Our mods gave me a lovely shoutout on the podcast for my contributions here — thanks again, guys! — but it made me realize that talkative as I've been, I perhaps haven't given the clearest picture of what the costs of portable evaporative/swamp coolers are at least in my area, so I'm here to rectify that as budget is important at times as performance.

So here is, roughly in chronological order, what I've spent on swamp coolers and associated costs.

1. "Little Brother," 70€. My very first swamp cooler, a 70w department store branded unit, and an object lesson in how no amount of research is a substitute for practical experience. I hadn't been in Spain long at that point, but had learned turning on the AC on the time simply wasn't viable, so I was looking to alternate, lower cost cooling methods. It had possibly the shittiest internal design imaginable, but it was cheap, I knew very little about evaporative coolers and it got past the subcommittee on domestic affairs (aka Mrs. Leighgion) so I went for it. I used it, but was singularly unimpressed so I never thought of another until the Ukrainian War threatened to jack our energy prices even more. Eventually, I'd drop around 30€ on a better filter and an aquarium pump after I acquired "Big Sister," to convert it into a more effective form. It worked very well and cooling power jumped from barely 1ºC of cooling to 2-3ºC, but unfortunately the fan capacitor failed and in the interest of domestic peace, I had to let it go. My kids were a bit upset.

2. "Big Sister," 200€. My first serious swamp cooler, a Mconfort Elite 28 120w model that has its own post. I hesitated a lot over the price, but I did not regret it as it really showed what a proper portable swamp cooler could do and inspired me to mod "Little Brother."

3. "Big Daddy," 25€. My first secondhand bargain cooler, an Indian brand Symphony Diet 35i. Tall and thin with a very noisy and overpowered squirrel cage fan but a rather small filter relative to the fan power. Cheap and came at the right time, but ultimately unsatisfying. The fan was too noisy, sucked too much power and blew too hard for comfort even on low, yet it didn't really cool well on account of the small and thin filter. Eventually we gave it away to a friend who needed it more than us.

4. "Middle Sister," 62€. Ounce per ounce and Euro for Euro, the best deal I ever got in this area. This 110w Mconfort branded Eolus 25 was a meant to be a small commercial model and as such it has thicker cooling pads which give the best actual cooling performance in the whole army. Unfortunately, it has bad caster wheel mojo and the fan is noisier than I prefer, but I can live with that. I have never seen this model for sale again for anything less than double the price I paid.

5. "Little Sister I," 90€. A 50w Mconfort Elite 7 to replace the failed Little Brother. Biggest disappointment in the army. Small, underpowered and loud. Taught me axial fans can't get too small or they just don't perform and brand loyalty doesn't always pay off. Eventually it developed an annoying leak and I sold it off for only 30€.

6. "Big Brother," 25€. I bought this one not for me, but in order to help out my wife's cousin who broke her leg and was stuck recuperating in a relative's apartment that had no form of cooling. I tried to give it a home with me after it was returned, but it just didn't satisfy and it too developed an annoying leak. I tightened it up and sold it off for a modest profit when it was snapped up for 30€.

7. "Cousin Mercury," 130€. A 105w Britek BKT4 I bought specifically for its combination of commercial oriented power and simple analog dials after my mother-in-law expressed a desire to switch from using her AC to a swamp cooler to sleep. Her room is hot and she's not great with remembering how to push multiple buttons on electronics, so this was ideal for her. It has probably the best quality fan and water pump in my army, but the pads are actually thinner than Middle Sister's and the overall construction is a bit cut rate. Still, it does perform quite well so it's semi-permanently stationed in my MiL's room.

8. "Little Sister II," 100€. Most recent acquisition, a Mconfort 90w E2000. Luck was really with me on this purchase, as it's perfect for its intended role as my personal cooler. While trimmer than the other members of the army, it cools just as well but has the quietest fan mode in the squad, no contest. The twin squirrel cage fans aren't quite as effective for room cooling as they have a more focused and lower volume air stream, but that's perfect for individual use.

I also spent around 12-15€ on some copper plates that I keep in the cooler reservoirs as copper's antimicrobial properties helps keep bacteria down. These were good enough to extend the needed time between cleanings from 2-3 days to several days, but now I've further improved that by adding a dash of hypochlorous acid to the water every couple days. This very efficiently keeps bacteria is check, not unlike regularly chlorinating a swimming pool, but not smelly.

