Dutch people.
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Dutch people. Peoples of the North, who lack a strong cultural awareness of how to handle heat waves. Please heed my words
1) Pull all the curtains closed. Reflect sunlight away from the windows. Tape up a bedsheet or something if you don't have curtains or blinds (not that rare in the Netherlands)
2) Open windows on opposite walls of the house, prop open the interior doors with something heavy, get a cross-breeze going. (Yes, the curtains may get flappy. I tucked the end of a long one under my bed mattress to mitigate this)
3) Take a quick shower with water that is only slightly warmed (neither ice cold nor steaming hot). Do this two, three, four times a day if you have to.
4) Similarly, drinking water that is ice cold may sound good but it's liable to give you stomach cramps when you're very hot. Your drinking water shouldn't be more than slightly cool.
@0xabad1dea Yeah this is all sound advice.
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y'all I know that if you have AC (most houses here don't) then obviously the windows should stay closed, or if you have good insulation (lol, whoever rated our apartment was clearly doing some creative math to avoid falling beneath the current legal minimum) that not opening the windows might work out better, assuming you did close the curtains.
But right now Northern Europe is full of people sitting in greenhouse ovens who tell themselves that opening the windows would be counter-productive because outside is where the heat is
I have spent most of my life in places with hot, humid summers like we're having in NL right now and I know what to do when there's no AC. I'm cool and comfortable at the moment in a house with no AC and poor insulation because I'm very proactive about getting the curtains closed and windows open early in the morning before sun hitting glass starts to heat up the house.@0xabad1dea you can also selectively open windows to encourage natural convection, which will help keep the house cool. I use blackout curtains in my bedroom, and they really help keep the sun from nuking the place during the day.
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@0xabad1dea @Newde there's some heat inertia. My fifty year old apartment peaked at 29 °C yesterday, 5 degrees lower than outside at the time.
Unfortunately the inertia also means it takes forever to cool down even with a cross-breeze. I've half-seriously considered mounting cooling fins on the walls.
I wonder if spraying water on the walls (for evaporative cooling while the windows are open) is a terrible idea or a *really* terrible idea.
@barometz @0xabad1dea @Newde
For inertia.
That pre-1950 house I'm living in has a basement which is usually pretty chill.
But, earth can only be cool for some time, before it starts to heat up as well - and staying at that level for long times.
Hottest other rooms are the Wintergarten with 31°C, and the office in first floor with 26°C (Outside Air is 29°C). -
Dutch people. Peoples of the North, who lack a strong cultural awareness of how to handle heat waves. Please heed my words
1) Pull all the curtains closed. Reflect sunlight away from the windows. Tape up a bedsheet or something if you don't have curtains or blinds (not that rare in the Netherlands)
2) Open windows on opposite walls of the house, prop open the interior doors with something heavy, get a cross-breeze going. (Yes, the curtains may get flappy. I tucked the end of a long one under my bed mattress to mitigate this)
3) Take a quick shower with water that is only slightly warmed (neither ice cold nor steaming hot). Do this two, three, four times a day if you have to.
4) Similarly, drinking water that is ice cold may sound good but it's liable to give you stomach cramps when you're very hot. Your drinking water shouldn't be more than slightly cool.
@0xabad1dea thermodynamics, it works. I had awnings and roof insulation installed so indeed we air at night and close down during the day
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@0xabad1dea @Newde @barometz rain also makes the walls wet right? I kind of like the concept at least, I wonder if there is an actual effective and safe way to evaporatively cool your house...
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@0xabad1dea Soaking your feet in a basin of cool water is another good way to cool and feels sooo nice. Great for people who can’t/don’t want to shower multiple times
@zwils @0xabad1dea Or very simply, turn on a fan and get the plant mister out. A little mist of water on your bare legs or down the back of your neck will do wonders. Or a splash of water in your neck where the big arteries are.
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@0xabad1dea @Newde @barometz rain also makes the walls wet right? I kind of like the concept at least, I wonder if there is an actual effective and safe way to evaporatively cool your house...
