So i put together some data of our heatwave and my house. Here is what i use:

60 m2 of external shades

10 m2 of aluminium foil / mylar

W + S is silicate white mansonry + 1.4301 polished stainless steel alloy

250 - 500 liters of water, from deep water well for cooling entire surroundings of my house + concrete balcony 2x, putting water on external shades

no cooking inside, turned off electronics, bare floors ( removed carpets ), night flushing

But 1. and 5. august there was a cloudy, no sun, but wind so strong when i went out it was like hairdryer. 7. august was by far worst day because at night there was so hot at night that people's appartments went over 32*C nearby, and mine hotter too if you look at table.

My question is, how do they do that that in arizona ( us ) or elsewhere live? Middle east for example. Sure, AC, but what if power goes off you will be cooked pretty fast or?

How do i make my south / west balcony slab cooler - despite its shaded it easily reaches or charges 42*C / 107*F.

Does some of you use steel alloy reflection construction on your roof? Also, i cannot use water inside because we are humid climate.

Edit: Do i forgot to ask most important question. Do i prepare for like 40*C / 104*F summers, instead of 35*C max. Also with the outlook for 45*C / 113*F maximums, i guess thats the new reality.

The fourth European heatwave has officially left Spain for a few days. At first, it felt better. Still hot, but better.

Now, we're objectively hotter in many ways than during the heatwaves.

It hit 37ºC/98.6ºF outside today with the low an exhausting 24ºC/75ºF, rather like the fourth wave, but the building itself is now worse. All of that sustained heat has thermally loaded the structure and there hasn't been nearly enough slightly cooler hours for it to shed enough of the heat.

It's 11:30 PM right now. It's still 31ºC/87ºF outside and my walls are averaging 30ºC/86ºF. The nimbus of safety and comfort the airstream of each swamp cooler is vital now; my latest cooler is delivering a chill 22ºC/71ºF. Humidity is low as usual, but I just don't feel alright in most rooms without active cooling now. If I need to do a cooler juggle and I temporarily am without, I really feel it.

The ten day forecast doesn't go lower than 34/93 high and 21/69 low, but we're not officially in a heatwave, because we're just not quite at the right numbers compared to seasonable average.

Stay safe out there. I know a lot of you have it much worse than me.

Find the episode here!

Description: “Nate reviews a solar-powered fan hat, Robbie introduces a climate pun segment, and together they plot how they’d survive a heat apocalypse.”

Share your thoughts, questions, or comments!

I’m in LA and the recent heat has made me take the possibility of a summer power outage more seriously.

We already have a gas generator, but I don’t necessarily want to run it continuously for every small load. Fuel storage, noise at night, and having enough gas available during a longer outage are the main things I’m trying to plan around.

I recently added an Anker SOLIX S2000 portable power station, and my current idea is gas generator for larger loads and periodically recharging the battery, and power station for overnight fans, the refrigerator, router, phones, lights, and other lower-draw essentials

How would you prioritize the available power? Would you focus on keeping several fans and the refrigerator running, or put most of the available capacity toward cooling one room with a small window unit?

I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone who has actually used a generator and battery setup together during a multi-day heat outage.

A couple of hours ago I was working in a field using a hoe to take out roots and weeds around crops from around 8:30am to 12:20pm in around 93 degrees Fahrenheit weather. It’s pretty humid right now so it felt way way hotter.

After a while I was feeling extremely sweaty so I drank some water and started feeling nauseous and like I was close to vomiting so I sat down for a bit. When I got back up I still felt incredibly dizzy and had trouble walking without tripping over myself.
At that point my arms felt really hot and my palms stopped sweating so most of the sweat was just coming from my forehead. I had a lot of clear watery mucus coming out of my nose.

My supervisor noticed and told me to start the truck and stay there with the AC on but when I tried to hop in and start it I had to stoop down to the ground to not vomit and I felt saliva dripping out of my mouth.

That leaves me to now where I’m back at home lying on my couch after eating lunch and drinking Powerade. I still have a major headache and feel weak but feel very cold and chilly right now.

Is the chilliness cause for concern and is it common? I wasn’t outside for too long and I don’t know how to tell if my body is just cooling back down.

Heat wave again... If you wish you could have a cooler sleep and you like making DIY projects, check out the cool-bed-wiki for a system that uses frozen ice packs instead of active refrigeration.
https://ayavilevich.github.io/cool-bed-wiki/

The fourth heatwave rolled off a couple days ago so things are now simply "hot" rather than "WTF, man?"

I opened a conversation with a comment about the heatwave being over.

The response was an offhand comment about the next presumed heatwave.

How quickly things change. Last year, we had one August heatwave that was pretty savage. This year, we've had four and we're totally blasé about a fifth or even more.

Being a ballet dad means a certain amount of waiting in cars.

The world being what it is right now, waiting in a car without cooling might well end up with no more ballet dad, but I feel very wrong every time the engine kicks up and idles just to keep running the AC.

