs your home of AC, TV, and PC? Even if your local summer weather hasn't been unusually hot thus far this year, are you keeping more water or other supplies on hand in case your area later gets gets the heat-and-darkness treatment?
- What advice would you give to others who want to maintain safety and sanity while under the broiler? (Especially useful are ideas for city dwellers, who don't generally have space for an extra freezer or a safe place for a generator.)
- Whether you're in one of the worst hit areas or not, are you taking any steps to protect electronics and data from outages or extreme heat? Have you seen any failures that you believe to be caused by temperature extremes?
- Finally, what are you doing to find some relief from this summer's heat, other than cranking up the AC? Are you spending more time at the local pool? Waking up early to enjoy morning temperatures? Scanning San Francisco real estate prices?
I hope your Independence Day is a good one, no matter the temperature.
Get the fuck out of here. How exactly does my use of an air conditioner in the summer contribute to extended post-storm power outages?
Don't worry, AC, he wasn't talking about you...
To beat the summer heat, turn off your Bitcoin mining rigs. If you turn on the air conditioning to compensate, it's going to cost you more electricity than the value of the Bitcoins that you generate.
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It was 106 at my car on friday when I got out of work. It was 107 outside my house saturday. Some areas around atlanta his 109 reportedly. My work parking lot is a big slap of concrete surrounded on 3 sides by buildings and the 4th by a hill, so it focuses heat even more with no chance of wind. On way home from work stopped at a bank drive thru. While in line I normally fill out my slip on the back of my visor, which is solid enough to be a good writing surface. Couldn't. It was too hot to rest my hand on it, as it was painfully hot to touch. Mostly stayed indoors as much as possible. Installed some thicker curtains to block more sunlight. Drank a lot of water. Made sure dogs did not stay long in yard, and did not walk on pavement. I used to live in florida, which stays hot longer, but doesn't get as hot because the sea moderates it somewhat. But it was more humid there. Prior to that I lived in the republic of panama, which is even moreso (never gets anywhere near as hot, but even more humid). I just keep telling myself that here, at least the heat eventually ends.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
and my biggest weather problem is keeping my coffee warm.
You know how a lot of people rag on the preppers who keep plenty of supplies & their own generating kit & stuff for end of of times. Guess who has power & food that isn't going to go off. Prepping isn't just for alien invasion scenarios.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
I live in Seattle, you insensitive clod!
(where many residents were still using their furnaces as of last week, and today's the first sunny and warmish-day in what seems like a month)
I bought one on Amazon just to try it out. Who would have thought a bunch of people living in a desert would have figured out how to stay cool. Re-wet it depending on how hot it is. Wring it out and put it on. Keep water in the fridge and it works even better.
If I've come back from a long run nothing cools me down faster than 1 or 2L frozen water bottle applied directly to arteries.
No AC growing up, and we just layed in front of fans and drank water. Human body can take quite a bit if you give it adequate water.
Location = SC.
Temps = over 100 last few days, 97 today, Horrid humidity as normal.
I had coated black roofs for years (I prefer metal roofing because it's tough and taxes are lower. I loathe asphalt shingles!) but two years ago I hit all my roofs with white roof coating including my non-air conditioned shop.
It reflects so much light that you can get sunburned by the reflection if you apply it on a bright day. I had to wear sunglasses while mopping it on!
Hard to measure on my utility bill what with all the tools I run, but I'm much more comfortable. If your local codes/covenants allow white or light roof materials or coatings, give them a try.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
http://www.builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/cooling-without-power.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After living in Memphis for some years now, here's how I adapted and feel completely comfortable at 90-100F
The adaptation phase:
1. Go outside, work in the yard, and sweat.
2. Drink lots of gatorade.
2. Set your thermostat at 80F, use fans when sleeping.
4. Get used to feeling sticky.
5. Drive with your windows down, no A/C
When going outside, I wear a wide brimmed hat, a long sleeve Dry-tec shirt, any color.
I now feel cold and need a jacket below 70F
QUIT CRYING, AND PLAN + INVEST $$$ BETTER.