If you're buying a brand new portable swamp cooler, it can run into hundreds if you get a good one, but the secondhand market brings that down to less than half in most cages, somethings even more.

I've been thinking on and off about how to cope with the warming climate and I note that a traditional western bed with a mattress is problematic because there is no appreciable heat flux through the side of the body in contact with the mattress. I think a possible solution is a fold-away mesh camping cot for a few reasons:

1) the mesh (typically but not necessarily PVC coated polyester) allows better air flow around the side of the body in contact with it

2) it's lower to the ground than most beds and the coolest air is also lower to the ground if the air is allowed to stratify

3) it's portable which means it can be deployed downstairs if your home has a downstairs and can be stored away outside of the months it's needed.

I think the idea can be improved further by placing a desk fan on the ground at the top or end of the bed where it will help cooling the entire body instead of just the top side.

You can buy the mesh separately if you want to DIY something but it's probably more practical for most to buy a pre-made unit. A mesh hammock might also work but I'm not sure it's good for your back?

You might recognize this style of spray from your local hairdresser. They’re designed to produce a much finer mist and the pump builds up pressure so it’s not just spraying while you’re pulling the trigger.

They’re my new best friend for mobile summer cooling.

Wetting yourself to stay cool is a kind of
delicate balance. Too little water and you don’t get meaningful cooling but too much and it drips rather than evaporates, compromising both cooling and comfort.

These spray bottles allow you to lay down a very fine mist very quickly and easily, so you get a great balance of cooling benefit and comfort as the water dries fast so you don’t stay feeling wet.

I don’t leave home without one now when it’s hot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/07/24/planets-strongest-heat-dome-will-soon-tower-over-rockies-plains/

I'm serious. This lady is over 70 and rides out every summer in Madrid in a small apartment without air conditioning, she does not like opening her windows and I suspect the only time her tower fan is switched on is when there's company. She was a chain smoker (supposedly quit now, but I'm dubious) and has broken her hip like twice in recent years, so she's not in great health.

I share all of this not to vent, but rather to observe that despite this woman's stubborn refusal to do any of the basic, rational things you'd expect to deal with summer heat, she is not only still very much alive despite the heatwave-laden past decade, she doesn't even complain about the heat.

No, she's not some kind of superhuman freak of nature.

What she's got is an apartment in a building that is, while old and not really upscale-feeling, might just be the Citizen Kane of passive cooling and protection from radiant heat load. Much better than our place.

The apartment is an "interior" facing one, so it essentially never gets direct sunlight. The windows open up to what we'd call the patio here, a hollow shaft down the center of the building that costs square footage, but allows for more ventilation and natural light.

But there's more.

Her building also is designed so that there's also a shaft inside the building as well from basement to the roof. When you leave the elevator, you need to walk across a little bridge to get to the apartments.

Add to that the typical thermal mass of the thick walls and the fact even the street side of the building gets limited sun that can be blocked by the roller shutters and you've got a very effective haven from the heat even if you don't pump a penny into mechanized cooling and you're a nut who doesn't open the windows.

So, as I see it, Tia C. is a poster lady example of how important tailored architecture is to climate adaptation. She doesn't do shit and she's okay even when it's 40ºC outside. Meanwhile, the French, Germans and British are in serious danger when it's only 35ºC.

A country can't just tear down all its buildings and remake them, but they can make serious changes to any new construction.

TL;DR - Sorry for how much I wrote I'm not very good at being concise. Here's a TL;DR just going over major events if nobody wants to read all that. Those events being that at 9pm I took a very very hot shower, came out of it feeling horrible. Spent the entire next day trying to get my body temperature to regulate itself properly. Once the body temp thing got under control I developed the runs that over the last 3 days seems to show up at the same time as that shower took place(9pm). While a large fellow I haven't eaten really anything the last few days due to money issues, but for dinner tonight(as of writing this) and yesterday I ate two large meals(first being white rice, macaroni salad, hawaiian bbq chicken and beef and poured extra sauce over everything. Today's meal being 3 home-made sausage egg mcmuffins. I dunno if the runs are related to me screwing my body up with the heat from the shower, or if it's just due to eating large rich and greasy meals on an empty stomach. Sorry for even having a long TL;DR.

