Expert reveals how you might be using your fan wrong – and why it’s not cooling you or the room down
WITH temperatures set to keep topping 30C over the next few days, many of us will be getting the fans back out in a bid to try and get some decent shut eye.
But according to one expert, your fan could very well be doing absolutely nothing to keep you home cool – all because of where it’s placed.
Sarah Gale – a heating and ventilation expert from Toolstation, which sells as array of cooling fans – has laid out her top tips for maintaining a good home temperature during the current scorcher.
And according to her, one of the keys is getting your fan to “work smarter, not harder”.
“People might not realise they’ve been using a fan incorrectly to cool down a room,” Sarah explains.
“Fans are great for moving airflow, so if the inside of a room is hotter than the outside, face the fan towards an open window to draw the hot air outside.”
While it might seem counterintuitive to have a fan blasting at the window, it means that the warmth from inside the room will be pushed outside, actually reducing your home’s temperature.
“Then at night when it’s cool, turn the fan the other way around and it will pull the cool fresh night air in.”
For the same reason, you’re better off keeping the curtains and windows shut when the air outside is scorching during the day.
“While it may be tempting to get ‘fresh air’ into the home,” Sarah explains, all it will actually do is allow the heat to get inside.
“This is especially true for any south facing windows as these will be exposed to the hot sun for the majority of the day,” she adds.
Sarah explains that in rooms with an extractor fan, you can pop it on for a short while to help quickly bring down the temperature.
“While this is not a large-scale solution,” she adds, the fans “in the kitchen and bathroom can be used to draw out hot, humid air to cool the immediate room”.
The ventilation whizz also says you must remember to shut the doors in any of the rooms where you’re trying out these tips, because “it’s much easier to cool down individual rooms rather than cooling down the house as a whole.
And her final tip if you’re hot-and-bothered is to turn off all the unused electrical appliances in your house.
Think of how hot your devices get when they’re plugged in to charge – all of that heat has to go somewhere, and in hot weather it contributes to making your room even more sweltering.
“Appliances such as TVs and computers are some of the worst culprits for this.”
With the late-summer scorcher expected to last until at least next week, that’s plenty of time to put Sarah’s tips into practice and hopefully keep your home’s climate a bit more bearable.
And there’s plenty of ways to have fun in the sun: Tesco have slashed the price of a paddling pool to just £5, and B&Q have announced a huge garden sale with plenty of essentials for relaxing outside in the gorgeous weather.
Just always remember the basics: wear sun cream, keep hydrated and stay out of the sun at peak times if you can.
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