some thoughts
First, pay attention to your own cooling. If you drink enough water (forget the bullshit about tea and coffee not counting, that was disproved years ago. Alcohol does take more water to process than it helps cool, but before you drank enough alcohol to really cause problems, you'd have died of an overdose.)All those isotonic drinks and mineral water are just an expensive waste of your money. Total, complete marketing bullshit. Plain old tap water is just fine - the water company has to watch it carefully or the pipes and fittings would be eaten up! Isotonic my ass. Urine is isotonic, but you drink that stuff and your kidneys will fail.
Eight glasses of water a day may be too much in December, in August it may be too little. If you feel thirsty, you are already in trouble. If you feel "hungry", try a glass of water first - the body is lousy at telling the difference until you are well over a quart low (maybe that's where idiot lights for oil pressure came from!)
With very few, very expensive exceptions, synthetic fabrics are nothing but garbage bags. They don't let your skin perspire as much as you need to. Ditch the polyester and nylon; wear cotton, linen, silk. Some Rayons are cool, some aren't.
Your shoes play a big role here - don't wear the same pair two days in a row, don't wear synthetic socks. If your job lets you, go barefoot or wear sandals. Maybe not with white socks and Bermudas...
Unless the humidity and heat aren't dropping at night (hello Dixie) your house will cool down eventually. Don't do things to reheat it. Or increase the humidity. Use the microwave, not the conventional oven. Pull the drapes before the sun shines in. Exhaust the moisture out of the bathroom after a shower, etc.You can keep a normal bedroom toasty warm at 0°CF with a 2,000 Watt heater. OK, add up the watts on all the appliances in your house running right now...yikes! We'll never agree on phase in this group, but even the most anal of us admit that the watts marked on the label are the heat in the house. 100% efficient. Double Yikes!.
This is where CFLs really do begin to pay off - ten light bulbs at 11 watts or ten at 100 watts...I did the math and changed over.
Evaporative cooling works best when you have low humidity and high, really high temperatures (goodbye Dixie and hello Arizona). There are lots of web-sites with the curves showing at what point they stop helping and start hurting, but if you live in the Co'Cola belt...fuhgitabo'it.
Refrigerant based cooling attacks the problems on two levels. One, it lowers humidity. Two, it lowers the air temperature. This is why you always read "If you need 6,000BTU of cooling and you have to chose between 5,000 and 8,000BTU units, take the 5,000). The longer the unit runs, the more it drys the air. The dryer the air, the warmer it can be without you feeling hot - your own air-conditioning works perfectly in dry air up to the 90°s. In moist air, 75° can feel too hot.
The energy saving of older, analogue systems is a joke unless you have a two stage compressor. If the system is smart enough to adjust for humidity, then it can really make a big difference.
Units which use the outside fan blades to pitch condensed water on the coils are much more efficient. By the same token, don't put the unit in the blaring sun if you can avoid it...just common sense.
I would dearly love this summer to experiment with a phase change system, hope my honey will let me. I think I've got a design which will save electricity and still cool adequately.
We'll see. My parents' house will be cool regardless - the elderly dog can't take the heat and neither can my dad. I had a ferocious fight with my brother about that last summer and reprogrammed the computer with a password to lock him out. Idiot won't talk to the doctors, so thinks 82°F and 65% humidity is just fine, cause that is still what the thermometer calls "comfort zone." I put in what the doctor's called for, with slight variations up and down during the day. And that's the last piece of advice - if your health and doctor permits, moderate physical activity will help you to stay cooler than none at all.
Here in Munich, a fan is really all you need, thank goodness. We don't really get all that hot...except when we do and then it usually is dry heat. I am so not complaining - Biergärten are the best air-conditioning in the world. It's nice we can just take our clothes off and dangle our feet in the river, with a cool beer glass in hand.