As an accident of geography, my town has three power companies. In my corner, luckily, I have the power company that does preventative maintenance and when there's a bad ice storm, we lose power for usually a couple of hours, once nearly a day.
Seven miles away, they have two-week outages. The PUC sets the rates independently, so it's not a matter of funding. If anything, my part of town is lower profit (less dense).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I've had a few power outages lasting maybe 30 seconds in total, which is rare, because prior to several weeks ago, it has been over a year since the last (20 second) power outage. It is currently 19C here, with a high of maybe 20. It will cool off to a chilly 6C tonight, so I shouldn't have any problems sleeping. My cat is fine and my AC unit is still sitting in the shed beside my snow shovel.
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I moved back to Canada.
Bonus: I don't have to hear about the presidential election.
Why can't you live without your AC? Many places are much warmer and people can't afford AC. They simply adjust and get used to the heat. Men is adapted to hunt kudus in the scorching heat of the southern African plains and should be able to deal with this. Accept the heat and stop wasting energy please.
Highest temperature I can recall ever seeing here in my 13 years living here. There haven't been any major power outages in the region that I've heard of (the local news has been pretty much leading every broadcast talking about the heat), although a few days ago a couple thousand people lost their power for a few hours in the middle of the night. Bet that was awesome, as our overnight temperatures are hovering in the high 70's, low-mid 80's. At 10 o'clock last night it was 85 or somewhere around there, I was sweating my ass off watching our local Independence Day fireworks...
Our boxer absolutely cannot deal with this heat (he's got longish hair, looks almost like a miniature St. Bernard even though he's been genetically tested 100% boxer) so we've been minimizing his trips outside to potty breaks, although we spoil the shit out of him so I doubt he really minds being stuck inside with his humans in the A/C.
Ponca City, Oklahoma
Back in the 1950s, we used "coolers" - huge metal boxes that cooled by evaporative cooling. The walls of the cooler were filled with porous wood shavings and a pump circulated water that dripped through the shavings while a 10 horsepower motor sucked air through the shavings and into the house. My bed was right in front of the blast of air from the cooler and I remember that it seemed to cool quite well - probably lowering the inside temperature 5 to 10 degrees and making it quite comfortable during the night. I found out years later that what we called "coolers" were called "swamp coolers" in other parts of the country and in my travels I saw swamp coolers still in use in desert climates in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California.
One reason that coolers worked so well back then was that during the drought, the humidity in Ponca City was about zero so water evaporated readily. It seems to me that up until about 1976, when Kaw Dam was built east of town, the humidity was a lot lower in Ponca City. My mother says that having Kaw Lake so close changed the weather patterns around Ponca City and that the humidity rose a lot since its construction. If someone tried to use a swamp cooler today, I doubt if it would work at all.
Every summer I would spend a month with my grandparents in Boswell, Oklahoma. Nobody thought anything about the heat - it was just how life was. But everybody looked forward to the cool of the evening, just when the sun got low in the sky and the shadows would lengthen and the fireflies would come out. The whole family would go out on the big front porch, sit in the swing, drink ice cold ice tea, and wait for our neighbors to come around and sit down with us to talk about the events of the day. Simpler days and better perhaps - at least in memory.
Ponca City, We Love You
Has been out of power 2 days. Having multilevel housing helps the temperature distribution vua wide vertical passage through the stairway. Spent it in the first level.
Most pressing was having cellphone powered. Did it in the mosque (only two buildings in the area were left powered: mosque and McDonalds), thanks to Allah, I go there for all five prayers.
Two of my friends (Virginia, Maryland) did not have it today. One of them got it today.
Small detail. Monday morning during commute hours noticed police car in the ambush at the unpowered intersection with major road/minor road scenario), checking for rollers. Really, police? Really?
I am originally from the steppe area of Russia, so we have derecho-shmerecho all the time, only it was called strong wind. Short after I left, there was the most serious hurricane that broke half of the trees in my parents town. The power was restored within few hours. That was 90s, the time of lawlessness and collapse in Russia, black years of Yeltsin, organized crime and disorganized government.
