Summer is an exciting time. It’s a season to enjoy breathtaking beach trips, dips in pools, and BBQs. To celebrate the season, you’ll need to keep the soaring temperatures in control at home. Many ways have been tried, tested, and proven to work well.

Keeping your home cool during summer will help make your stay indoors comfortable. Also, family members will have a night of quality sleep, including babies.

How to keep your home cool during a heatwave will depend on how much you can spend. Some home cooling measures are long-term, while others are short-term.

The long-term measures require a substantial amount of money to buy cooling equipment like a fan. You can use the pieces of equipment for years.

Short-term measures deal with the effects of heat on your body and will make your sleep comfortable. You can use kitchen appliances like freezers and fridges to reduce the effect of heat on your body. For instance, you can cool your pillowcase before bedtime.

In this article, you’ll learn ways of keeping your house cool during the day and at night. The article also covers simple hacks to improve your sleep during summer.

1. Buying a Fan

Keeping your home cool during a heatwave requires money. With enough cash, you can buy a fan. Large fans, like tower fans, are more expensive than desk fans, which are small in size. The performance of these fans in cooling your home depends on their sizes and other factors. An AC installer can advise you on the best type of fan to use in your house.

Tower fans are more powerful and rotate faster to disperse air in the room. They’re more suitable for living rooms, bedrooms, and other bigger spaces. Desk fans are placed strategically to cool a small space or room.

As expected, the bigger and more powerful fans are more expensive than smaller ones.

There are some tips to improve the performance of fans, including:

  • Leaving a big bowl of ice in front of the fan. The air from the fan will carry water droplets from the ice and thus help cool down the house.
  • The positioning of your fan affects its performance. First, you can place the fan pointing at an open window at night to push the warm air outside. Second, you can place the fan outside of the window in a room you’re not using. The fan will drive hot air out of the room first and suck warm air into other rooms.
  • Setting a ceiling fan to rotate in an anticlockwise direction will circulate air in the room more than clockwise.
  • Positioning the basement fan pointing at the rest of the house pushes cool air below the house into the ground floor.

Get your return on investment by ensuring your fan is working optimally during the summer. Also, the good positioning of the basement fan will reduce moisture and increase airflow in the crawl space. Lower cases of crawl space mold removal or inspection will be reported.

2. Blocking Sun

How to keep your home cool during a heatwave depends on how effectively you can block the sun out of the house. Typically, light streams through windows. The light carries a warm air that warms your house.

To keep your home cool, consider closing windows, curtains, and blinds during the day to block the sun out of your rooms.

Remember that window direction will determine the amount of sun streaming into your house. If your window faces the south, heatwaves will radiate into your house during the day and in the evening.

If closing windows fail to work as planned, you can place a car window sunshade on your windows to prevent light streaming into rooms. When placing the sunshade, ensure it’s flat to avoid the concentration of sun rays in the folds. Before buying car sunshades for windows, seek professional advice on their safety.

Keeping blinds shut will also block the sun from streaming into your house. Wooden Venetian blinds adjust room lighting by altering the gap between slats and wood. Typically, wood is a natural heat conductor; thus, it will help keep warm air out of the room. How to keep your home cool during a heatwave depends on how warm air streams out of rooms and how cool air gets into the house.

3. Keeping Windows and Garden/Balcony Doors Open at Night

Opening windows and balcony/garden doors at night will help in allowing cool air to move through your home. Remember that moving air is cooler than still air, and temperatures are relatively low at night compared to the daytime. You can optimize the cooling effect by opening windows at opposite ends and doors in between. The opened doors and windows will create a draft, allowing air to move freely through your house.

If flies and mosquitoes are causing havoc, buy a net covering the doors and window frames.

If you’ve sash windows, open the tops and bottoms equally. According to the manufacturers, sash windows are designed to allow cool air through the undersides while hot air gets out through the tops.

Close the windows and balcony/garden doors the following morning before it gets hot. Sometimes it can be tempting to open curtains and windows when it’s warm inside. But the truth of the matter is that the outside temperature is much higher than the one inside the house.

When you close windows, warm air will not stream into the house; how to keep your home cool during a heatwave is an achievable task.

4. Eating Outside and Avoiding Oven Use

Summer is the best time to have your favorite BBQs. Since the house is warm, staying inside may feel uncomfortable. You can switch from the dinner set to eating outside, where cool breezes move freely.

Eating outside can be a good outdoor experience. If you feel uncomfortable, follow the following steps for a better experience;

  • Build a shade using either bamboo or sheet
  • Make the dining time memorable by including an outdoor activity after eating.
  • Serve the food outside
  • Ensure that you savor the moment despite other people’s opinions
  • Put drinks on ice
  • Landscape your lawns and gardens to make them beautiful. Check the hydroseed service companies to get a professional landscaper.