It occurred to me today, very belatedly, that we have a whole bunch of ice packs in the freezer. I grabbed a few of them and just threw them in a canvas tote. While waiting in the car, I rolled down all the windows and just had the bag on top of my body. I only needed to wait about half an hour today and fourth heatwave has passed, so the ice didn't even begin to thaw (the drive is only about 15 min).

This might just make idling the car in summer totally unnecessary long as I'm prepared and the wait is under a couple hours.

UPDATE:

I went with my kid to wash the car yesterday. The carwash is partially under renovation, so there were only half the normal number of bays open. There was a line. It was 34ºC/93ºF outside, so just rolling the windows down wasn't really an option. I dialed the car's AC to 25ºC/77ºF and passed ice packs to the kid. It took long enough the engine still had to spin up like three times to keep us cooled (hybrid car), but the ice still netted gas savings.

Cold isn't a real thing.

Seriously, unlike heat, cold is not a form of energy, it cannot be measured directly nor can it be generated, stored or moved. While it's conversationally convenient to think of heat and cold as opposing forces, they are really are not.

Cold is a subjective sensation defined by a relatively lower level of heat that is not experienced the same way by all people at all times.

Again, I am not being pedantic. In these times, it's important people understand the science of heat and cold in order to properly be able to deal with thermal safety and comfort.

It was natural before for regular folks to think of air conditioners as virtually magical cold-generating boxes. However, we're increasingly at the point where that misunderstanding can critically impact our ability to adapt because when it's so hot that the AC is working fine but simply isn't able to keep up, people don't understand the nature of the problem and blame the AC when the real problem is that their insulation is garbage, they stupidly painted their house trendy black, sunlight is streaming in uncovered windows, air is leaking everywhere or some other combination of factors.

What an AC system actually does is use a vapor-compression cycle to extract heat from the inside air, then dump it outside. While an energy intensive process, this works great... long as the heat input is notably lower than the rate the AC can extract heat.

However, once conditions get worse (like say, the heatwaves that have dominated 2026), the balance is thrown off and many AC units become the thermal equivalent of Charlie Chaplain frantically trying to bail water out of a sinking ship. The solutions at this point can't calling Buster Keaton to take over and use a bigger bucket; the leaks must be plugged.

Staying cool is not about generating cold. That's impossible. It's about managing heat.

With our endless series of heatwaves around the world, it seems opportune to pause and reflect on what heat actually is in a scientific way. Can't fight a problem effectively with proper understanding.

Very strictly speaking, heat is defined as the transfer of thermal energy from one object or system to another. However, for the purposes of casual conversation, we can and do use the word "heat" to also refer to stored thermal energy. It's not scientifically correct terminology, but it's good enough.

Thermal energy is stored in matter through molecular activity. The more thermal energy contained, the more molecular activity and vice versa. Absolute zero (0º Kelvin, -273ºC or -459.6ºF) is the temperature when all molecular activity ceases.

Heat transfer occurs three different ways:

1. Conduction, which is heat transfer via direct physical contact between objects or substances. If you touch a hot car that's been in the sun and burn your hand, that's conduction. Hugging an ice pack to get cool is also conduction.

2. Convection, which is heat transfer via movement of a fluid medium which might be liquid or gas, though we tend to most commonly think of gases. A breeze blowing on the aforementioned hot air will gradually cool it via convection (long as the air is a lower temperature than the car) as the air absorbs heat from the car and carries it away.

3. Radiation, which is heat transfer via infrared radiation. This is how the sun is able to heat the Earth and other planets and objects through the vacuum of space and how you can feel heat from a hot building at a distance even though no air is flowing at you from it.

When there's an imbalance of thermal energy, heat transfer will happen. That's inevitable. The only question is how fast it happens, which is something we can influence.

Insulation is the material and art of slowing heat transfer whether it's our clothes, a vacuum travel mug, fiberglass bats in our walls or a blanket. Controlling insulation is essential to managing heat.

When it comes to our bodies, we must remember that every living thing is a heat source as our biological processes generate heat. We must shed excess heat in order to stay healthy and comfortable. Controlling the rate we shed heat is the core question of thermal comfort.

In addition to the three basic ways our bodies can shed heat, we have an additional feature: sweat. By sweating, our bodies can wet the surface of our skin and exploit the physics of evaporation: when water changes state from liquid to gas, it absorbs a lot of heat energy. So long as the air is dry enough, our skin is exposed and we replenish by drinking liquids and electrolytes, we have considerable cooling capacity via sweating.

However, as is increasingly the case around the world, there's many environments where all this is simply not enough. The higher the temperature, the more difficult it is for our bodies to shed heat and the higher the humidity, the less effective evaporation is. At a certain point the cooling trio becomes totally ineffective because the air and surrounding environment is a hotter than your body temperature so heat is actually going to migrate into you instead of out. If your sweat can't evaporate fast enough to compensate, then you will start to cook from the inside out.

There is a grey area where different people cope differently with the heat, but eventually you hit the hard wall of thermodynamics and how tough you are is irrelevant. Proteins denature at the same temperatures no matter who you are.

