How we survived 120 degrees WITHOUT air-conditioning | Tips for staying COOL in the summer!

how do you stay cool without air conditioning so this past weekend we experienced triple digits for three days in a row here where we live in the pacific northwest we actually topped out at 120 degrees fahrenheit here at 3 30 in the afternoon and without having air conditioning we had to pull out all of the stops in order to keep our house as cool and ourselves as possible so my first tip is a pretty basic one but when you combine all of these together they work very well the hottest our house got 120 degrees fahrenheit was 88 degrees fahrenheit so that is obviously during the heat of the day when it's hotter outside than it would be inside is to close all of the doors and windows but not just close them but actually block the sunlight that's coming in so we have all of our blinds closed if you don't have blinds or curtains or window coverings you can use sheets you can use towels whatever you can to create an extra barrier from allowing the heat and the sun to come through your windows now after doing that especially if you have children you want to minimize the opening and closing of doors and kids running out because every time you open that door you're just letting in extra heat so we actually had come back from running to the store and so we had a game plan everybody had to grab so many bags so that we could get all of the bags and all of the groceries from the car into the house with only opening the door once so we did manage to do it we waited until everybody was right at the door open it come in as fast as you can and then shut it but that does really help now if you have to go in and out picking a door that is in the shade or most likely has northern exposure because usually obviously it's in the shade it's going to be cooler and northern exposure usually is away from the sunlight is being strategic about what doors you are opening and closing if you have to open them so of course we're keeping everything buttoned up tight during the day so that we're not letting any extra hot air in but once it begins to get cooler at night than it is in the house then you're going to want to open everything up so we open all of the doors with the screen having the screen doors because living on a homestead when you have livestock there's lots of fly so making sure that we've got the screen doors but creating as much air flow as possible so obviously opening up all of the windows keeping those doors propped open and then in front of them if you have any fans is placing your fan we do this in our bedrooms as well as here because i can open up which is why this is sitting here it's like it's permanent home during the summer um but i can pull my shades back open this up have just the size a screen door and then turn this on high and once the air is cooler outside and the fan is facing this way then it's actually drawing the cooler air from outside and directing it inside to the house now some people like to take like a milk jug with water and freeze it put it in a deep freezer get like a block of ice and put it on a stool or a table or something right in front of the fan and have it blow over that frozen surface to provide cool air i think that works more effectively if you're sitting right next to it rather than just you know further away or for a large room like this but that was one of the tips that i've seen that a lot of people have been using kind of creating like a basically kind of like a swamp cooler with their fan but here's the one that was very very helpful especially when we were trying to go to sleep at night and it was too late to go out and too dark to go out into the swimming pool or to hose down or to take a cold shower and that is you can take a dish towel or a washcloth get it damp and then put it in the freezer i like to freeze them so that they're kind of like in a u-shape like this and then put them on the back of your neck like that and as it begins to thaw which will happen pretty close back i didn't measure so well but i'll pull that a little bit um you will be surprised at how fast this actually cools you down i highly recommend having multiples and you can do like i said a kitchen towel is going to be a little bit longer so it'll come down the front but the back of the neck is awesome and then when we're trying to go to sleep actually with the way that your circulation works under the armpit is a great spot and then i like to put it on my torso when i'm trying to go to sleep at night especially if you have a fan blowing on you this works great so as i said have multiples of these because they will begin to thaw and then you can just keep swapping and trading them out but these can be a lifesaver when i was a teenager i worked at a local restaurant that did not have air conditioning even in the kitchen and i worked on the fryer the deep fryer and the grill and that's actually where i learned this trick it was the only way that we could get through the day with standing over and cooking and so you would just come home and you would have like trails where the water would melt um from the towels hanging so you just kind of have this perpetually wet but as we know that's why we sweat right any time you have moisture it begins to evaporate it does help to cool the body down so it's not necessarily a bad thing and i know other people said that they will even spray like their bed sheets down at night so they're at least damp before getting into them when it's really hot that hasn't been the one that we tried because i just used my frozen towels the other thing is being very strategic with your cooking because heating up the house with both the stovetop and the oven if i have my oven on and i'm baking and i've got stuff simmering