“The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.“
holyshit this could be a game changer
“Using this new paint formulation to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. … That’s more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses.” (statement,paper)
This week I came across a fascinating working paper on air conditioning in schools by Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, Jisung Park, and Jonathan Smith. Using data from ten million students, the authors find a relationship between hotter school instruction days and lower PSAT scores. They also find that air conditioning offsets this problem, but students of color in lower income school districts are less likely to attend schools with adequate air conditioning, making them more vulnerable to the effects of hot weather.
This is a key problem for making social policy in a changing world. If global temperatures are rising, at what point does adequate air conditioning become essential for a school to serve students? At what point is it mandatory to provide AC for the safety of residents, just like landlords have to provide heat? If a school has to undergo budget cuts today, I would bet that most politicians or administrators wouldn’t think to fix the air conditioning first. The estimates from Goodman and coauthors suggest that doing so could offset the cost, though, boosting learning to the tune of thousands of dollars in future earnings for students, all without a curriculum overhaul.
Making such improvements requires cultural changes as well as policy changes. We would need to shift our understanding of what air conditioning means and what it provides: security, rather than luxury. It also means we can’t always focus social policy as something that provides just the bare minimum, we also have to think about what it means to provide for a thriving society, rather than one that just squeaks by. In an era of climate change, it might be time to rethink the old cliché, “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
Evan Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.
A Whole Summer’s Worth of Links Crammed into a Two-Weeks-Sized Bag
A Whole Summer’s Worth of Links Crammed into a Two-Weeks-Sized Bag
Some of my own stuff that’s gone up lately: Grad School Achebe #3: No Longer at Ease, my review of Lynell George’s A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” from American Literature 93.2, and my scorching hot take on Loki and Black Widow.(There’s a mini-scorching-hot-take on Loki and The Suicide Squad in this Twitter…
Sliding in to Book Omens Week last minute with some more practice of my alt Aziraphale and Crowley designs I made for Book Week last year I loved them a lot and wanted to make some more with them so I also did a little Eden sketch to figure out their body designs lol
I’m not sure I’m happy with the first Crowley here and I still love these designs so be prepared to hopefully see more of these boys in the future
My second piece for the @blissfulimperfectionzine! Another monstery painting based on medieval art. Aziraphale in this one is specifically based on the lion in Jacobello Alberegno’s Triptyque de l'Apocalypse and Crowley is based on various serpent illustrations in medieval illuminated manuscripts I’m really proud of this one, I hope u enjoy!
Exclusivity is up for the @blissfulimperfectionzine so I get to post my paintings! Here was my piece for the nsfw portion, and it’s based on Kieth Haring, stained glass, and medieval religious art
1. Close your curtains and blinds—especially in sunny rooms.
Windows let in visible light. But unless your windows are fairly new and high-tech, they also let in lots of radiant heat. Curtains and blinds will help keep that extra heat out.
Thick curtains are a great investment because they work in all seasons. They block the sun in the summer, stop cold drafts in the winter, and act as additional soundproofing if you live in a noisy area. They’re also among the easiest beginner sewing projects. But if you can’t afford them, no worries! Hang an unused blanket or towel instead—it may not be pretty, but it’s better than nothing.
I hate living in a cave, so I open my blinds throughout the day as the sun moves. Just closing the curtains on any sunny, south-facing windows for the hottest parts of the day will make a big impact.
2. Install window film.
The next level of window protection is window film. Renters, don’t worry—you can install this yourself without getting help or permission from your housing shortage profiteer of a landlord!
To install window film, all you need to do is cut it to size, spritz the window with water, and let static cling hold it effortlessly in place. It comes in a lot of fun patterns, and can also double as privacy film if you choose a pattered or frosted design.
3. Shut the door to any rooms you aren’t using.
Whether it’s summer or winter, closing the doors to unused rooms will help regulate temperatures. It’s much easier to heat/cool one room than five.