A breathtaking landscape design makes staying outside thrilling.

Using an oven generates heat. You can consider preparing meals that don’t need an oven to cook—for instance, a taco, spaghetti, and grilled chicken. How to keep your home cool during a heatwave by eating out relies on family members’ willingness to participate.

5. Switching Lights and Unused Appliances Off

Light bulbs will produce unnecessary heat. If it’s not dark outside, switching them off is advisable. The type of bulb impacts the amount of heat they release.

You can reduce heat in the home by avoiding conventional incandescent light bulbs and using energy-saver bulbs. Energy saver bulbs save the energy used by traditional bulbs to heat. In addition to cooling your house, the bulbs will save you money.

Electrical appliances like desktop computers, televisions, fridges, and freezers, generate heat when turned on. You can reduce the heat by turning off the appliances when you’re not using them.

Also, charging appliances like phones, laptops, and tablets will warm the home by releasing heat. Therefore, it is advisable not to charge the devices overnight.

Ensure the backs of freezers and fridges are well ventilated because they can pump unnecessary heat into the house.

When heating and other electrical appliances malfunction, they release more heat. You can talk to an HVAC repair professional near you to repair the devices.

6. Buying Houseplants

In addition to making your house happier, houseplants will help address how to keep your home cool during a heatwave and boost your mood. Plants act like an air conditioner and generate moisture in the room through transpiration. There is no better season to stock up on plants than during summer.

When you group plants in a room, you’ll create a microclimate that’s cooler than the general atmosphere. Houseplants will also reduce indoor pollutants.

The common houseplants are peace lilies and rubber houseplants. They work well in humid conditions and naturally cool houses.

7. Swapping Sheets and Other Bedding Materials

Replacing tog duvets with cotton linen sheets will help improve breathability. Cotton sheet fabric allows more cool air to stream through than polyester sheets. Materials with a high thread count are smoother and make sleeping comfortable. On the flip side, tagged sheets cling to your nightwear, making it hard to sleep and causing overheating.

Mattresses and pillows consisting of breathable fabrics can allow heat to flow away from your body; thus, your body temperature is controlled.

You can feather down your mattress toppers to reduce heat. The cotton casings wink moisture away, keeping your body cool overnight.

8. Using Freezer and Refrigerator

Freezers and fridges help with storing perishable food products. Apart from this, they can help reduce the effects of heat waves in summer.

You can use the fridge to keep ice. How to keep your home cool during a heatwave hack rely on fridges and freezers usage.

Here are some of the uses:

  • You can fill a bottle with water and freeze it for some hours and place it on the foot of your bed.
  • You can cool the bedding before sleeping using the fridge.
  • You can put your pillowcase under the fridge to cool before bedtime.
  • You can chill socks using a fridge.

Cooling your body temperature will help you to sleep comfortably. Doctors advise people to drink cold water regularly during hot seasons. You can use a whole house water purifier to ensure water in your house is safe for drinking. In the case of water leakage in your house, you can use available drain cleaners to unblock pipes or sinks.

9. Adjusting Body Temperature

You can adjust body temperatures by putting your wrists under running cold water and bathing your feet with cold water before sleeping. This way, you’ll lower your body temperature.

Other methods of regulating body temperature include:

  • Eating plenty of meals with high water contents
  • Drinking coconut water
  • Drinking buttermilk
  • Drinking fenugreek tea

The remedies will cool your body down naturally. By discussing how to keep your home cool during a heatwave, you can improve your sleep.

10. Wall Insulation, Shutters, and Energy Efficient Windows

If you can make a significant investment to keep your home temperatures down, consider wall insulation, awnings/shutters, and energy-efficient windows.

Energy-efficient windows not only keep heat inside the home during winter, but they also keep the heat outside in summer.

Awnings provide shade from the sun’s rays. You can keep your home cool without using electricity.

People think wall installation helps during cold weather; what they don’t know is that they are good at keeping the heat out in summer.

A professional AC contractor will offer installation and maintenance services of the windows, insulation, and shutters.

With adequate money to invest in improving your home during cold seasons, you’re also handling the question of how to keep your home cool during a heatwave. The improvements are long-term home investments. Ensuring you buy quality materials.

Conclusion/Outro

Following tips to keep your house cool during summer will make your indoor stay comfortable. It would be best to handle the biggest challenge of controlling home temperature, to improve sleep. Babies’ sleep and comfort are affected more by heat.

Ways to keep your home cool during a heatwave include closing windows during the day, buying houseplants, and investing in a good fan. Make a significant investment by purchasing shutters or insulating your wall and enjoy staying in a cool home.

Short-term measures like taking a cold bath, dipping your wrist in a water tap, and drinking cold water will help cool your body.

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