Household hacks: How we're keeping cool(er)

I've lived in New Jersey pretty much all my life, and so I'm used to hot, humid summers. Daytime temperatures over 90 degrees F are so common that they're not even worthy of comment, and there have always been summer heat waves when it gets into the upper 90s for a few days at a time. But nothing in all my years of New Jersey summers prepared me for the kind of heat we've been having this past week. 

Most of the state has been under a heat advisory for the last seven days, with the daytime heat index reaching 100 to 105 degrees. It's not too bad in the evening and early morning, but between 10am and 8pm, the outdoors is pretty much unbearable. Brian has been unable to ride his bike to work all week for fear that he'd just keel over from the heat on his ride home. And it's going to get worse before it gets better; tonight, it's unlikely to drop below 80 degrees all night long.

Most New Jerseyans, I imagine, are dealing with this by staying in their air-conditioned homes, cars, and workplaces for most of the day. But our house only has A/C in two rooms: a built-in wall unit in the living room and a window unit in the office. They can't do a thing to help us with cooking or eating in the kitchen or sleeping in the bedroom. And even in the rooms where we have A/C available, we prefer not to deploy it unless it's a true emergency, which I define as over 90 degrees indoors during the day or 85 at night. As we've learned from past experience, running the A/C all day is hugely expensive; one summer when we had guests staying with us for just one week and put an air conditioner in their room to keep them comfortable, our electric bill for the month more than doubled. And of course, for those who aren't getting their electricity from clean energy sources like we do, using more power also contributes to climate change, which means heat waves like this will only get more frequent and more severe in the future.

So, just as we do to stay warm in the winter, we're relying on a variety of household hacks to keep us at least tolerably cool until the heat wave breaks. Here's a roundup of our best cooling tips:

Summer Strategy #1: Use windows selectively

As soon as it cools down in the evening, we open windows throughout the house to to let in the cooler air. In the morning, as soon as the outdoor temperature gets higher than the indoor temperature, we close them all down to a crack. (We leave just a little gap for ventilation, because otherwise the house gets too stuffy.) We also lower the shades to block out solar radiation. During this latest heat wave, we've taken it a step further and started keeping the door to our guest room closed, since that room has south- and east-facing windows with blinds that don't fully block out the sun.

Summer Strategy #2: Use fans everywhere

We have an Eco Breeze fan in our office that I received as part of my payment for writing some ad copy for the company. It has a built-in thermostat that automatically switches it on as soon as the outdoor air gets cooler than the indoor air, and back off when the indoor air gets down to a preset temperature (or when the outdoor air heats up again). It also has the advantage that, unlike other window fans, it can run even in rainy weather. It's basically like a window A/C unit with all the cooling parts taken out. I probably would never have bought one if it hadn't been given to me, but now I consider it indispensable. The only reason I haven't bought more of them is that, like a window A/C, it permanently occupies a window all summer long.

For the rest of the house, we rely on lower-tech cooling. At night, we keep a window fan running in our bedroom's one window. When Brian gets up in the early morning, he usually shuts off the fan and closes the curtains to keep the room dark, but during this heat wave he's been compromising by turning off only one of its twin fans and closing just one curtain. He also sets up our huge exhaust fan in a kitchen window to vent hot air out of the house, replacing it with cooler air that flows in through the windows.

Once the outdoor air gets warmer than the indoors (which has been happening pretty early this week), we stow all the window fans and spend the rest of the day relying on stationary fans. We keep the ceiling fan in the kitchen running whenever we're in there, and in every other room, we have desk fans pointed at us wherever we happen to be. There's a little one that sits on my desk, one in the living room next to the couch (which Brian moves to his desk if he's working from home), and one in our bedroom that we keep pointed at the bed to keep air moving directly over us as we sleep.

Summer Strategy #3: Sip cold drinks

In weather like this, it's important to stay hydrated, so we both chug plenty of cold water all day long. You may have heard that hot drinks are actually more cooling, but that's only because they stimulate sweating; in New Jersey's humid climate, where the sweat never evaporates properly, they're counterproductive.