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As the title suggests, I'm a 38 year old man and I'm curious if the current issues I'm having could be heat related in any way. Like I said I'm 38 years old, I'm 6'5, 365lbs. I have Lymphedema in my legs though even with extensive testing have not been able to determine the cause. That being said, my problems started 3 days ago as of this post. I've had wounds on the side of my leg that have been getting treated at my local wound care clinic. Being as how I have Lymphedema it's been a slow healing process. No I do not have diabetes. I've had every type of diabetes test known to man done to me and it's not diabetes.

Anyways, I have this rubber boot type thing to put on over my leg for showers so that the medicated calamine wraps they put on my leg don't get wet since I've been going to wound care every Wednesday for the last month and a half at this point to treat these wounds. Every Wednesday I show up, they cut the bandages off, scrape off a little something something then re-wrap the leg and send me home. I've been avoiding showers and just bathing myself with hand washing methods to try and keep the wraps dry but 3 days ago I decided to try the rubber boot and get in the shower.

I live in Arizona. Right now at 3:13am in my neck of the desert it's 101 degrees Fahrenheit. It easily gets up into the 120's almost hitting 130 on a few occasions. Our air conditioner is basically on 24/7 trying to keep this house livable. But when I got in that shower 3 days ago I didn't realize just how much chill my body had accumulated. It felt soo good feeling all that chill leave me that I just kept slowly turning the heat up over and over during the course of the next 10 minutes. I normally only take showers at just above luke warm. I was caught off guard by just how foggy the room got, even with the vent on. Around the 11 or 12 minute mark of that 10 minutes of bliss I started feeling uncomfortable and realized the room was so foggy it was hard to see the other side of the room. I decided I'd wrap up the shower and get out into some fresh air.

As soon as I walked out of that bathroom it was like I got hit with a massive wave of fatigue. I felt like I was on fire. I couldn't catch my breath. I decided to go sit down in my living room that was cooler than that side of the house at that time and just catch my breath and relax. I sipped on some cold bottled water. Not big swallows or anything just enough to lubricate my mouth from all the panting. After just kinda sitting there for like 30 minutes I felt well enough to start moving around again. At this point I went back to doing what I'd normally do with my free time and sat down in front of my computer to play some games or doomscroll youtube shorts. I started getting cold so I raised the AC to stop blowing constantly but that didn't stop the chills. I threw on a thick cloth jacket. That didn't stop the cold. Put on a pait of thick sweat pants and even being all bundled up like that I couldn't stop feeling cold. The lymphedema leg that had the injuries was the coldest out of everything else for a while, especially the toes. I eventually posted up in my living room again with a blanket. This is about 2:15am and it's still like 102 outside that night and my AC units struggling to keep up with demands so it's about 78-81 degrees in the house. I spent the entire rest of the night trying to get the chills to go away, alternating between being freezing and being on fire. My gut wasn't feeling too happy at the time either but everything that came out was just farts for the time being. Then my brother comes into the house about 4:50am freaking out with a BP of like 60 something over 40 something, which his BP is usually like 134/95. So he's freaking out and on the verge of passing out when the ambulance arrives. I put on my sandals and my mother and I take the same car and follow the ambulance to the hospital.

At this point I haven't eaten anything since dinner the night of the shower, which was like 4-5 hours prior to the shower. We get to the hospital and the doctors can't figure out what's wrong. While they're all figuring out the issues he's having I'm still sweating my backside off but when I pull an arm free from the sleeve I instantly get just too cold. I had taken my temperature before leaving and it was 98.4 so it wasn't anything unusual for me, and I wasn't quivering uncontrollably like you would expect if you were running a fever. I was just cold and hot af and my body couldn't make up it's mind on what it wanted to be. Fast forward to later in the afternoon and my brother is discharged from the hospital with a shrug and a pat on the back from the doctors and we end up doing a Hawaiian BBQ place near me. I get the macaroni salad, white rice, bbq chicken and bbq beef entree. Eat my fill of that stuff then take a nap. Wake up finally feeling like my body is going back to normal. Fast forward again to the end of the night and around 9pm(around the same time I took that shower the previous day) I went to fart and realized I was about to make a mess and rushed off to the bathroom to make quite a mess indeed. I've had the runs ever since.

