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this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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Asklemmy
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Whrere I live, temps go in the 40-50°C range in the summer (and 60+ in some inland areas). Here is what we do to stay cool.
Cool(er) air ventilation Windows open at night, closed past morning, with blinds down when sunlight starts hitting the windows. Ensure that air can circulate through (otherwise, you might actually get heatstroke from how hot the house gets). In cass the heat makes you feel like you cannot breathe, blinds down and windows open (better than suffocating) Also, no joke, get greenhouse green screens, and set them up inverse outside your windows. Instead of trapping heat in, they throw heat out instead. Surprisingly cooling.
WATER AND COOLING FOOD! Water is a must, and there are foods that cool you down instead of warming you up. (avoid the later wherever possible!) Examples of cool foods: frozen desserts, lassi (yoghurt water drink, makes you sleepy) etc
Fans. Fans everywhere. Doesn't matter if hot enough that it feels like a hair dryer instead. Evaporation + air is your friend (bonus tip: if you live in a dry zone, get an air cooler. It's an enclosed fan behind a self contained waterfall. Humid air is particularly cooling. Beware metal cabinets in the same room though. They rust, bad).
Baths. Baths are especially cooling. Take at least 2 a day. My cousins, who live inland at 60+ temps, bathes at least 4-5 times a day. Also, their bathrooms all have massive fans :)
Clothes. In summer, we wear our thinnest, oldest cotton clothes possible (aka, almost seethrough). We never go out in them, but they sure make the house bearable.
Naps and talcum powder. Human body temps naturally decrease when napping. Talcum powder, spread on the hottest parts of the body, absorbs heat and cools you too. The powder gets soaked in sweat and is useless pretty quickly, but combine bath + fan + powder + nap (and probably no undergarments/naked) makes noon bearable to go through. Talcum powder in particular stops rashes from too much sweating, if you have trouble bathing more than twice a day like I do.
Thats about it from me. Hope it helps!
A swamp cooler is another term for a similar thing (a damp surface with airflow). Humid air is not cooling though. It's actually the opposite, because it makes water harder to evaporate, which is how our body tries to stay cool. That's why a humidity feels so hot. Evaporation cools, which means we can use this to cool air, which is how these evaporative coolers work. They don't feel cool because they're humid. That's a side effect. Water evaporating pulls heat out of the air, so it's cooler. The higher the humidity the worse these function.
Fair ppint. Never that humid here though, except during cool rains, so I didn't even realise.
Fun fact: the air conditioner was invented because the southern US is frequently so humid that evaporative cooling doesn't work, and it's hot. AC pulls water out of the air in the process of cooling, so it has a double effect of making the air cooler and allowing your sweat to evoporate to cool you.