@pepijndevos if it rains inside your house, you need to fix your roof
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@Newde a Dutch house with closed windows in a heat wave is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY hotter than outside.
(assuming you don't have AC running, which most won't.)
@0xabad1dea @Newde Some are, etc. If so, open the window because at least moving air is nicer than stale air.
But as long as it's cooler inside, keep them shut.
And if you can hang something over the outside of the windows, even better! Our house came with shutters on the ground floor and those things keep things a looot cooler than the upper floors.
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@pepijndevos if it rains inside your house, you need to fix your roof
@lambda I was thinking of wetting the OUTSIDE walls to make them cool down. Inside... yea you could hang wet laundry to dry I guess. I guess air chillers work on this principle and aren't very effective right
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@0xabad1dea Can't wait to move out of my hell apartment with no cross-breeze possibility. Makes managing heat very difficult.
Same here. A proper cross breeze isn't really possible (unless there is a storm).
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@DJGummikuh @0xabad1dea same here in Düsseldorf. Keeping the balcony door open overnight with a fan pulling cool(er) air from outside overnight got my living room back to 24 before it started heating up again.
I’m keeping the AC on and barely managing to keep the house under 27 on average.
@leitzke @DJGummikuh @0xabad1dea
Turn the fan. The fan pulling cool air in is trying to push air into a room already full of air. Also since I assume that your fan is not mounted well outside the window it's mostly stirring the warm air it's sitting in, hoping to "grab" some of that cool outside air in the process.
If you turn it, you push the hot air out. Put the fan about half a meter inside so it sits in the hot air and blows it out the window. The resulting vacuum will be filled from the outside - works best if you have a second window open -
@0xabad1dea Soaking your feet in a basin of cool water is another good way to cool and feels sooo nice. Great for people who can’t/don’t want to shower multiple times
@zwils @0xabad1dea Or partly fill the sink and put your firearms in flat.
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y'all I know that if you have AC (most houses here don't) then obviously the windows should stay closed, or if you have good insulation (lol, whoever rated our apartment was clearly doing some creative math to avoid falling beneath the current legal minimum) that not opening the windows might work out better, assuming you did close the curtains.
But right now Northern Europe is full of people sitting in greenhouse ovens who tell themselves that opening the windows would be counter-productive because outside is where the heat is
I have spent most of my life in places with hot, humid summers like we're having in NL right now and I know what to do when there's no AC. I'm cool and comfortable at the moment in a house with no AC and poor insulation because I'm very proactive about getting the curtains closed and windows open early in the morning before sun hitting glass starts to heat up the house.I lived in an upper story south-facing apartment in Mannheim during the 2003 heatwave. It was absolutely awful. I think something like tens of thousands of people died across the continent.
What worked for me was opening all the windows for maybe an hour or two in the morning to get some air exchange, and then closing everything up and lowering the Rolladen for the rest of the day and evening. I'm not sure if rolling shutters are common in the Netherlands, though.
I ended up buying a portable AC unit after that. I got used to working without AC in the heat, but I just needed one room cool enough to sleep in.
Best of luck to everyone trying to survive right now!
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Dutch people. Peoples of the North, who lack a strong cultural awareness of how to handle heat waves. Please heed my words
1) Pull all the curtains closed. Reflect sunlight away from the windows. Tape up a bedsheet or something if you don't have curtains or blinds (not that rare in the Netherlands)
2) Open windows on opposite walls of the house, prop open the interior doors with something heavy, get a cross-breeze going. (Yes, the curtains may get flappy. I tucked the end of a long one under my bed mattress to mitigate this)
3) Take a quick shower with water that is only slightly warmed (neither ice cold nor steaming hot). Do this two, three, four times a day if you have to.
4) Similarly, drinking water that is ice cold may sound good but it's liable to give you stomach cramps when you're very hot. Your drinking water shouldn't be more than slightly cool.
@0xabad1dea I'm from America... wtf is happening over there??
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@0xabad1dea I'm from America... wtf is happening over there??
