Summer in Minnesota can be brutally hot. Those long, hot days can put a lot of strain on your air conditioner—sometimes too much strain. If your air conditioner breaks, Welter can fix it. But how do you stay cool while you wait? 

Here are ten ideas. 

#1 Close your curtains 

In the battle against heat, sunshine is your enemy. Closing your curtains will filter out a significant amount of sunlight, which will prevent the room from getting any hotter than it already is. The thicker the curtains, the more cooling power this will have. 

#2 Turn off incandescent light bulbs (and replace them with LEDs!)

The sun isn’t the only source of light making your home hotter. If you have incandescent light bulbs in your lamps, you are effectively using tiny ovens to light your home. The quickest fix is to simply turn off any incandescent light bulbs. For a longer term fix that will allow you to leave the lights on, consider getting some LED bulbs. These don’t give off heat the way incandescent bulbs do, they last significantly longer, and they are much cheaper to power. 

#3 Don’t use the oven or stove (or microwave)

Are you really going to roast a chicken on a day like this? Keeping all extraneous sources of heat turned off is a vital and very effective way to keep your house from getting too hot. Microwaves will also bring some unneeded heat, and they’ll do it much faster than the stove or oven. 

#4 Hang out in the basement

Heat rises. So when the temperature goes high, you should go low. Most houses in Minnesota have basements, and the underground nature of these spaces has been used to keep food and people cool since ancient times. So grab a cold drink and a good book and enjoy the pleasant chill of your basement. 

#5 Reduce the humidity 

It really isn’t the heat—it really is the humidity. Reducing the humidity in your home can trick your body into making the air feel nearly ten degrees cooler than it would with high humidity. A simple dehumidifier is easy to find and will do the trick. And be sure to drink plenty of water: not just because you’ll be sweating from all that heat, but also because dehumidified air is dry air—you know, that stuff in the winter that cracks the skin on your hands. 

#6 Don’t wash (or dry) your clothes 

If you’re stuck at home on a hot day, it may seem like a good idea to get some laundry done. But beware! Washing your clothes generates a significant amount of heat from the motor that drives your washing machine. And drying your clothes has the same problem in addition to dryers being literal hot air machines. The process of washing and drying your clothes also increases the humidity in your home, which keeps the air temperature warmer. 

#7 Take a cold bath

Yes, the advice so far has been “avoid water at all costs.” But anything that brings something cold into your home is a winner when trying to combat overheating due to a broken air conditioner. A cold bath supercharges what your body does naturally to keep you cool (i.e. sweating) and will keep you cooler longer. Plus, if the rest of your home is hot enough and you make your bath cold enough, you can turn it into a DIY ice bath/sauna situation. 

#8 Use ceiling fans properly 

A ceiling fan doesn’t cool a room simply by moving the air around. In fact, if your ceiling fan is spinning clockwise during the summer, it’s actually working to heat the room by pulling warm air down from the ceiling. To maximize your fan’s cooling power, make sure to set it to spin counterclockwise. 

#9 Keep doors closed

This is a simple one: when air isn’t moving between rooms, it will require less effort to cool. But it’s not just doors between rooms you should keep closed: closets and pantries are easy to overlook because of how small they are. But the fewer cubic feet of air you need to cool, the easier it will be to beat the heat. 

#10 Ice + fan = makeshift air conditioner 

A table fan or a box fan can help keep the air flowing in the room, which can help keep things tolerable. But if you want to get fancy, put a bowl of ice in front of the fan. The ice will cool the air above it and the fan will blow that cool air right to you. This is as close to having a working AC unit as you can get, but it does involve significantly more trips to the freezer. 

Don’t swelter, call Welter

The best advice of all to keep your house from getting too hot this summer: don’t let your AC break in the first place. Regular AC maintenance will keep your unit up and running for a long time. But if your AC unit does break, our technicians can come out and repair it quickly. And if you need a whole new AC unit, we can replace your old one!