My partner shocks me every day by going upstairs an hour before bedtime and turning on the window AC unit in our bedroom preemptively. If the door it shut, it will be pleasantly chilly by the time we’re ready to turn in. I just… what is it even like to have proper executive function like that?! So glad I’m the beneficiary of his amazing neurotypicality…
4. Open your windows at night.
In many areas, the overnight temperature drops by 10° or 20°. So once the sun has gone down, let all the accumulated heat out of your house by cracking your windows open overnight.
If possible, open them from the top rather than the bottom. Hot air rises, so that’s the stuff you want to GTFO overnight.
5. Create airflow with box fans.
Box fans are incredible. They don’t cost much to buy or run, but they make a huge impact on quality of life in a hot climate.
Believe it or not, installation makes a huge difference. If you put your box fan in the wrong spot, it’ll only make your heat issues worse! The placement and direction of airflow has a huge impact on its efficacy! (More on this in the next section.)
If you place a box fan in a sunny, south-facing window that looks out over a boiling-hot parking lot, you want it to push that hot air outside, not suck it all back in. But if you have a window that’s on the cooler north side of the house, maybe shaded by a big tree, flip it around so it’s pulling the cooler air inside.
If you have just one, point it away from the biggest source of heat and try to sit near it. If you have two or more, point them all in the same direction to create airflow throughout the whole house.
6. Point your fan blades in the correct direction.
Notice how fan blades are tilted at an angle? Depending on which direction they’re turning, they will either push air in, or pull it out.
The same goes for ceiling fans. If you’ve never changed the direction of your ceiling fan blades, you’re using them wrong!
Ceiling fans in the summer should run counter-clockwise, to push hot ceiling air down to cool.
Ceiling fans in the winter should run clockwise, to pull cold air up and distribute heat evenly.
For box fans, you physically flip the whole unit around. For ceiling fans, hop up on a chair and look for a little switch on the side. You’re welcome.
7. Install AC window units.
Okay, okay, when I said “without air conditioning,” I should’ve stipulated that I really meant “without central air.”
Depending on your area, the age/design of your building, the floor you live on, and your personal tolerance for heat, fans and such may not be enough! If you need the sweet relief of air conditioning, window units are a life-saver. (Literally.)
We have a small 5,000 BTU unit for our bedroom, and a larger 10,000 BTU unit to cool our entire first floor. It doesn’t make the whole house frigid, but it lowers the temperature from “a warm summer day in Hell” to “a warm summer day on Earth, in a good timeline.”
Obviously they use more energy, which equates to money and carbon emissions. So the best thing you can do is to get an energy-efficient model, make sure it’s the correct size for your home, turn the unit on only as needed, and use it in combination with all the other methods suggested here.
8. Run a dehumidifier.
Humidity sucks. It reduces the efficacy of all of our bodies’ built-in cooling systems, plus many of the other techniques suggested here. A dehumidifier will help remove moisture from the air, making the heat feel a lot more bearable.
9. Avoid cooking with heat indoors.
The winter is a wonderful time to simmer soups, bake bread, and make your kitchen a source of continual warmth and satiety. Not so, the accursed summer! Cast your high-effort pie-baking aside until the howling of wolves summons autumn.
THIS IS SUMMER. SUMMER IS FOR SANDWICHES. And caprese, and smoothies, and Choco Tacos. END OF LIST.
Grow the list of meals you can make that cook quickly, with little or no additional heat. If you must apply heat, do it outside on a little Smokey Joe. Or wait until the heat of the day is long past.
10. Line-dry your clothing—or only use dryers at night.
After stoves, clothes dryers are the hottest appliance. So put your clothing in the dryer only after the sun has gone down. If you’re rocking a low-maintenance wardrobe with no need to iron, you can set it to go right before bed and safely forget about it until morning.
(Or, y’know, five days after, when you go to put another load in, if you’re trying to be more like your hero: me!)
