At 3.20pm on Tuesday 9 June the thermometer on the landing said 26.5°C and the city was at 28. A year ago, in the week we sanded the front bedroom floor, the same thermometer read 29°C at four in the afternoon with 31 outside, and I sat on the stairs with a wet flannel on my neck. It isn't a fair comparison, because this hot spell only began on Saturday, but I'll take it.
Our house is a brick terrace with a concrete tile roof, so it heats slowly and gives the heat back for hours after the sun has gone. The front faces west and gets the sun straight in from lunchtime. The back faces east and has its turn early. We have no air conditioning and no plans for any, so this is the routine we used this week.
Windows, curtains and fans
- From about 5.30am: windows open at the back and front for a through-draught while the air outside is cooler than the air in.
- By 9am: windows shut once it's warmer outside than in. Back curtains drawn by 11am, front curtains and the box room blind by noon.
- From about 8.30pm: windows open again as soon as the street cools, and they stay open until bedtime.
- Fans: a desk fan (30 W) in the box room and a tower fan (45 W) in the front bedroom at night.
That looks obvious written down. On Saturday we got it wrong. I closed the back curtains first thing because the morning sun was there, then left the front windows open all afternoon, which let the west sun heat the front rooms from 3pm. By 5pm the landing was at 27°C. The times are now on a card stuck to the fridge.
What it costs to run
The curtains and blinds were already on the windows, so they cost nothing to run. For the fans I used the £12 plug-in monitor from last June. At roughly 27p a unit, the 30 W desk fan costs a little under 1p an hour and the 45 W tower fan a little over 1p. Ten hours of both comes to about 20p.
I did look at portable air conditioners on a wet Sunday last autumn. The ones I found were rated at 900 to 1,200 W, which at the same price per unit is 24p to 32p an hour, so four afternoon hours would cost about £1.10, or five days of both fans. The display in the kitchen sits at about 165 W overnight, our usual baseload, and the two fans together add 75 W when they're running. We also cooked less: salad and cold meat on the hottest nights, nothing in the oven before 8pm, and the hob only for pasta.
Matt's classroom was 31°C by lunchtime on Tuesday. He came home, stood in the hall with his shoes still on and said it felt like a cellar. From a man who lives in a house with a peach bathroom, that is high praise.
The box room, and next door
The box room is the hottest room, with a west-facing window and 2.1 x 1.9 m of air. On a hot Wednesday or Friday I take the laptop down to the dining table in the back room, which has been in shade since lunchtime, and that's where I'm writing this, with the back door open and my feet bare on the floor. Pickle has found the coolest place in the house all by herself. She spends the afternoon flat out on the hall parquet we restored in January, which I'm taking as a review.
I knocked on Maureen's door at 6pm on Tuesday. She was in the back kitchen with a damp tea towel round her neck like a boxer, every west-facing curtain drawn and the back door wide open. I asked if she had water and her fan, and she told me not to fuss. "Ron always said, shut up at noon and open up at night," she said. It's the same routine, from a man who never owned a thermometer.
So that's about 20p a day for the fans, and a good deal less sitting on the stairs with a flannel.
