Tag Archives: Keeping Cool

MobLog

Funky Fan

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Funky Fan

I thought I’d share a picture of our purchase on Saturday.

As some of you may know, we have Beth’s parents over for a visit, and whilst the one fan we had was fine for keeping our bedroom cool, we needed a second to put in our spare bedroom, so as it didn’t become unbearable for sleeping in there. (As a side effect it also enables the spare bedroom to be cool enough to work on the Mac during daylight – something that hasn’t been possible up to now.)

Anyway, what with all that was going on earlier in the week, we didn’t actually get to buying a fan until the Friday. On Friday afternoon Beth did a trip around several shops to find them all sold out. On Saturday morning I paid a visit to one of the big DIY stores and it was in general a similar story, with most fans sold out. All they had were weedy little desk fans, or the fan we actually got, the triple fan with neon lights. Needless to say most people were walking past them, usually with a comment about how hideous they were. However by that point we were getting desperate, so we bought one anyway.

As a side comment, the first one was dead-on-arrival, but the replacement unit worked fine.

It is indeed truly hideous with the neon on, but what people don’t realise unless they look closely, are that the neon lights are on a separate switch from the fans, and with the three separately positional and pretty powerful fans, it is doing a great job at keeping the place relatively cool as we head for some more temperature records!

General

Feeling the Heat

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Heatwave

So today, the temperature is potentially going to break the all time record for July. The BBC are predicting a temperature of 35°C, with the possibility of it going higher locally. The weather forecasters are describing this as exceptional – the average temperature for this week in July is usually 21°C to 23°C – although it is worth bearing in mind that this is the third time this year that the temperature has exceeded 30°C, and the second time that the Met Office has issued a heat wave warning.

Of course, bearing in mind our usual temperature range, the UK is not overly well set up for this level of heat, hence why the heat wave warning always includes contact details for the NHS health advice line. We have air conditioning in the office, however typically we don’t have the instructions for the hieroglyphics on the control panel – good thing we’ve got the Internet though…

At home, like most UK houses we don’t have any air conditioning, so instead we’re getting quite well practiced in where to put fans, which windows and curtains to open and close at which times and so on. Upstairs is usually rather too warm most of the time; however we can usually keep the living room cool enough that we keep the patio door closed as inside is cooler than outside. The other useful trick is to remember that modern houses especially have loads of insulation. In terms of the roof, this tends to be above the ceiling, of the top floor, rather than directly beneath the roof. This means that as the house warms up, all the heat gets trapped by the insulation in the loft, however opening the loft hatch releases that heat past the insulation, so is a great way to dissipate heat. However the loft itself also gets very hot when the sun is beating down on the roof, so equally we tend to keep the hatch closed during the day, so as not to try to add too much to the heat.

If your interest in the weather extends further, I’ve recently added a new plug-in to the today screen of my PDA – SPB Weather. Although out of the box it retrieves its weather data from a site in Russia, the forums on their website include a template and instructions to enable the use of the local BBC weather forecasts from their website as the source of the data. Looking at the predictions for the next few days, the temperature is going to settle back down a bit, with some cloud and rain predicted. However it still not to the seasonal average, and looks like it may still be nudging 30°C.