If you have the space (and your climate is something closer to the Sahara than the Amazon), consider line-drying your clothes. Piggy has strung a retired climbing rope in her backyard for just this purpose… the smug, crunchy bitch.
11. Unplug unused appliances.
This tip is just perennially good in all situations: unplug shit you ain’t using! Lots of appliances pull phantom power, even when supposedly turned off. This adds heat to your house, dollars to your power bill, and unnecessary carbon to the atmosphere.
The average American household spends $100+ each year to power devices that are turned off. I can think of many things I would rather spend that money on, such as…
17 blocks of pretty good Parmesan cheese,
10 blocks of really, really good Parmesan cheese with those crunchy flavor crystals, or
25 store brand cannisters of shake Parmesean cheese because, listen, we’ve had it up to here with your out-of-touch neoliberal cheese snobbery!
So if you’re not using it, unplug it fully. Make it a habit to flip your power strips off as part of your bedtime ritual. (Or follow the next step, for all of the benefits with none of the work!)
12. Use programmable power strips.
I must confess that this article started as an attempt to answer a cheap-person question that has plagued my marriage for years. “Is it cheaper to run your window AC on a low setting all day? Or to blast it at full strength to cool the room back down after it’s gotten boiling hot?”
The tl;dr is that it is better to run it only as needed. Your AC doesn’t have to “work harder” to cool the room; it is programmed to run efficiently, regardless of the room’s temperature.
If you’re someone who really struggles with high heat, and cannot wait for your home or apartment to be brought to a comfortable temperature, here’s what you do. Get a programmable power strip. You can set it to turn your AC on an hour before you get home from school or work. In general, these things are great, and they pay for themselves within a very short time.
13. Use LED lightbulbs.
LED light bulbs cost a bit more than incandescent (old-fashioned) bulbs. But they consume 1/8th the energy, die less frequently, and run much colder. Incandescent bulbs reach a surface temperature of 250°, whereas LED bulbs are closer to 100°.
The rise of LED bulbs may have killed the Easy Bake Oven industrial complex—but it has also spared our homes from much unnecessary heat.
14. Sleep on breathable sheets.
The best sheets for summer tend to be linen, bamboo, eucalyptus, Tencel, and cotton/poly blends. They are breathable, moisture-wicking, or both.
The worst sheets for summer are flannel, fleece, and pure cotton. These are fantastic insulators best left to the winter months.
15. Try a cooling pillow.
Bedding technology has come a long way in recent years. You can get whole mattresses engineered to please hot sleepers.
But since mattresses are a big investment, start with a cooling pillow. They’re filled with materials designed to let heat escape from your head and face.
16. Dress down.
I’m not saying you should get naked… but listen. If you come around my house in the summertime, you are absolutely going to have to wait at the door while I put some pants on.
The easiest, most environmentally friendly way to control your body temperature is to dress appropriately for the season. So make sure you’re in shorts and a tank top before you reach for the thermostat.
It’s too hot for modesty. Save the planet. Slut it up.
17. Eat and drink cool stuff.
Staying hydrated is the best way to aid your body’s amazing natural cooling system: getting schwetty. Ingesting cold foods and liquids can help lower your body temperature by 2.4° for about half an hour.
Look, Bitches Get Riches has always been a pro-ice cream, pro-iced coffee, pro-gazpacho blog. But we’re done hiding our allegiances in the shadows. If you don’t know, now you know.
18. Take a cool mid-day shower—not cold!
Taking a cold shower will actually work against you. The sudden shock of cold will make you feel cooler, but it will also kickstart your body’s temperature regulation systems, ultimately warming you up.
But a cool shower is great—especially if you don’t dry off immediately. Let the water evaporate slowly off your skin for maximum true cooling.