This country is going down.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
As timothy mentioned, the Texas ozone hole has been working out and seems to be in better shape now. I typically bike for 20 minutes around noon everyday, and it tends to be ~95-100 F. If power goes out, I will survive for at max a day on. After that, I'm moving in my university lab.
Couple of points to keep in mind to avoid heat/sun-strokes:
- Wear a cap, no matter how douchebag-y it makes you look. Heating up of the head leads to headaches, drowsiness and other symptoms of a "heat-stroke"
- Avoid frequent high temperature gradients. For example, if you're driving to lunch from work, and the restaurant is only a few minutes away, I suggest do not turn the AC on. It sounds like a Herculean task to sit in that hot tinbox without AC, but it's the frequent hot-cold-hot-cold cycles that actually hurt your body more. If it's unbearable, just put it on low cool and low fan for a few minutes.
- Drink loads of buttermilk (the salty/sour ones, my choice). It is culturally used as a coolant in parts of middle east and most of India since the days of the dinosaurs.
Currently it is 92.5 degrees at the high school weather station. When the storm came through we lost power twice, but only a matter of milliseconds each time (UPSes switched over and lights flickered). My family does have a generator that we can use if there is a long duration power failure.
My biggest advice for purchasing a generator is to know how to size, maintain, connect, and most importantly for portable models store the generator. When sizing the generator, take the following priorities in order. (NOTE: THIS LIST DOES NOT TAKE MEDICAL EQUIPMENT INTO ACCOUNT, THAT IS PRIORITY ZERO!) First, you want to maintain your refrigeration of food, cooking can be done with non-electric methods. Remember, you can disconnect a refrigerator momentarily to run the microwave if you have enough capacity in your generator. Second thing you want to look for is cooling of people, if cost of the generator is a problem, rule out air conditioning and use fans during the outage if possible, otherwise you may want to look at dropping some of the lower priority loads. If you must have air conditioning and you have a central air conditioning system, use a window unit in one room temporarily and live out of that room for the duration of the outage, this reduces the cost of the generator substantially. Third priority is lighting at night. This is best provided by incandescent or halogen lights as CFLs and LEDs can be damaged by power fluctuations in smaller generators caused by refrigerators and air conditioners starting. Fourth on my priority list is battery charging for communications, The idea is to charge batteries later at night when your generator load is lower. Get a jump start pack and charge that up and use the lighter sockets in it to charge the cell phones during the day. Don't worry about cordless phones, that is a very low priority in this situation use a wired phone on the landline. Everything after these four priorities are considered luxuries. TVs, PCs, even your router and modem are very low on the list. A transistor radio will serve you well to bring news and information.
In our household the extreme heat means we are running air conditioners harder than normal and in the case of the bedroom units, starting sooner than normal. The obviously affects our electric bill.
Preparation for a long duration outage in my household simply means we will have to take the gas cans out of the area to get gas for the generator. If out power dies, at least two of the local gas stations will be down as they are served from the same substation and it is very unlikely that the line between my house and the substation would be knocked out as the line is short (I'm about a block from the substation).
My advice to the city dwellers that don't have power or air conditioning in this heat is to simply get out of the situation. At a minimum go shopping at the mall during the daytime and best find another place to stay.
Protecting electronics and data is actually of minimal concern to me as my equipment is protected by a UPS and my data is backed up with the most critical backed up in multiple places. I do recommend an off site backup of some kind though. I have not seen any damage directly related to this extreme heat in any of my equipment or any other equipment that I've seen.
My method of beating the heat is simply cranking up the A/C and drinking more water. My home has air conditioning, my car has air conditioning, and my office has air conditioning.
sudo mod me up
is that the same hand that saved all those banks ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Ahh, "let them eat cake" approach...
"I have the power company that does preventative maintenance and when there's a bad ice storm, we lose power for usually a couple of hours, once nearly a day."
My power company also does preventative things by BURYING THE FUCKING CABLES!
