The best ways to beat the heat on the cheap in your house during the summer

Summer has hit and the sun is shining brighter than ever before. As temperatures rise across the country making or breaking records, many households are trying to find ways to stay cool without breaking the bank. While investing in a quality air conditioner can help, many effective ones are expensive, both in purchasing the A/C unit and keeping it powered up all day. Luckily, there are some inexpensive ways to keep your home cool throughout massive heat waves.

Your biggest ally in the battle against aggressive heat is water. You likely know that you should drink lots of water to stay hydrated and help cool yourself down, but eating water-dense foods such as cucumbers, pineapples, and strawberries can be a delicious way to beat the heat. Freezing fruits and making homemade popsicles can also create yummy ways to cool down and hydrate your body while being healthier than ice cream (even though that’s still an option).

Water can help you and your wallet from overheating aside from drinking or digesting it. If you feel overheated, splashing cold water on your face and dipping your feet and hands into ice-cold water can help regulate your body temperature and feel relief. This is because the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and the upper parts of your face contain networks of blood vessels that are responsible for temperature regulation throughout your body. Taking a cold shower isn’t recommended since showers tend to be brief and the rest of your body would instinctively try to retain heat rather than release it, but taking an extended cold water bath or dip in a pool would be long enough for your body to truly benefit from it.

Darkness and shade are also your friends during a heat wave, even when you’re already indoors. Shut your windows and doors to keep the heat out, and lower the shades, too. If possible, you can install some shades outside your windows to block sunlight from even entering your home in the first place.

If all of these steps aren’t working and you’re a handy person, you can also build something to cool your room that can be just as effective as an air conditioner while using less energy: a swamp cooler. With a bucket, a drill, some tape, a small electric fan, and ice water, you can create a portable powerhouse that can cool off a room at a significantly lower cost than A/C. It’s also less expensive to build one swamp cooler for each room of your home than it would be to depend on an A/C unit to cool off your entire house.

During the extreme heat that the season brings, it’s important to both your comfort and your health that you prepare yourself, your family, and your home. Doing these steps among others can help keep your temperature regulated and safe during the dog days of summer. Stay cool out there and be careful!