19. Hold a cold ice pack to your neck.
Here’s a fun tip: if you’re ever helping someone experiencing heat stroke, the three most effective areas for rapid cooling are the neck, the underarms, and the groin. These areas have major arterial blood flow, with blood vessels very close to the skin. So cooling the blood there has the quickest positive impact.
Plus, anyone who’s ever had long hair will tell you it’s a disgusting swamp back there when it’s hot out. The back of the neck is nature’s furnace. So if you can’t shower, place a cold washcloth or ice pack against your neck for some instant, easy relief.
20. Escape!
Sometimes retreat is the best option. If a really bad heat wave is coming, and you live on the 4th floor of a city apartment surrounded by shimmering pavement, you could be in very real danger.
The hottest part of the day is between 12 and 4 p.m. On really bad days, plan to use that time to go somewhere to escape. You can run errands in air-conditioned stores, do your work at a local coffee shop or library, catch a movie, go swimming, or do anything to get you out of the house.
While you’re away, leave your windows cracked to let the worst of the heat escape. And remember to check on any elderly or disabled neighbors, as they are especially vulnerable during heat waves.
Air conditioners might cool your house but they’re warming the planet. The good news is they don’t have to in the future, thanks to the Kigali Amendment.
1. Close your curtains and blinds—especially in sunny rooms.
Windows let in visible light. But unless your windows are fairly new and high-tech, they also let in lots of radiant heat. Curtains and blinds will help keep that extra heat out.
Thick curtains are a great investment because they work in all seasons. They block the sun in the summer, stop cold drafts in the winter, and act as additional soundproofing if you live in a noisy area. They’re also among the easiest beginner sewing projects. But if you can’t afford them, no worries! Hang an unused blanket or towel instead—it may not be pretty, but it’s better than nothing.
I hate living in a cave, so I open my blinds throughout the day as the sun moves. Just closing the curtains on any sunny, south-facing windows for the hottest parts of the day will make a big impact.
2. Install window film.
The next level of window protection is window film. Renters, don’t worry—you can install this yourself without getting help or permission from your housing shortage profiteer of a landlord!
To install window film, all you need to do is cut it to size, spritz the window with water, and let static cling hold it effortlessly in place. It comes in a lot of fun patterns, and can also double as privacy film if you choose a pattered or frosted design.
3. Shut the door to any rooms you aren’t using.
Whether it’s summer or winter, closing the doors to unused rooms will help regulate temperatures. It’s much easier to heat/cool one room than five.
My partner shocks me every day by going upstairs an hour before bedtime and turning on the window AC unit in our bedroom preemptively. If the door it shut, it will be pleasantly chilly by the time we’re ready to turn in. I just… what is it even like to have proper executive function like that?! So glad I’m the beneficiary of his amazing neurotypicality…
4. Open your windows at night.
In many areas, the overnight temperature drops by 10° or 20°. So once the sun has gone down, let all the accumulated heat out of your house by cracking your windows open overnight.
If possible, open them from the top rather than the bottom. Hot air rises, so that’s the stuff you want to GTFO overnight.
5. Create airflow with box fans.
Box fans are incredible. They don’t cost much to buy or run, but they make a huge impact on quality of life in a hot climate.
Believe it or not, installation makes a huge difference. If you put your box fan in the wrong spot, it’ll only make your heat issues worse! The placement and direction of airflow has a huge impact on its efficacy! (More on this in the next section.)
If you place a box fan in a sunny, south-facing window that looks out over a boiling-hot parking lot, you want it to push that hot air outside, not suck it all back in. But if you have a window that’s on the cooler north side of the house, maybe shaded by a big tree, flip it around so it’s pulling the cooler air inside.
If you have just one, point it away from the biggest source of heat and try to sit near it. If you have two or more, point them all in the same direction to create airflow throughout the whole house.
6. Point your fan blades in the correct direction.
Notice how fan blades are tilted at an angle? Depending on which direction they’re turning, they will either push air in, or pull it out.