I had no outage for 19 years, the year the house was connected.
It's raining. As usual.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
The local stores such as Lowes are completely out ... and have been even before the storm ... of the type of air conditioners people want. I talked to an employee there who told me even the store manager there is pissed off because headquarters is too clueless to send the kinds of air conditioners people want, in sufficient quantity. It's portables that people want. The store has over 200 window units that don't sell very well, and 0 portable units that are in high demand. This employee said he gets 10 to 20 queries a day for portables, and about 4 units come in every couple weeks. There's something stupid going on at headquarters ... his words!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Damn tiny mobile fonts! Thought it was a new porn site.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm not an American, I live in Southern Europe where temperatures often go over 40C (*9/5 +32 = 104F IIRC the conversion).
Our ancestors managed to survive without AC using common sense.
1. Close every shutter early, and open them late (when the temperature is cooler outside). You don't want curtains, it won't work.
2. Limit your movements : you don't want to open the front door very ten minutes.
3. Shut down every electronic devices, or isolate the room in which they are.
4. Have a nap during the hottest hours of the day ( 2-5 PM), and profit of the coolest hours of the day : early in the morning, or a bit hotter, late at night. (Obviously, if you're not working, and have the time to do it.)
5. Drink often, and drink water.
6. Take care of the young, and the elderly. The latter are usually forgotten, and left alone. Have a look at the 2003 summer in France/Europe if you want to know what not to do. Sometime people were found dead days or even weeks after they actually died.
That's basic things that can make quiet a difference.
It's as if a bunch of people were brought up to believe human beings aren't adaptable to some moderate temperature hikes. We are, only stupid ones aren't.
It has nothing to do with stupidity, dumbass. The issue is that human bodies adapt slower than the weather changes. People in the midwest are not accustomed to these temperatures. Especially the old, the young, and the ill.
I'm born and raised in central Michigan, but I lived a handful of years in Tucson, Arizona. It took me about two years before I could stay outside during the day as long as natives. I would simply get too hot and have to go inside, regardless of how much water I drank. One day I literally drank three bottles of water to every one my cousin drank, and I still had to go inside eventually because I was showing early signs of overheating.
However, even in the middle of January when it would drop below freezing, I never once wore a coat in Arizona. Not even a light jacket. The natives thought I was nuts. To me, it was literally never cold because of the intensity of the sun regardless of the actual temperature. Even at night I could still feel heat radiating off the ground from the day since even mid-winter the daytime temperatures were still in the 70s.
When I moved back to Michigan, it only took one winter to reset my body to this climate, but it was the coldest winter I ever remember (the weather was actually quite mild).
In summary, I'll be pointing and laughing in six months when you get 8 inches of snow and have to shut down the entire state for a week.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I'm in southeast Michigan. Temp here is 98 today, and has been similar for the past week. At home, I normally run the air conditioning a couple weeks of the summer. This year, it's been running constantly since April. At work, our buildings are serviced by an internal power plant and it seems to hit capacity when the temp gets over 95 or so, so we've been under instructions for the past week to turn off lights and computers to reduce the electrical and heat load. I'm sure HVAC systems in places like Houston and D.C. are designed to deal with this kind of heat, but Michigan ain't Texas (or at least we keep telling ourselves...)
On the topic of dealing with the heat, one thing that helped me a few years ago was losing weight. I lost about 50 pounds (went from ~230 to 175), and one of the unexpected positive consequences is that I am much more tolerant of warm temperatures than before. Previously, just sitting around in anything over 80 degrees was uncomfortable, now that threshold is more like 90. (On the other hand, I'm now more sensitive to cold, but hey, that's what winter coats are for.)
Do NOT do a DIY on a automatic power generator or try to jumper a manual generator to your house as if you do not do it the right way it can back feed and kill workmen trying to fix the power lines.
Obviously I've had plenty of cold beer and should have been more ... useful with my prior posting, so I'll respond to myself...