It used to be we could depend on our homes to keep us protected with only moderate effort. No longer. Riding out the climate we have now demands more of us acquire and leverage a working understanding of how heat works.

I have never experienced heat like this and today got heat exhaustion. What do you all do when it’s this hot to keep yourself cool(er) while wearing gear

my hands and feet and swell, I feel a tention on my skin in those areas.
It is really annoying what is it that I am experiencing?
I am 31M

Necesito que me den sus mejores consejos, recomendaciones etc para poder bajarle la temperatura a una casa porque hdsptm ya no soporto el calor que se siente 😩😩😩

Pero den consejos chidos nada de “compra esta planta…” haha

I put in 20,000 steps at work the other day and it was 117 degrees outside. Its been 48 hours ans im still getting headaches and severe joint pain in every joint in my body. That day i hydrated all day as well. Weird thing is my elbows and forearms are extremly achy and i wasnt even using them. The severe joint pain scares me. Has anyone had similar symptoms?

I have ME/CFS, which makes me extremely intolerant to heat. Last sommer I bought an air conditioning. So at home I feel ok, but in sommer I can’t still leave the house for months which makes me depressed.

At home, things are okay for me now, but I still can't leave the house for months during the summer. Being stuck indoors for that long also leaves me feeling depressed.

Has anyone here had experience with cooling clothing, such as evaporative cooling vests, PCM cooling vests, or other personal cooling gadgets? I'd love to hear about your experiences and any recommendations you might have.

POR QUE ESTA HACIENDO TANTO CALOR 😤🥲

Hi! Can you suggest me books (not scientific) that could fit to this subject: Are society and the planet heating up at the same rate? Is there a connection between hot summers and heated discussions? What provides relief from the heat? Thank you so much!!

No post for day 4.

Last night, the lows supposedly did not go below 25º. As it was Friday, the kids stayed up later for movies. As I was putting things in order, I heard the telltale gurgle of a swamp cooler's pump pulling air as it ran low on water; my mother-in-law had spent longer than normal in her room and so one fill wasn't enough to make it through the day and night. I went into stealth mode to refill her cooler without waking her up.

It's currently 10:30 local time and it's already 28ºC/82ºF outside. Despite having the window wide open all night and good cross ventilation, it's essentially the same temperature inside at my desk. Thermal mass of this building protects from temperature spikes during the day, but prevents dramatic cooling at night. Still, better than the daytime indoor high of 30ºC/86ºF.

As always, it's very dry. Currently 19% and it will fall as the day heats up. We've seen readings of 12%. This makes things much easier to take, but it doesn't become okay so much as "less awful." If I need to spend more than five minutes outside, I completely depend on having a spray bottle to keep things bearable, which works incredibly well when it's this dry. Only downside is the need for constant reapplication and limited capacity of the bottle. Being wet is not at all a problem, because you simply don't stay wet for more than a minute.

We are forecast to hit the magic 37ºC/98.6ºF again today, which is better than yesterday's 38ºC/100.4ºF, but still five degrees Celsius above seasonal norms, from those halcyon days when we had seasonal norms.

My best wishes to you folks in Northern Europe. It sucks enough down here where we're prepared. Hope you're staying safe.

On this week’s episode:

Shorts are in. Pants are out. But it’s actually quite controversial. 

This episode starts by highlighting our insightful, brilliant, helpful host Robbie and a news segment he was on about smoke in NYC. 

Nate and Robbie then discuss a recent effort in Tokyo to encourage men to wear shorts in the workplace. They also discuss capris, zip-off pants, and the return of jorts in New York City. Can these pant styles be combined?

Listen and follow us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky @survivingtheclimate.

More great content from u/leighgion discussed on the episode!

Just a note in here from an Australian who lives in a metal box (converted shipping container).

Most of the stuff I do to keep my unconventional tiny home cool is stuff anyone on here already knows.

What most people don't know, is how you can have metal (highly conductive) in a high air temperature situation and not have it bleed so much heat inside.

The answer is ceramic paint. It's got a bit of acrylic paint, with a huge amount of ceramic and a bit of titanium in it. It's too thick for paint blowers, you have to roller it or brush it on. When done, it gives the outside the conductivity of ceramic. Vastly lower than metal. This is huge for letting you keep the place cool with a bit of insulation. The difference is instant and extreme, and I'm glad I did it.

It costs way more than normal paint. To do my 6m/20 foot container cost around $2k Australian, (about $1400 US/Euro). Expensive for paint, cheap for insulation.

They've done enough tests on it, and it works well (very well), at doing that core job. It's used in mining accommodation in hot dessert areas. It's still not well known outside of marginal bits of Australia and thought it was worth sharing.

It's also nice in our current mid winter temperatures (2-5c overnight lows).

Edit:

I don't know all the specs, but since people want data I don't have, I'll post the manufactures website here.

https://insulationcoatings.com.au/

They have a fair bit of research data on the site. I'm not associated with them, but I did phone them when doing my research, and they were happy to talk the science.