this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Cries in European (we usually don't have AC)
A dehumidifier plus a "swamp cooler" (a bucket of ice in front of a fan) works pretty well so long as you keep it to one room and only expect it to work for a few hours or so. Otherwise you'll be buying a lot of ice and doing a lot of work dumping the water from the dehumidifier.
Won't the dehumidifier warm up the room again?
Yes, but it's not a big deal because it only will run once the humidity gets above a certain level - especially if you're using it to cover multiple rooms where any heat from it running will disperse across a wide area. You set it to something like 60% and it will pop on occasionally for a few minutes to maintain that level.
In a closed room with a swamp cooler it's a bit of a different story, but that's why I recommend that only for a short period of time, a couple of hours at most. Just long enough to cool down yourself and the room.
So you leave the dehumidifier on all the time on an automatic setting in a central location in the house to keep the air in the house fairly dry, run a swamp cooler late in the afternoon to cool down your room, and if it isn't too hot and humid outside, open a couple of windows in the house to get some cross ventilation going and air out the house once the sun goes down.
Neither do Canadians
https://lemmy.world/post/40277663/21045211
Bruh, learn physics: Those don't work too well if it's too humid. ๐
... isn't it the other way around?
Nope. You lose heat by evaporation of water on your skin. If the air is too humid, water can evaporate worse and worse.
That's why heat in the Sahara is easier to handle than in the amazon forest.
OK, but I'm not talking about making your body temperature drop, I'm talking about feeling cooler. Doesn't having more stuff in the breeze make it feel cooler?
No. What makes you feel colder is the air moving faster and therefore absorbing sweat off your skin more quickly. If the air is already moist then its capacity for extra heat goes down. You should look up what Wet Bulb Temperature is. In short, it's when the humidity nears 100%, which prevents the air from absorbing any heat from your body because it's no longer pulling sweat off of you. At this level of humidity, even special forces units have found themselves incapacitated within hours due to heat stroke during army tests of soldier capabilities in those conditions. There was a heatwave of about 70-80F in the UK a couple of years ago where multiple people died of heat stroke related organ failure because the humidity was so high that their organs couldn't cool down and overheated until they just stopped working.
If you want to cool down, ideally the first step is to get a dehumidifier to pull water out of the air. This is how air conditioners work as well, they pull moisture out of the air which carries heat, and then transfer that heat and moisture somewhere else.
In the short term, you can use a "swamp cooler" as an ad hoc air conditioner to help cool down. A swamp cooler is just a big bucket of ice in front of a fan. The ice will cool down the air in front of the fan as it blows over it, allowing it to absorb heat from the rest of the room. This only works short-term though, because it won't do anything about the humidity in the room and will actually increase the humidity as the ice melts.
thank you for that thorough explanation on why I'm wrong, I understand the idea much better now.
I don't know what else to tell you other than "evaporation makes it feel colder".
Have you ever been in a Turkish sauna? That's the same principle. Warm water in the air is definitely not pleasant and refreshing.
That air isn't moving
At this point you must be trolling. Turn on your hair-dried and cool yourself down with warm air, since you seem able to.
That's what your mom did (I'm her fan)