Portable a/c is running now, got one of the window vent kits from cutmy.co.uk and even though it took two days of bookmarking and refreshing, managed to catch a unit in stock. The room thermometer still insists it’s 29c but with the torrent of cold air blasting it sure doesn’t feel it. Now of course we just have to pay the leccy bill when it comes, but to offset we turned off all the fans for just the one a/c so that’ll help a bit anyway.
I'm going to give the space blanket idea a go on the next go around as I've heard folk getting decent results. For now I'm sitting in my study with an old portable air con doing it's best to send me deaf, but keeping the room at a comfortable 23 degrees, whilst the rest of the house is hovering around 30. For those that have jumped on the portable AC band wagon do yourself a favour and get an exhaust tube insulation kit, they make a hell of a difference to the heat radiated out of the exhausts.
I know it's good to be able to escape from the heat. But you can save quite a bit of electricity by running them warmer. I'm running my AC at 27c at the moment, it also removes moisture so even with it running on lowest setting it feels much more refreshing than without. For portable AC, also worth consider getting an intake tube. The amount of hot air it is blowing out means equal amount of air has to come from somewhere.
I think I will go for an insulated tube, but won’t be going for a dual duct mod for it, my cats would tear something cardboard like that to pieces!
Very high temps out side but 25C inside, not too bad, sealing and insulating the house seems to do the trick, also running on low power machines these days help too, keeping me comfortable in the office despite so many running, if it wasn't for roof velux the house would be a lot cooler, they seem to act like a magnifying glass on the house amping up the heat, 10C difference between upstairs and down, there will be cloud formations soon Need to get some blinds on those bad boys.
Could put some cheap UV window film on the outside of it too! Cheap because on the outside it’ll weather more but being on the outside it’ll block it from coming in much more efficiently.
There are some nice concertina blinds for them, but given the situation it would be entirely socially acceptable to cover them with anything you can find, an old dressing gown or the contents of your recycling bin, for example
I've read people opening up the loft hatch to let hot air escape. Same principle here, Can you open the roof windows slightly and open downstairs windows to create a chimney effect? At the same time, put a space blanket on the outside to hopefully block out enough sun?
despite best efforts, ended up with mild but noticeable heat exhaustion twice over the last 2 warm spells... **** the hot weather and all who sail in it...
Yeah my other half was borderline needing ambulance last heatwave, that's why I desperately scrambled to find and secure an air con unit, it's so rough. I hope you manage to find any cool.
When I ran my portable air con regularly I used to do 2 things which made a difference. First was to have a fan behind which blew cooler air further into the room and delayed the thermostat cutting it off as it delayed the cold air pooling round the unit. Secondly I wrapped and taped the thermal insulation material you use for lagging pipes or putting behind radiators (a sort of aluminium covered insulator) and covered every bit of the tubing. This ensured most of the heat went out of the window. I've just remembered a third thing. Rather than immediately switch it off I used to run it on fan only for 30-60 minutes to make sure as much heat as possible was removed from the unit out of the window otherwise the heat soak from the condenser heated the room quite a bit.
We used to do that for about 6 months of the year. Not long after we got the portable AC, I started feeling a hot blast coming down from the loft hatch when the AC was running. Yeah, no, balls to that - the loft hatch stays closed now!
The air outside was 8C higher those windows are staying closed until late even when there's a drop off, hopefully, need to bring some ladders and try to cover those velux, well out of reach, I use a stupidly long pole to open/close, electric blind will be required, if I can retro fit such a thing.
Heat rash is receding. Though I was getting something crazy like smallpox when I first noticed it. Lurgy is down but not out.
Thankfully a breeze today and the bonus.is they haven't thrown anything about on the fields today which means we can have the doors open. Some very hot days it's a choice between melting and suffocating in extreme cow manure stench