The same goes for ceiling fans. If you’ve never changed the direction of your ceiling fan blades, you’re using them wrong!
Ceiling fans in the summer should run counter-clockwise, to push hot ceiling air down to cool.
Ceiling fans in the winter should run clockwise, to pull cold air up and distribute heat evenly.
For box fans, you physically flip the whole unit around. For ceiling fans, hop up on a chair and look for a little switch on the side. You’re welcome.
7. Install AC window units.
Okay, okay, when I said “without air conditioning,” I should’ve stipulated that I really meant “without central air.”
Depending on your area, the age/design of your building, the floor you live on, and your personal tolerance for heat, fans and such may not be enough! If you need the sweet relief of air conditioning, window units are a life-saver. (Literally.)
We have a small 5,000 BTU unit for our bedroom, and a larger 10,000 BTU unit to cool our entire first floor. It doesn’t make the whole house frigid, but it lowers the temperature from “a warm summer day in Hell” to “a warm summer day on Earth, in a good timeline.”
Obviously they use more energy, which equates to money and carbon emissions. So the best thing you can do is to get an energy-efficient model, make sure it’s the correct size for your home, turn the unit on only as needed, and use it in combination with all the other methods suggested here.
8. Run a dehumidifier.
Humidity sucks. It reduces the efficacy of all of our bodies’ built-in cooling systems, plus many of the other techniques suggested here. A dehumidifier will help remove moisture from the air, making the heat feel a lot more bearable.
9. Avoid cooking with heat indoors.
The winter is a wonderful time to simmer soups, bake bread, and make your kitchen a source of continual warmth and satiety. Not so, the accursed summer! Cast your high-effort pie-baking aside until the howling of wolves summons autumn.
THIS IS SUMMER. SUMMER IS FOR SANDWICHES. And caprese, and smoothies, and Choco Tacos. END OF LIST.
Grow the list of meals you can make that cook quickly, with little or no additional heat. If you must apply heat, do it outside on a little Smokey Joe. Or wait until the heat of the day is long past.
10. Line-dry your clothing—or only use dryers at night.
After stoves, clothes dryers are the hottest appliance. So put your clothing in the dryer only after the sun has gone down. If you’re rocking a low-maintenance wardrobe with no need to iron, you can set it to go right before bed and safely forget about it until morning.
(Or, y’know, five days after, when you go to put another load in, if you’re trying to be more like your hero: me!)
If you have the space (and your climate is something closer to the Sahara than the Amazon), consider line-drying your clothes. Piggy has strung a retired climbing rope in her backyard for just this purpose… the smug, crunchy bitch.
11. Unplug unused appliances.
This tip is just perennially good in all situations: unplug shit you ain’t using! Lots of appliances pull phantom power, even when supposedly turned off. This adds heat to your house, dollars to your power bill, and unnecessary carbon to the atmosphere.
The average American household spends $100+ each year to power devices that are turned off. I can think of many things I would rather spend that money on, such as…
17 blocks of pretty good Parmesan cheese,
10 blocks of really, really good Parmesan cheese with those crunchy flavor crystals, or
25 store brand cannisters of shake Parmesean cheese because, listen, we’ve had it up to here with your out-of-touch neoliberal cheese snobbery!
So if you’re not using it, unplug it fully. Make it a habit to flip your power strips off as part of your bedtime ritual. (Or follow the next step, for all of the benefits with none of the work!)
12. Use programmable power strips.
I must confess that this article started as an attempt to answer a cheap-person question that has plagued my marriage for years. “Is it cheaper to run your window AC on a low setting all day? Or to blast it at full strength to cool the room back down after it’s gotten boiling hot?”
The tl;dr is that it is better to run it only as needed. Your AC doesn’t have to “work harder” to cool the room; it is programmed to run efficiently, regardless of the room’s temperature.
