Coping with hot weather

As I am now completely bedbound (can't turn on the side, for example), I suffer greatly in the heat and while my partner is away, I have all the fans in the house blowing air at me. One fan has a remote so i can regulate the flow and direction.

I also have a small air cooler which is meant for camping/RVs etc. It has a water container into which ice can be put and a fan which pushes the air through the cold water so the air gets cooler. Of course, it is not ideal and not as good as air conditioning because the water in the container gets warmer and evaporates.

 

Lots of cold water from the fridge and a tiny bit of gatorade in each big glass.

 

Interesting ...it does look like the cooling effect does come with the requirement to have a lot of exposed skin and to be in a dry rather than humid atmosphere though which makes sense in terms of evaporation etc. They don’t seem to understand why this happens with hot drinks though and the stuff about the ‘thermo sensors’ seems quite speculative. It also doesn’t look at cold drinks side by side in different environmental conditions. I think what I get from this is unless you are in an arid dessert it’s not a good idea to drink a hot drink to cool down?

The spicy food thing is more likely to be based on pain conditioning and cultural, since capsicum heat is mainly detected by pain receptors in the mouth and throat. Mustard and pepper are similar. So unlike taste receptors the heat part can be dialled down by the brain the more you are exposed to it. I suspect that the fact that chillies grow better in hot climates may be the reason they are popular in those regions?

 

Sorry to be a spice bore but I found these articles quite interesting mainly because it allowed me to celebrate that my memory hasn’t completely gone to mush in this hot weather):

Spread of chillies from Central America across the world (mainly due to Europeans trying to find alternative to pepper due to ottomans blocking trade routes from India)

http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1628191_1626317_1632291,00.html

Pain receptors for chillies

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-it-that-eating-spi/

 

I’ve just brought the cooling towels mentioned above, in bamboo as it’s eco friendlier.

Does anyone have rave reviews for the expensive dyson fans? I have an £80 Honeywell tower fan that’s reasonable but not so powerful. Outlaying £3-400 on dyson is only something I could do if it was much better.

 

I havent tried this but wearing damp socks to bed I heard can work

 

Last summer I found wetting a soft thick tea towel and laying it over my chest in bed helped to get me off to sleep.

 

Have you considered strapping a slice of buttered toast to your cat's back? Apparently cats always land on their feet, and buttered toast always lands buttered side down, so with the toast strapped to her back when she fell off the window ledge she'd start spinning and become a perpetual motion machine, which apart from anything else (scientific breakthrough, viral youtube video etc etc) would serve her right.

 

Unfortunately she did land on her feet (it's a high enough drop to allow that), she has damaged joints because of it - she generally landed on grass but, and this was a long time ago, I would assume after several days of hot weather the concrete would probably have given her a softer landing.

ETA - with toast fitted on her back she would obviously land on her head

@Trish

It's not all my neighbours, it's mainly 2 (out of 18) flats, with another few chipping in occasionally. The main problems outside come because of a decision the housing association made about a year ago, it seems specifically to piss me off. 10 yards away there used to be a right of way through a fence (dropped curb and everything lol) onto another "road". Because this "road" was used to deal drugs, the dealers of which were never any problem to passers by, they blocked the through access off, to distance it from their estate. So now we have cars of people turning up right outside, on the housing associations estate, instead of around a corner, not on their estate, with loud music going, attracting crowds of "people" who coz they are drunk, stoned, and generally young, are a bloody nuisance. The other aspect to blocking it off is instead of being able to cut through to the main road when I go out I now have a 200-250m walk to get to the same place, which is a problem.

 

It's bloody freezing!!!

(Met office says outside temp is 16C, my thermometer says inside temp is 24C, which is conventionally considered to be warm, but I'm cold, virtually shivering)

A cold front is apparently an effective way of dealing with hot weather, but not a good one right now.

 

Wonko has just reminded me of another useful tool, the indoor thermometer

I've got a 'HTC-1' (whatever that means). It has a nice large display, tells temperature (C or F), humidity, time and date, and has an alarm too. It's lightweight, has a stand and a keyhole hanging thing, so can be free standing or hung on the wall, large enough buttons to not be fiddly, a button to switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit, and a AAA battery will run for years on it.

 

It is 27 C with the relative humidity at 83%. I literally peel myself off of my sheets when I get up.

 

Has anyone here tried the kind of cooling bandages they use for horses? You put them in the freezer.



(I already have a cooling mat meant for dogs, so why not get a pair of these as well? )

 

It's going up to the upper 30's for the next few days and it's only May.

 

My epoxy resin, that was supposed to be here on Thursday, to repair a free evaporative cooler, was announced as 'irretrievably damaged' by the courier last night. This is after amazon stating that delivery had been attempted twice, when the courier said it was still in a distant hub.

Amazon still want me to wait until Tuesday for it, when the courier has said they will not deliver, as it's irretrievably damaged.

I imagine that it was insufficiently packaged and got caught in the hubs sorting tracks/machinery. I do hope that Evri didn't have to shut down a conveyor gunked together by high strength epoxy

On Tuesday I have no doubt amazon will simply start the refund process, so possibly another several days before I get the money back so that I can order again.

Meanwhile the price of it has gone up from £17 to a few pennies under £19, when even the original price was pushing it for repair of a low end broken 'free' cooler. It's a VonHaus - a company that deliberately has inferior things manufactured as people buy them as they are relatively cheap. Tat often is.

So my chances of getting this cooler working in the next week or so seem....slim.

In the meantime I have no doubt all the steam coming off my head, and flames coming from my ears, will cool me down.

ETA - and it gets worse. Amazon made me wait until today before allowing me to 'do' anything, they aren't going to, despite their system saying undeliverable. They then graciously accepted there was a 'problem', and still did nothing. They did provide a link for me to use so I could take action, but things like cancel order, ask for a refund, or even 'speak' to a person, all unavailable. Even a sub option of report a problem only offered me tracking.

I am now trying a 'chat' with amazon marketplace, to ask for a refund, quoted response time is 3 days, to even have it considered. Before which they they want the damaged item back.

So - maybe January 3267 before this tank gets fixed, by which time the epoxy could well be £47.6 Trillion a tube vs my £17 something refund.

 

On the plus side I have just managed to produce my first batch of spherical ice cubes, so that's nice, and more on topic lol

More difficult than you'd think, my first attempt only produced one sphere, the rest were definitely not spherical.

All down to the speed they are whirred at when standing in the freezer I expect

 

@Wonko

Why spherical ice cubes? Just for fun or are they special in some way.

 

They are very special to me, they cool drinks, an important thing, and they cool them ,allegedly, faster than cubical ice cubes - something to do with the surface area being larger. They are also significantly bigger than standard ice cubes so may last longer.

Obviously I have to research this, it will probably take many drinks to do so.