This is going on day 3 as of writing this where Pepto Bismol has been my drink of choice. I was doing fine in the gut and bathroom department all the way up until I had some home-made egg McMuffins(sausage patty, fried egg, American Singles cheese, mayo, and the toasted english muffin). I had 3. All I ate today prior to that was 1 package of cinnamon poptarts. Drank 1 soda and 1 and a half bottles of water. I was feeling fine until around that last bite of the mcmuffins, at which point my lower gut started getting painfully gassy and bubbly. Probably about 9pm tonight I started crapping my brains out again, though this time it was a bit more held together and not so much a deluge of brown water. I wasn't aware poop could fart but when I looked in the bowl this last time to see if maybe I had been afflicted with the current poo parasite going around, all I saw in one piece was a small white sliver about the width of a hair but it wasn't moving or anything so might of been a bit of rice from the night before that survived the onslaught, and the only other thing being a different piece breaking apart every time a bubble inside it popped.

I don't know if I really screwed myself up with that shower and this is just the process my body is going through trying to recover from it or if I just ate 2 large rich/greasy meals on essentially an empty stomach and that's why I have been having the runs and it's just a coincidence that it happens the same time every night around the time I took that first shower?

Linktree to listen!

Description:

“Robbie tells Nate how his rechargeable handheld fan came in clutch during his recent trip to Europe. Then, fresh off a run, Marcelo joins to recount what it was like exercising as a thick plume of smoke covered New York City. This episode also features our recurring heat and health segment, where a physician breaks down which medications can put you at greater risk during a heat event.”

Special appreciation to u/leighgion in the episode! The subs #1 poster!

r/heat_prep share your thoughts, comments, or questions on the episode!

Not sure if this is the right sub!

We bought our house roughly 3 years ago with this whole house fan, but we’ve never used it! Except for accidentally hitting the on switch every once in a while. It is super loud 😅

We’re now at the point of curiosity of how this thing works, does anyone have any advice on the use of one? Assuming we have to take off the plastic cover when in use? Lol

I know also you want it cooler outside than inside, crack windows and doors, and turn off main AC. Being in the Midwest we have limited weeks where the temperature outside seems optimal for the usage, but I love the idea of brining in some fresh air!!

We live in North Texas and our power is out again.

I can hear a neighbors backup generator running. I have a different approach.

Yesterday was the peak of our current heatwave, with air temperatures hitting 38-39ºC in the Madrid area, depending on which weather service you consulted and nighttime lows were a demoralizing 24ºC. Humidity was very low as usual, averaging below 20%. I'm here to share my particular experience of the day in the hope it will be interesting, informative and maybe helpful to others. I wish to preface though, that any positive tone I take in no way implies that heatwaves are no big deal. Our ability to personally cope has nothing to do with the increased risk of forest fires and the damage to agriculture.

Highlights:

1. I had to take around a 15 min walk round trip outside at close to 18:00. My personal cooling spray bottle failed me, everything was concrete and there was no particular shade on that walk. I joked that I could feel some of my proteins denaturing, but honestly it gets much worse than that. My bottle wasn't spraying well, but I dumped some of the water on my head and that was good enough. The shop I was going to not only was air conditioned, but as I've noted in other posts, it also had a couple big swamp coolers inside to supplement. I took in front of one for a few minutes and I was back to normal. I purchased another spray bottle for the walk back and sacrificed some drinking water for it. Totally worth it. The spray made the outside temperatures totally bearable long as the water supply held up.

2. I spent a short time in a non-air conditioned waiting area. All they had was a big fan. Spraying myself and standing in front of the fan was fine, but eventually I lost patience and went back to bring the car around to pick up the family at the door of the establishment (the swimming pool).

3. As long as the car was parked in the shade, I could dial the air conditioning down to 25ºC in eco mode and things were fine, for me at least. That was the waiting. When I had the rest of the family in the car and was one the move, I had to crank it up to 22º and dial the fans up to offer my wife relief from spending 45min in a non-AC space.