Althought today is not as bad as it has been, temperatures in the Washington D.C. area have been rather ugly in the past few days (today is relatively cool) with temperatures hitting 100F (38C) most of this week. Our thermostat is part of the in-house A/C system that measures inside and outside temperatures, but it doesn't report anywhere except to us.
Local power (Pepco) failed for 35 hours with Friday's Derecho storm. Because this kind of multi-day power failure hits us at least once a year, we spent a small fortune on a whole-house natural gas driven power generator that made our life quite comfy (except for the internet (Comcast) outage, but Comcast went out after the power went down, and came back before Pepco restored it, yay!) Although a whole-house generator is probably overkill (what you *need* is something to keep core services running: refrigerator, AC/heat, and water if you're running on (tasty) well water).
We have two A/C units in our house, and the generator knows how to alternate between them, so only one of them runs at any one time, which keeps the peak usage down. For the curious, this setup cost us between about $10-11k but the ability to weather this kind of situation in almost perfect comfort was (and will continue to be) worthwhile. The power supplied by the generator is not necessarily optimal: Our A/C units freaked out a few times, complaining about bad power quality, system failure, and whining about the filters needing replacement, but after regular power came back they went back to normal. No, not optimal, but far, far better than getting baked in the heat. The generator kicks in about 30s after the power grid dies, and keeps running for about 2 minutes after regular power comes back. For your computers you really want a UPS to tide you over the short glitches.
There, I hope this is useful for someone :)
--Udo.
Don't the global warming alamists claim a 2 degree increase in the next 100 years? You had to "plan ahead for that"?
That's the average worldwide increase. In actuality, it'll be highly variable from region to region. Some places will get colder, some more will get hotter, all will get nastier weather, some will flood, some will go dry. It really is more "climate change" than "global warming."
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
When my old whole house AC went out, I had nothing. That taught me a lesson. I put in the 3 smaller individual units to eliminate a "single point of failure" issue. One may go down, but I have 2 "backups". It was a bit expensive - These ductless systems are. The aspect of zones is a plus, but not the main reason. I used to travel a lot before I retired back around 2003 and saw these things everywhere, even hanging off apartment balconies in places like Bangkok. I checked out Mitsubishi and Sanyo models. Both are pretty good from what I read at the time. I chose Mitsubishi and am very happy with them. In Asia I think I mostly saw Sanyos, if I remember correctly. I'm in my 60's and try to be as prepared as I can. Also, being ductless, they made more sense heat-loss wise since the old duct work is in the attic (all the old ducts in the house are sealed off).
Actually, standing on the roofdeck of my apartment building just as that "June 2012 North American derecho" was rolling in, through the curtain of rain, I could see bright orange and blue flashes of light close to the ground about every 40 seconds. These were not lightning strikes; I think they were power lines being brought down by falling trees. And visibility was limited because of the rain. That storm must have caused hundreds of breaks over a large area of land. One needs quite a lot of people and equipment to fix all that in the time span of only a few days...
The chest freezer with frozen 2L bottles works very well. (a) they have tremendous thermal mass and (b) even when they thaw, you can drink the water. Used this trick for many years. They also don't rupture even if you fill them a touch too high, unlike gallon milk jugs.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
You should plan on one minimum 3-day outage per year with the current electrical grid, on a national average. If you want to drop that to 8 hours per year, expect to pay about $1,400 per kW peak demand per year more. If you want to go to 45 minutes per year, it should be another $700/kW.
An interesting thing about that number is that it is actually cheaper to put in your own generator (or even solar with batteries!) than having the utility do it. The payback is only a couple years worst case.
The issue is that for higher reliability you need to limit distance effects and be able to tolerate maintenance activities.
Roman air conditioner. Basically a pipe buried underground with air forced through it by heating it at one end. The air drawn in is cooled by the surrounding earth. In winter it will work as a mediocre heater since the temperature about 15-30 feet underground stays relatively constant year-round at around 50-55 F (not as effective as a fire, but this would work even in the absence of firewood). Would work in high humidity too, though you'd need to add some sort of drainage system to remove water which condenses out from the temperature change.