@CrissCrossCannibal it's getting into the 90s with high humidity, which for Dutch people feels like getting into the 110s with high humidity would feel to people from warmer American states.
The weather here is very mild and every time it gets Actually Hot or Actually Cold people start keeling over because they don't know how to take proactive care
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@0xabad1dea Unless your house is equally hot as outside (RIP) it's probably better to keep windows closed during the day.
@Newde @0xabad1dea
26° yesterday evening after an hour with the windows closed when it finally got cold enough to go for a walk23° today at noon with doors and windows open and 27° outside.
With the windows open, inside is like any other shadow. Windows closed is like a greenhouse.
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@Newde a Dutch house with closed windows in a heat wave is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY hotter than outside.
(assuming you don't have AC running, which most won't.)
@0xabad1dea @Newde living in the UK, brick houses… it's like a pizza oven if you don't pay attention.
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@0xabad1dea I am in the US in my 50s and I have finally absorbed and accepted this just this year.
If I open my curtains I also open my windows so I’m not exactly in a greenhouse, but I’ve finally figured out that leaving the curtains and windows closed during the day keeps my apartment cooler. Also, a fan in the window that is blowing in is dumb but I used to do that a lot too. I had a mom who was obsessed with fresh air and I think that’s how I got stuck on this.
My electric usage is much better this year than it was last year at the same time. The bill is higher because our electric company sucks, but I am using less which is still a win for me.
@maggiejk @0xabad1dea It's not dumb if you have two fans on each end of your house and you take care to put them both in the sense the wind is naturally trying to blow.
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Dutch people. Peoples of the North, who lack a strong cultural awareness of how to handle heat waves. Please heed my words
1) Pull all the curtains closed. Reflect sunlight away from the windows. Tape up a bedsheet or something if you don't have curtains or blinds (not that rare in the Netherlands)
2) Open windows on opposite walls of the house, prop open the interior doors with something heavy, get a cross-breeze going. (Yes, the curtains may get flappy. I tucked the end of a long one under my bed mattress to mitigate this)
3) Take a quick shower with water that is only slightly warmed (neither ice cold nor steaming hot). Do this two, three, four times a day if you have to.
4) Similarly, drinking water that is ice cold may sound good but it's liable to give you stomach cramps when you're very hot. Your drinking water shouldn't be more than slightly cool.
@0xabad1dea "2) Open windows on opposite walls of the house, prop open the interior doors with something heavy, get a cross-breeze going. (Yes, the curtains may get flappy. I tucked the end of a long one under my bed mattress to mitigate this)"
This may be true for an open-plan house, but I disagree if you have multiple rooms and corridors... Better then to isolate the rooms getting heat by closing the doors to them! After ventilating the whole house in the early hours, we close all the doors and windows during the day and stay in the cooler rooms. E.g. our living room is currently 10 deg C cooler than the outside air tempertaure so no way opening any windows will help there... but our kitchen is easily 5+ deg C warmer than the living room towards evening and leaving that door open makes everywhere feel hot.
Then overnight, when the outside air cools off, we can open everything up and ventilate.
Mind you, I say this sitting in the upstairs office which is 33 deg C - because that's where the monitors are. Mini fan to the rescue...
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y'all I know that if you have AC (most houses here don't) then obviously the windows should stay closed, or if you have good insulation (lol, whoever rated our apartment was clearly doing some creative math to avoid falling beneath the current legal minimum) that not opening the windows might work out better, assuming you did close the curtains.
But right now Northern Europe is full of people sitting in greenhouse ovens who tell themselves that opening the windows would be counter-productive because outside is where the heat is
I have spent most of my life in places with hot, humid summers like we're having in NL right now and I know what to do when there's no AC. I'm cool and comfortable at the moment in a house with no AC and poor insulation because I'm very proactive about getting the curtains closed and windows open early in the morning before sun hitting glass starts to heat up the house.@0xabad1dea I put rescue blankets, those thin silver/golden ones, on my windows from the outside, that keeps the heat better outside than curtains and it doesn't block the light completely.
Edit: English term is space blanket apparently