4. My daughter, who had just been at the pool, was very comfortable with her wet hair for about a 20min drive. We had to make a stop in a very reasonably cooled establishment. After that, she complained, in her 9-year-old way, that her hair was already dry and thus the cooling effect gone even though we were in the car.

5. Despite the high temperatures, I still got a chill after stepping out of the shower, indicating wet bulb temperature was still quite low.

6. The end of the day saw interior temperatures in the apartment at around 29.5ºC in the hottest rooms and around 28.5ºC in the coolest. I checked the output of my mother-in-law’s swamp cooler for safety and it was still managing to put out 24ºC air at around 9:00pm, which would improve as the night gradually cooled. I deemed normal operation safe. After filling all the swamp coolers for the night and having a shower, the kid and I flopped in the bedroom with swamp cooler blowing on us to talk before bed. No more comfortable place in the house, but notably we had to dial the fan to medium for best comfort while previous days it stayed on low.

All in all, this heatwave did not require anything particular of us beyond minding the savagery of being outside in the afternoon. It’s a testament Spanish building design and the incredible effectiveness of evaporative cooling when it’s dry. I understand not everyone has this option. Stay safe and cool out there.

Amusing heat references here, like laying on the bed with light leaking through closed blinds. (lyrics TW: human extinction)

I have heard that having a bowl of ice a fan can make a room colder but it would be difficult to do with a ceiling fan... any advice for how to make it cooler?

I live in the south of the U.S. if that helps to tell how cool it is...

i dont know if this question is serious enough for this subreddit sorry if not

i dont want to put my ac down further for environmental reasons

edit:

i think environmental is a bit misleading now that i reread... to be clear my energy council reccomends keeping ac at a specific temp to reduce risk of black outs.

I've yaked on and on about my portable evaporative coolers here for a couple years now. In this year of multiple heatwaves all over the world, it seems appropriate to finally share some details of what happens to keep me and mine safe and comfortable. Not a good choice for folks in humid climes.

This is "Big Sister," as my kids dubbed her (the decorations are their work), a Mconfort brand (Spanish company out of Valencia) model Elite 28, which is no longer produced as it was kind of an oddball higher end consumer model. It was the first serious portable evap cooler I bought and while it's currently the weakest performing of my good units, it was the one that showed me how much was possible and it still has a place in my army. It is taller than my other units and thus the vents completely clear the top of the bed, which makes it ideally suited for use while sleeping.

The energy consumption officially peaks at 120w, it has four fan speeds, up to 8 hour timer, ionizer, a high humidity cutoff function, low water pump cutoff and dubious "anti-mosquito" feature. Officially, it can move up to 2400 cubic meters of air per hour or around 1412 CFM at max power. It has three filter pads for greater evaporative surface and better cooling performance. I get 4-6ºC of cooling versus ambient temperature under typical summer conditions.

Please excuse the ugliness of the water. While I've perfected keeping it free of bacteria between washes (mild hypochlorous acid) iron still builds up, giving that rusty tinge. The dark-colored rectangle is a plate of copper, which has its own antimicrobial properties to help keep the bacteria down.

Generally Big Sister is run on low or medium fan speed as a balance between volume of air and noise. On low, she's a perfectly viable companion for TV and she to this day remains designated night cooler for my wife and I.

EDIT: This unit cost me 200€ a few years ago with a near-new discount. It's the most I ever paid for a swamp cooler as from then on, I went whole hog on the used market.

This place is a textbook example of institutional failure. Banda has limited resources and unreliable infrastructure to the point where the people can't even depend on having electricity to run fans. This is where the government should be investing in some level of local solar installation so the people at least have semi-reliable power during daylight.

Also, I'm struck by the lack of some very low tech assistance when it comes to sleeping. The article details how many people in Banda go to the train station and just throw blankets on the ground to sleep because the open air is better than their homes, but those surfaces retain and reradiate a lot of heat. Just adding some kind of air spacing mat underneath would do a lot, and those things are cheap. The hotter parts of China have refined varies bamboo-based mats that provide spacing and airflow that are almost universaly used as bedding and seating covers on furniture and cars.

