People, we still have half of July and all of August to go and if you still don't have your hot weather routine straight, here it is.
1. Hopefully you have at least double pane windows. Close them before you leave the house in the morning, AND close the curtains, especially on a sunny side of the house. This can keep the house TEN degrees cooler even if you don't run the AC while you're gone. If you have a storm door, open the glass panes so as not to trap the heat from the sun against your inside door.
2. SET YOUR AC TO 80 degrees. This is the most energy efficient temperature, and it is much cooler than outside in a heat wave. Using windows and curtains properly will avoid stressing your AC and the grid.
3. A dehumidifier can be the equivalent of five degrees of AC. My home can't have HVAC and mini-splits don't handle these heat waves well. But my through-the-wall unit has a dehumidifier and when it's 100% humidity but not hot, that's the ticket.
4. USE CEILING FANS. Air movement is crucial to keeping cool, as you know from experience. It will also make you feel cooler when you are trying to sleep on a hot night.
5. Make sure your pets are inside if you're not home during the day or night. Talk to your veterinarian about ways to keep nervous pets from tearing up the house, but leaving them outside in heat that would kill you is just abuse.
6. If temperatures are going to drop below 85 at night, turn off the AC and open the windows. Ventilation is crucial to sleeping well. Make sure internal doors are open so rooms don't get stuffy.
7. COLD SHOWERS. A cold shower just before bedtime cleans and refreshes. Start with mildly warm water and then turn the temperature down every half minute or so. Then only dry your butt to avoid diaper rash, and let your ceiling fans blow you dry. It's cleaner than a swimming pool and you don't have to get into your hot car or run through the heat wave to use it. Also running cold water over your wrists, or splashing your face with cold water, are refreshing. And if you're not at work, pouring cold water over your whole head also works.
8. DRINK YOUR WATER. Not iced coffee, not alcohol, not caffeinated soda. These will all drain fluids from your body, removing your coolant.
9. Put bottles of your emergency water in the freezer, at least 5 of them. In a heat exhaustion emergency, put one against each side of the neck, one in each armpit, and one in the groin while you wait for emergency services. You can also run cold water in the bath and put the person into that, but put in the ice bottles because I know from experience that cold water doesn't stay cold in this kind of heat.
10. Keep FOUR ice cube trays frozen. I'm just one person and I know I go through at least one tray each day.
11. Prepare cool foods in advance to eat when "it's too hot to cook". Make large batches; freeze some of it if it's more than a week's worth of food. Get vegetables, fruit, cheese, milk if you can tolerate it, and juice (not juice cocktail or fruit drink which are sugary). Yogurt is great: you can mix two tablespoonfuls with flavoring like cocoa powder and sugar or fruit preserves, and stick it in the freezer for about 15 minutes. Chex mix with raisins and carob chips is another good choice.
12. Dress as lightly and loosely as you can. If you have to run in and out of buildings, wear light colors. Dark colors absorb light and heat up.
13. Linen bedding is the best, it is historically known for its coolness. It wicks heat away from you. It cools off rapidly once you roll over onto the other side of the bed.
14. Hopefully your bed is two people wide. When you have heated up one side, you can roll onto the cool side. Pillows are the same way, once the one you are lying on gets warm, especially if the pillow case is linen, you can move it so the cool side is under your head.
15. Have a downstairs sleeper. It can be as much as FIVE degrees cooler downstairs than up. This will help you get to sleep. Sometimes if I wake up around 2 a.m. I will then go upstairs and finish the night in my bedroom.
16. PLAN FOR THE ELECTRICITY TO FAIL. This can happen if the drain of AC is too high or a storm shreds the grid. In 2012, a derecho storm took out power to some 2 million people in the DMV who had my same power company. It lasted 22 hours. The heat index was about 112. My only ventilation was the windows on the north side of my house. My only air movement was a Victorian type wooden lady's fan.
I keep my freezer packed with food. You cannot open your freezer when there's no power or things start to defrost. In 2012, mine stayed frozen and I didn't have to throw anything out. When Hurricane Isabel came through in 2003, my power was out for THREE DAYS but my packed freezer stayed frozen. Some things in your refrigerator freeze well. Throw them into the freezer the minute the power goes out and you might save even more.
If you don't need electricity to run your shower, you can still use cold water in case you start to develop heat exhaustion, but you will need to keep the water running because, like I said, it doesn't stay cold long in severe heat.
You may need to leave your neighborhood to find cooling. The derecho took out power to such a wide region, I probably would have had to go 200 miles to central Pennsylvania to find a hotel that still had AC. KEEP YOUR CAR GASSED UP so you can evacuate in such an emergency.
Keep your phone charged and plan to use it only for communication, not entertainment. HAVE A DEVICE SPECIFIC CHARGER THAT USES YOUR CAR TO RECHARGE, whether it plugs into a cigarette lighter or in-board Wifi/USB port. Some chargers come with multiple plug ends to suit most outlets.
Also since shit happens, buy one of those multi-charger boxes that you can recharge from house power. Mine has an AC/USB recharging port useful for phones. Its charge stays good for over a month; I can use it to power my laptop for 5 hours. I have a flashlight that will recharge from this box or from my laptop using a USB port -- and so it will also recharge from my car's USB port. Some multi-charger boxes can also pump up a tire. Mine has already paid for itself by saving me two towing fees.
Nobody is immune to weather emergencies, and that includes wildfire seasons in the Pacific Northwest. Emergency assistance is always stressed at first and you need to prepare to be your own first responder. But even when there's no emergency -- wildfire, derecho, hurricane, tornado -- you need to prepare to deal with hot weather, if you want to behave like a responsible adult.
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