Summer Strategy #4: Minimize stove and oven use

In the wintertime, we use the oven as much as possible to keep the kitchen warm. In summer, quite the other way, we try to keep oven use and even stove use to a minimum. We rely on a combination of cooking on the grill (if it's not too broiling hot to be outdoors), using the pressure cooker to minimize stovetop time, quick-cooking dishes such as pasta, and cold salads that require no cooking at all. And if we absolutely have to bake something (such as our traditional anniversary cake), we do it either at night or early in the morning, with the exhaust fan running continuously to vent out the heat.

Summer Strategy #5: Chill out in the basement

Even with a fan pointed directly at us, there have been nights this week when our living room futon felt uncomfortably warm. The soft surface traps body heat, so it feels a bit like sitting in a hot bath. So, a few times this week, we have abandoned the living room and retreated to the basement, where it's as much as 10 degrees cooler, to play games or watch TV on Brian's laptop.

Summer Strategy #6: Apply ice

Another way I try to mitigate the heat when lying in bed or sitting on the couch is to grab a gel ice pack (the kind used for icing an injury) out of the freezer. I apply it directly to my pulse points (neck, wrists, thighs) for a quick burst of cold. I've tried other strategies for cooling the pulse points, such as a cooling neck band and wristbands that you soak in cold water, but I haven't found them all that helpful. With the humidity this high, the moisture can't evaporate, and the coolness of the water is offset by the damp material clinging to my skin and impeding airflow. And before long, they warm up to body temperature and provide no benefit at all.

By combining these six strategies, we manage to stay reasonably comfortable for most of the day, but things get challenging at bedtime. We've stripped down the bed to the minimum, with just the sheets and the duvet cover minus duvet, and stripped down ourselves to the minimum of clothing as well, but the mattress itself still traps body heat, so every part that's in contact with it feels overheated. In weather like this, I would happily run an air conditioner in the bedroom if we had had one, but we don't, and we've had trouble figuring out how to add without blocking off the room's only window for the whole summer.

On the very hottest nights, we sometimes sleep on the futon in the office, which has A/C, or in the basement, where it's naturally cooler. But this doesn't necessarily lead to a better night's sleep, because if we shut the cats into the room with us, they pounce on our feet, and if we shut them out, they scratch and meow at the door all night. So throughout this heat wave, I've been trying to tough it out in the bedroom with fans and ice packs, but with limited success.

I recently saw a suggestion in Consumer Reports that a cooling mattress topper can help. However, they're not talking about the "passive" kind of cooling with heat-absorbing gel, which they say doesn't work very well; they're recommending "active" systems with a little water cooler under the bed and a pump to circulate cool water through a network of tubes in the pad. These devices cost over $700 for a full-sized mattress, they include a bulky unit that needs to be stored under the bed, they use electricity (though not as much as an air conditioner), and they require regular maintenance to fill, drain, and clean the water tank. I've looked into some less expensive bed-cooling devices from the Cooling Store , such as the water-filled "Chillow" and a gel cooling pad, but I just don't know how well they would work.

One thing that definitely won't work is this alleged "portable AC" that I've been seeing ads for all over the Internet. From the description, it's pretty obvious that this is not an air conditioner at all, but an evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler, which is supposed to cool you down simply by blowing air over water to evaporate it. In the first place, there's no reason to pay $90 for one of these when you can get something similar for less than half the price at Target or Walmart (and those models are honest about what they are, rather than misleading customers by claiming to be air conditioners). You can even make your own with less than $20 worth of parts. But we have no reason to do any of these things, because swamp coolers are pretty much useless in high humidity.

So, having weighed all the options, we've decided it's time to bite the bullet and add an actual air conditioner to the bedroom. I managed to find a small over-the-sill model that can fit in our bedroom window without obstructing it too much, so it can still admit light. At $430, it's significantly cheaper than the mattress cooler, and a lot more likely to be effective. It also has a fan-only mode, so it can also take the place of our old window fan (which would probably have needed replacing soon anyway) on summer nights when it isn't overpoweringly hot. And since it's Energy Star-certified, it won't completely destroy our ecofrugal cred to run it on the few nights a year when it is.

Besides, according to Hallmark, appliances are the traditional 18th-anniversary gift, so it's only fitting.