It’s a hot summer night, or you just live in a climate that’s hot all year round. Well, don’t worry I’ve got you covered. These are some of the best tips I’ve accumulated while living in my college dorm during the summer. Things that I wish I would have learned sooner, because when its hot outside sleeping is almost impossible. And if you can’t afford, or aren’t allowed to have an A/C unit then your life can be a living hell!
First I would recommend hopping in the shower, taking a nice ice-cold shower can help to immediately cool your body. Next, grab a spray bottle and fill it with ice and water, place it next to your bed, so that at any point during the night you wake up you can spray yourself down with some ice-cold water. Next, drink a full glass of ice water to help to cool down your internal temperature. Okay, you should be in pretty good shape yourself now. Let’s learn how to cool down your bedroom!
You can keep your bedroom cool by:
- Turning Off Your Electronics
- Using an Ice and Fan Trick
- Freezing Your Bed Sheets
- Wetting Your Clothes
- Applying Ice to Your Pulse Points
- Using Cotten Sheets
- Installing a Black Out Curtain
- Utilizing a Window and Fan Hack
- Buying an Evaporative Cooler
Turn off Your Electronics
It may not come as a surprise to you, but electronics generate excess heat in your bedroom. It could be that high powered gaming PC you have on in the corner, an older style flat-screen TV, or possibly that power-hungry laptop you have charging by your bed. Whatever electronics you have on, its time to power them off. It’s adding a significant amount of unnecessary heat to your bedroom. For example, if you have a 500-watt power supply that is 80% efficient, it means that it’s actually using 600 watts to create the 500 watts necessary to run your computer. That extra 100 watts of energy doesn’t just disappear, it is dumped into your room as waste heat. And assuming your room is relatively small, then over the course of an hour, you could be adding a few extra degrees to the temperature of your already hot room. So power everything off, or better yet unplug it!
Ice And Fan Trick
Okay, it might sound crazy at first but I promise it does actually work to some degree. Grab a large bowl and fill it to the top with ice, then using a fan blow air in front of the bowl towards your face. Obviously, the ice will melt throughout the night, but the goal here is to get you asleep.
I found what works the best in terms of setup is to tilt
Freeze Your Bed Sheets
First, grab a plastic bag, and place your bedsheets inside of it. Next, place your bedsheets in the freezer a couple of hours before you go to sleep. Take them out and cover your bed, immediately hop in, and enjoy. Truly a godsend when you are tossing and turning from the heat. It doesn’t have to be quite as long as a couple of hours, 20-30 minutes work also. But if you can plan ahead I find that the longer I leave them in the there, the longer it lasts, and the quicker I can get to bed.
Also, make sure they aren’t damp first or you’ll have a heck of a time trying to pull them apart! Especially when you leave it in there for an extended period of time.
Make Your Clothes Damp
Yep. Just as the title suggests wetting your clothes will help to cool you off. The effect is known as evaporative cooling, and its the same thing that makes sweating so effective at cooling you after an intense workout.
Basically how it works is that the heat that your body normally produces would be slowly transferred away to the environment, evaporative cooling speeds up this process by transferring heat away from your body during the process of heating up your sweat, or in this case the damp clothing that is surrounding your body. The water will evaporate using the heat that is transferred away from your body, and since your body no longer contains as much heat you are cooler and more comfortable as a result. So I guess making your clothes damp is kind of like simulating breaking a sweat but without the need to replenish your body’s water supply.
Applying Ice to Your Pulse Points
Your body has 8 main pulse points for you to choose from. There are pulse points:
- The Wrists
- Sides of the Lower Jaw
- The Temples
- The Side of Your Neck
- Inner Biceps
- Behind Your Knee
- Groin
- And The Upper Portion of Your Foot
A pulse point is defined as the sites on your body where you can easily feel the pulsation of your heart. And the most commonly used one is on your wrist. By placing a cold compress, an ice pack (wrapped in a thin towel), or even cold water on this area you will do wonders at cooling down your entire body.
The reason this occurs is actually pretty intuitive. The pulse point is the closest you can get to the blood that is circulating your body (from the surface of your skin), so by placing something cold there, you are effectively cooling your internal temperature, by cooling down the blood that is circulating it. Not by a significant amount mind you, but even dropping your temperature, a few decimal points can have a considerable effect on how hot you feel. Remember: make sure to wrap the ice in something like a paper towel or washcloth, doing so will prevent freezer burn on your skin.
Use Cotton Sheets
Switching up your sheets when the weather turns warmer is an important task to keep in mind if you want to stay cool on a hot summer night. Using wool sheets just won’t cut it when the temperature gets above 80 and well into the 90’s.
Using Black Out Curtains
If you’re a late sleeper or someone who enjoys complete darkness in the morning before you get up, then a blackout curtain may serve you well. Blackout curtains also help prevent sunlight from penetrating through your window during the day and heating up your room during the day and carrying into the night. Blocking out the sun helps to keep your room a more stable temperature during the day also. I personally use ECLIPSE Blackout Curtains which help to completely block out the sun during the day, keeping your room cooler when its time to sleep!
Awesome Window and Fan Hack
So we have already used a fan and ice trick to help cool you down by blowing cold air on to you during the night, but I still have another trick up my sleeve.
Create an awesome cross breeze throughout your room by opening two windows in order to flow air between them. Open the upper portion of one window and have a box fan (or even a regular fan) facing out of it. Next, on the other window open the bottom portion. The resulting drop in pressure will flow outside in through your bedroom and out through the top portion of the window facing out with the fan. To amplify this effect consider wetting a thin sheet with cold water and placing it in front of the window drawing in outside air. Now the incoming air will be cooled using evaporative cooling so you can make the most out of this clever hack.
Do-It-Yourself Heat Curtain
If you’ve never heard of a heat curtain then you are in the right place. While blackout curtains do a great job at blocking the heat the sun produces from making it into your room, this hack is a lot cheaper and works fairly well for how easy it is to set up.
First, get a large piece of cardboard. Trim the cardboard until it is the about the size of the window. Next, take white sheets of paper and layer it across the piece of cardboard until it is completely covered. I usually do a couple of layers of plain white paper, or enough until there is no cardboard showing. Lastly, place the piece of cardboard with the white paper covered side facing outward (towards the suns). Do this for every window in your bedroom during the day. At night you can remove these Heat Curtains and use one of the other tips involving windows.
It works based on the principle of emissivity. Emissivity is the tendency for a material or object to absorb or reflect thermal radiation (sunlight in this case). A perfectly black object often referred to as a black body (in the field of heat transfer), would entirely absorb all thermal radiation while a perfectly white object would reflect it. This is one of the reasons why blacktop during the summer is so darn hot. Back to the DIY heat curtains, the white paper reflects the solar radiation which prevents heat (in the form of solar radiation) from making it into your bedroom during the day.
Evaporative Coolers
If you live in a climate (west or southwest) with very dry heat, for example in the desert. Then using an evaporative cooler might be beneficial. It works similar to how your body uses evaporative cooling to maintain its temperature. An Evaporative cooler adds moisture to dry air by passing it through a moist pad inside the unit. The dry air evaporates the moisture which reduces the temperature of the air that is released from the unit, cooling your room by up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Evaporative coolers are 10x more efficient than regular A/C units and require no venting. So you’re not stuck having to mount it in the window or run a vent to make
After doing a bunch of research if found that the Frigidaire EC200WF Portable Evaporative Air Cooler (from Amazon – click the link to check the current price) provides the best cooling power of any Evaporative Cooler I’ve found online or in stores.