If you’re someone who really struggles with high heat, and cannot wait for your home or apartment to be brought to a comfortable temperature, here’s what you do. Get a programmable power strip. You can set it to turn your AC on an hour before you get home from school or work. In general, these things are great, and they pay for themselves within a very short time.
13. Use LED lightbulbs.
LED light bulbs cost a bit more than incandescent (old-fashioned) bulbs. But they consume 1/8th the energy, die less frequently, and run much colder. Incandescent bulbs reach a surface temperature of 250°, whereas LED bulbs are closer to 100°.
The rise of LED bulbs may have killed the Easy Bake Oven industrial complex—but it has also spared our homes from much unnecessary heat.
14. Sleep on breathable sheets.
The best sheets for summer tend to be linen, bamboo, eucalyptus, Tencel, and cotton/poly blends. They are breathable, moisture-wicking, or both.
The worst sheets for summer are flannel, fleece, and pure cotton. These are fantastic insulators best left to the winter months.
15. Try a cooling pillow.
Bedding technology has come a long way in recent years. You can get whole mattresses engineered to please hot sleepers.
But since mattresses are a big investment, start with a cooling pillow. They’re filled with materials designed to let heat escape from your head and face.
16. Dress down.
I’m not saying you should get naked… but listen. If you come around my house in the summertime, you are absolutely going to have to wait at the door while I put some pants on.
The easiest, most environmentally friendly way to control your body temperature is to dress appropriately for the season. So make sure you’re in shorts and a tank top before you reach for the thermostat.
It’s too hot for modesty. Save the planet. Slut it up.
17. Eat and drink cool stuff.
Staying hydrated is the best way to aid your body’s amazing natural cooling system: getting schwetty. Ingesting cold foods and liquids can help lower your body temperature by 2.4° for about half an hour.
Look, Bitches Get Riches has always been a pro-ice cream, pro-iced coffee, pro-gazpacho blog. But we’re done hiding our allegiances in the shadows. If you don’t know, now you know.
18. Take a cool mid-day shower—not cold!
Taking a cold shower will actually work against you. The sudden shock of cold will make you feel cooler, but it will also kickstart your body’s temperature regulation systems, ultimately warming you up.
But a cool shower is great—especially if you don’t dry off immediately. Let the water evaporate slowly off your skin for maximum true cooling.
19. Hold a cold ice pack to your neck.
Here’s a fun tip: if you’re ever helping someone experiencing heat stroke, the three most effective areas for rapid cooling are the neck, the underarms, and the groin. These areas have major arterial blood flow, with blood vessels very close to the skin. So cooling the blood there has the quickest positive impact.
Plus, anyone who’s ever had long hair will tell you it’s a disgusting swamp back there when it’s hot out. The back of the neck is nature’s furnace. So if you can’t shower, place a cold washcloth or ice pack against your neck for some instant, easy relief.
20. Escape!
Sometimes retreat is the best option. If a really bad heat wave is coming, and you live on the 4th floor of a city apartment surrounded by shimmering pavement, you could be in very real danger.
The hottest part of the day is between 12 and 4 p.m. On really bad days, plan to use that time to go somewhere to escape. You can run errands in air-conditioned stores, do your work at a local coffee shop or library, catch a movie, go swimming, or do anything to get you out of the house.
While you’re away, leave your windows cracked to let the worst of the heat escape. And remember to check on any elderly or disabled neighbors, as they are especially vulnerable during heat waves.
Installing curtains on open doorways is an extremely effective heat divider as well! In my apartment I used a tension rod with a curtain to separate the hot kitchen from the cool living room with the air conditioner.
A toaster oven is a great way to cook using less heat than a traditional oven! Mine cost something like $30 and is large enough to cook 2 chicken breasts at once (perfect for several days worth of salads)
If you want the cooling effect of curtains without major loss of light, look for ones labeled “light filtering” (not sheer) - I still get the benefit of a good 75% of the natural light with little to no heat and crucial privacy for my ground level apartment
