Stuffiness - an unpleasant, but at the same time common phenomenon for urban housing owners. For what reasons does the room become stuffy? Why doesn't ventilation help in the summer heat? What to do if it’s stuffy in the apartment?
Everything is relative. If you compare a modern apartment and a rustic log house with the “conveniences” on the street, the first may seem like a real communal paradise. However, the owner of a log house could hardly spend at least a week in an ordinary 9-story panel apartment. He simply wouldn’t be able to breathe in it, there wouldn’t be enough fresh and clean air.
The habit of city dwellers to endure stuffiness can create many problems. It leads to constant fatigue, long periods of falling asleep, poor sleep and headaches in the morning.
There are several reasons why stuffiness is created in the house - both in winter and in summer.
Why is the room stuffy?
The room is stuffy due to excess carbon dioxide. When we breathe, we take in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. The longer we stay in an unventilated room, the more carbon dioxide in the air and the less oxygen. And the more people in the room, the faster the concentration of carbon dioxide increases.
There may be enough oxygen in the room, but this will not help. If the concentration of carbon dioxide is high, the person will feel unwell.
A high concentration of carbon dioxide is also the answer to the question of why the room is stuffy in the morning, even if the room is ventilated before going to bed. If you sleep with the windows closed because there is heat, cold, dust or noise coming from the street, then you will sleep in a stuffy room.
Top tips
Creating a cooling system
The first thing that comes to mind when fighting the heat is, of course, creating some kind of air conditioner from improvised materials with your own hands. As a rule, almost every apartment already has at least one fan, which, however, copes with the heat rather poorly - it simply drives warm air from place to place.
By the way, it is important to follow several important rules if you really want to ventilate the room and not let in the hot heat from the street : close the windows when the temperature outside rises above +25 °C. The lowest temperature is from 4:00 to 7:00 and in the evening after 20:00.
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However, with a little imagination you can turn it into something worthwhile and useful for fighting the heat. Let's look at the most popular methods and choose the best one in terms of efficiency and ease of “creation” (you can put on a white robe for respectability, so that your family will immediately understand that you are an inventor, not a hack):
Place a bowl or better yet a pan filled with ice in front of the fan. You can even take 3-4 plastic bottles (they are more convenient to freeze), but then do not forget to place a tray or large plate under them, otherwise the melted water will drain from them onto the floor.
Efficiency: high. Of course, this will add humidity to the air, and as we know, dry heat, when air humidity is low, is more easily tolerated than heat with high humidity. However, too low humidity leads to dry skin, poor body heat transfer, and damage to the upper respiratory tract.
In this case, this is desperately reminiscent of air conditioners, especially the centralized type, which are not just equipped with an automatic air humidification system that allows you to maintain the humidity in the room in a comfortable zone.
Cons: As a rule, bottles heat up in about 30 minutes to almost room temperature.
Advice: to ensure that cold air is drawn in from the rear and no extraneous warm air is sucked in, glue a homemade cardboard casing around the circumference of the fan with double-sided tape.
Gauze is placed on the fan in 2-3 layers, about 5 meters long. The lower or upper (or both) ends of the gauze are lowered into a bowl of cold water. When the fan is running at max. speed, the air in a medium-sized room is cooled by 4-5 degrees.
Efficiency: average - it’s pleasant to be in such air, but the air throughout the apartment is only slightly cooled.
Let's start getting creative! We cut off the bottom part of the bottles, focusing, for example, on the label - the cut line will run exactly along it. Cut carefully, the resulting parts should be the same in height!
Using a compass, measure a circle on cardboard or plastic that will correspond to the diameter of the fan, and carefully cut it out using a utility knife. We evenly distribute the cut parts of the bottles on it with the funnel down. We outline each of them with a pencil and carefully cut out the resulting circles with a knife.
We fix the funnels of the bottles in place of the holes and glue them with silicone hot glue. It is better to apply glue around the circumference of each of the six windows on both one and the other side of the panel.
Closer to the edge of the panel, two holes must be made between the bottles at a distance of approximately 30 mm from one another. Plastic clamps are inserted into the holes, with which the structure will be secured to the fan. How to thread the tightening:
Now all that remains is to secure the panel to the front grille of the fan using clamps, the remaining free ends of which must be cut off, otherwise they may interfere with the rotation of the fan and make an unpleasant sound when it operates.
Voila: beauty and intelligence beat the heat!
My home is my castle
The most important rule when dealing with heat is to make sure that the sun does not enter the room, because light raises the air temperature by 3-10 degrees, which also creates a greenhouse effect.
By the way, an excellent, unusual option is horizontal metal blinds outside the window . This way, they will absorb all the heat from the sun, but it will not get into the room - a super option, although the neighbors will probably think that you are being a bye bye