on our stovetop i mean that can easily raise the degrees by at least a couple if not five degrees which i love in the winter time when the house is cold but i don't want that in the summertime so i try to use things like my instant pot a slow cooker i try to avoid using the stove if at all possible now there are some times when i do have to use the stove especially if we're having those hot temps for days on end and when that happens i prefer to do it in the evening because in the evening we're still getting cooler at night and i can open up all the windows and i'm going to get air flow airflow coming from the house and cooling it down rather than trying to do it in the morning the house is cooler in the morning but i'm increasing the temperature build and then it's going to stay warmer all day without a way to cool it off so i find it better to run or turn on anything have it hot if you have to heat it up in the afternoon but my favorite way is if i don't have something that i'm putting or cooking in the insta pot or the slow cooker is to make sure that we are just cooking outside so my next tip is to cook out doors so of course having a barbecuer a lot of people have a barbecue but that can be a great way and then we also have our smoker which this is not requiring live coals so we're not really worried about fire danger but usually you can use charcoal in an approved things and so we've got the smoker here and we have these set up so they are in the shade that's going to be absolutely key to helping keep cool so we've got these here but another thing that you can do even though we've got our grill here is create an outdoor kitchen area so out here even though we are in the sun we get more of a breeze and this is my outdoor area where we'll cook salmon and burgers this is nice because it's up to waist high i've got a large cooking area i also can put this lid on here if things are almost getting done or if we want to do even a little bit of smoking we can do this and so i like having the prep table here because i can bring all of my ingredients out from the house to minimize trips going into the house because one that's going to be more work on me and it's also going to make things hotter and opening and closing those doors like we talked about earlier so i like to bring everything kind of out and then i've got this area where i can prep and pull things off and put them here and then i don't have any of my utensils out here right now but i can also hang them from here so that just makes it for easy access so this is just cinder blocks um that we've gotten set up here and then this is just like and then i can pull so this has got some little handles here and this part doesn't get too hot um even when i've got the fire there but if i need to add more wood and or charcoal depending on what my cooking medium is like i can easily pick this up move it aside etc and then set it back down now another cooking area that we've got is our fire pit over here which i've got a lovely buttercup growing in so you can tell i have not had a fire in here extremely recently but i like this because it's obviously this is just an old cone from like a crusher but this works really nice because it helps keep it contained and you also want to have that nice firewall up but i do a lot of my dutch oven cooking out here so baking time when it's really hot and you're trying to keep your house cool the last thing you want to do is turn the oven on but there's only so much that you can do cooking wise when you're smoking or when you're grilling etc and sometimes i like to continue with my baking and so i'll bring my dutch ovens out here and then i can make anything in them that i would in the regular oven in the house and so once i get the coals going that all stays contained in here and then i'll put it on my dutch ovens and keep them going in here so if the kids are running around or animals or whatever they're not going to be in any danger of knocking it over or brushing up against the hot dutch oven in the coals and burning themselves and i don't have any of this heat going on inside the house now this is a little bit more of a long-term method on keeping cool but planting deciduous trees strategically and i say deciduous because in the winter time we actually want any sunshine that may be coming to help warm up the house but we definitely don't want it in the summertime so if we're planting things like maples those are a big batch of maples there and right now they're not providing any shade but this is because we're still pretty early in the day here as we get to the latter part of the day which is the hotter part of the day the sun will actually begin to dip down and those will begin to provide shade in the evening hours and shade the house about three hours before it would normally get shade if they weren't there so it's something you don't want to plant trees too close to your house obviously for safety reasons and other things but planting them strategically it'll take a while obviously before they're big enough to provide shade but that can be a long-term thing to think about to help keep your house cool naturally and of course if you have any type of pool obviously that's going to help keep you cool without air conditioning as well if you're looking for more ways to cook outdoors you can head on over to the website i'll have the link below this video i have a blog post with number of ways for you to be able to do that and i would love to know what your best tips are for keeping cool if you don't have air conditioning

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 416,684

Keywords: summer heat, air conditioner, air conditioning, staying cool, hot outside, beat the heat

Id: 3WWDSK6nHhI

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021