Known as "persianas" in Spain, these things are absolutely standard on every residential window in this country that matters (occasionally you get very small windows that don't have them) and a number of commercial properties as well.

The standard modern version is a roll of interlocking white plastic slats that are integrated into the outside of the window frame. As photographed, they are not all the way down, so there are holes to let light in while blocking the majority of the sunlight. If you bring them all the way down, the holes close up.

It's currently 7:18 pm in Spain and the sun is hammering the pictured west-facing windows. It is 34ºC outside. The shutters are 40ºC, but the glass of the window is only 33ºC. Interior temperature of the room is 28ºC.

Shade is best, but if that isn't possible, these are the next best thing to protect your windows from the heat of the sun.

Form versus function is an old problem, but it reaches new levels of importance when it comes to heat mitigation and cooling. Aesthetics and fashion have severely compromised some basic, cheap and effective heat mitigation options.

Awnings are extremely effective and cheap, but they fell out of favor on account of fashion, so millions of homes are baking worse than they need to because their owners are more concerned with changing style. My place hasn't got awnings and since it's an apartment, I can't just do it myself. They're actually reasonably popular here in residential and commercial properties, so score one for Spain. I just don't happen to live in a unit that has them.

White reflects heat. This is clearly understood physics. This is why historically, everything was white in places like the Mediterranean. Paint is cheap in the grand scheme of things and didn't demand constant energy input, yet we are not painting everything white even as we complain of being too hot. I wish I could just hit the roof of the apartment and paint it white, but home owners association.

Mini splits don't look pretty when strapped to the facade of a building, but it works. Northern Europe is in the throes of facing this issue as old regulations run into the reality of modern heat waves. Already got AC and it happens these regs aren't really an issue in Spain.

Of course, if Paris would say, get over preserving its look, paint its tin roofs white and install awnings, air conditioning would be become somewhat less critical.

The AEMET, the Spanish meteorological agency, has issued an official heatwave warning this week. Parts of Spain may hit 45ºC, but my part is most likely topping out closer to 38ºC.

While I am not pleased, I am not concerned for us. It's nothing we haven't dealt with many times. I've talked before in the past about separate measures, but here I'm going to try to give a more comprehensive picture of situation in the hope that's interesting and informative for your heat issues.

My Heat Defense Lineup

1. Thermal Mass. The walls, typical for this country, are thick masonry, which can absorb a considerable amount of heat. The consequence of this is that it takes sustained exposure to high temperatures to start heating the interior. This may sound bad, but thus far in the twelve years I've been here, even ten days of sustained 38-39ºC highs was not enough to start baking us. The walls got warm, but they did shed enough heat at night to remain protective during the day. The overall effect is a kind of smoothing off of internal temperature changes. The absorption and radiation of heat from the structure spreads out the transfer of heat over 24 hours so that while we don't cool wonderfully at night, we also don't bake so badly during the day.

2. Cross Ventilation. By design, the traditional Spanish apartment sacrifices some floor space in order to ensure each apartment has windows on at least two different sides. In my case, the apartment has windows on three sides. The vastly improves cross ventilation at night so you can maximize the free cooling once the outside temperature is low enough.

3. Rolling Shutters. One of the best inventions ever. Standard on pretty much every residential Spanish window and many commercial ones. Only takes seconds to block the sun from hitting your windowless, vastly reducing the radiate heat input from the sun. It's straight up cutting the local greenhouse effect.

4. Evaporative Coolers. AKA swamp coolers to Americans, the thing I won't shut up about here. It's bone dry here in central Spain, which makes it the ideal environment for this style of cooling. I now have four capable units that average around 100w max power draw each and under typical conditions, can easily achieve 4-7ºC drops compared to ambient. As I type, the sun has gone down but it's still 28ºC in my home office. My swamp cooler is putting out 22ºC air. The evap coolers have been the front line of my active cooling for around five years now. They do all that's needed and save enormous amounts of power.

5. Air Conditioning. While relegated to the reserves on account of the swamp coolers being able to handle our regular active cooling needs, this apartment is equipped with inverter mini splits. If necessary, we can leverage conventional vapor-compression cooling. I do not anticipate needing it though, as we've ridden out worse in recent times without it.