No cheap method of cooling is as reliable as expensive, unsustainable air-conditioning. If you need to control the climate for your electronic devices...
...you're not living as frugally as you might be. If you need to save serious amounts of money, you don't plug in electronic devices. There are good reasons to maintain a Net-free home anyway, and you would never have believed how much cooler an office is when you do the math in your head, with a pencil, and the writing on a manual typewriter.
(Actually, when Frank B. Gilbreth proclaimed the death of the traditional pencil, as in those good ol' school-bus-yellow Ticonderogas, he was advertising the so-called mechanical pencil, which really was superior. Mechanical pencils replace the wasted wood around the graphite stick with a more durable metal shaft you can refill with plain graphite sticks. Mechanical pencils can be considered both Green and an upgrade, if you have a convenient source of plain "leads" to refill them.)
The other frugal way to reduce cooling cost is to get out of the city. If you're not employed in a city full-time, see if you can telecommute from a small town or even a farm. Look up the towns from which people are posting comments on the Internet like "What population problem?" There are reasons why those towns are not crowded, but local warming effects from too much pavement, too many cars, too many air conditioners, too many TVs, and too many computers, are not among them. Some places really are underpopulated because, the last time realtors tried to market properties there in US cities, the concern on people's mind was how much wheat they could raise on their land. If you don't want to raise wheat, you might actually like living in a place where wheat did not grow well. In theory all you'd need to do would be to keep those places leafy and sparsely populated...many of them have only very short hot seasons. In practice, you'd want to be sure your home in Saskatchewan was cheap and efficient to heat.
Seriously, people survived summers in muggy Mississippi before air conditioning was invented. They even survived without being able to store ice.
The secret: Even when sweat is not evaporating efficiently enough that you feel the cooling effect, air blowing over wet skin reduces the temperature enough to prevent heat damage, most of the time.
1. Your own home may already be clothing-optional. This is a good way to reduce cooling costs since it also reduces laundry expenses. When you need to wear clothes, your options are cotton, linen, and hemp. Linen and hemp become comfortable to wear when they've been aged to the very brink of natural decomposition, but you can spend the winter getting them there. In addition to reducing the extent of human suffering from heat, keeping the plastic off our skins reduces the inconvenience and discomfort many people endure from fungus infections.
2. Don't fear sweat. Sweat does need to be washed out of clothes before bacteria get into them and start fermenting. That Sick Green laundry-hamper aroma comes from bacteria that can put a drain on the human immune system. However, when people maintain a good healthy interpersonal distance, fresh sweat doesn't smell bad. At a healthy distance most people don't notice it, and those who do continually tell pollsters that fresh sweat is, if anything, an attractive odor. So let your body cool itself. (If you like the way underarm deodorants interact with your personal fragrance, they're cheap enough, but avoid the "antiperspirant" kind--they can be toxic.)
3. Use water liberally. Keep cool water in a foot bath under the desk. Apply cool water to your wrists, face, and scalp as needed. On very hot days, you might want to wear wet clothes. (Cushions and upholstery need to be replaced, if they can't be laundered, every year or two anyway.)
4. Eat lightly in hot weather. Nibble on small amounts of cool, juicy things like fruit and raw green leaves. Toward the goal of reducing malnutrition we all learned in primary school to construct menus that included foods from every nutritional group at every meal. Actually it turns out that, as a daily rule, that means more protein than the human body needs. If you consumed meat, milk, fish, eggs, cheese, or even mixtures of a grain and a legume, every day all winter, you can safely live on raw fruit and vegetables through a summer heat wave. Of course, a little grilling is part of the summer tradition, but it's easiest to stay cool if you light the fire around sundown, when mosquitoes start to fly.
5. Drink lots of water in hot weather. Dehydration is more of a threat than heat itself.
6. Adjust your behavior to the weather. Get up early and do physical work while the heat and humidity are relatively low. Sit down with a cool drink and a fan during the heat of the day.
7. Wear closed-toe shoes or boots while working with heavy machinery or large animals, since they reduce the risk of breaking or amputating toes. Don't wear the same shoes or boots in the house. Change footwear at the door. Avoid reusing a pair of socks unless they've been laundered and dried between wearings--always put on fresh dry ones.
8. If you're in the habit of using a computer or cell phone, and you're not being paid to do that, break the habit. Write down a list of what you want to do with those devices in between trips to a public-access computer center in town. While there, don't waste time surfing. Get your news from printed papers. Public libraries often keep a selection of newspapers available. Neighbors often agree to leave the newspapers they buy at a cafe, too, to reduce the number of subscriptions anyone needs to pay for.
9. Use a fan. When just waving a hand-held fan around your face is not enough, you may feel that it's worth the expense to run an electric fan. Another alternative is to rig up a device that activates a fan when you move your feet or rock a rocking chair. Another tradition, which may add enough general entertainment value to offset its inefficiency, is to spend hot afternoons with a friend and take turns fanning each other. (Actually, the desire to make the other person do all the fanning may account for the origin of slavery, but that's now illegal in all but a few...very hot...countries.)
10. Maintain a clean environment. Don't "just learn to live with" the odor of fungi or bacteria that thrive in a warm, damp environment. They cause "summer colds" and "allergies." Kill the fungi and bacteria before they attack humans. Oldfashioned "natural" cleaning agents like baking soda, borax, lemon, alcohol, and vinegar will eliminate most odors. I've been known to escalate to bleach and Listerine. No aerosol spray is necessary, or even very helpful, in eliminating odor-causing fungi and bacteria. Scrubbing solid surfaces, and sloshing porous substances through moving water, are good hot-weather exercise and very frugal ways to eliminate pathogens from the house.
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