The heat’s starting to hit and that can mean all sorts of troubles in the garden and around the home. I’ve found the hot weather is particularly bad for my mental health, especially the days with that witheringly northerly wind. As the hear ruses, everyone becomes more cranky too.

Wet bulbs and heat death

Another issue that’s becoming more common as both heat and humidity rise, is that it becomes more difficult for our bodies to cool themselves through sweating, leading to death. The measure of this is valued the ‘wet bulb temperature’ and is found, eventually by wrapping a thermometer with a damp cloth. As the water in it evaporates, that damp cloth cools the thermometer, leading to a lower temperature than if the thermometer is dry. That’s also the way our body works – sweat evaporates, cooling us.

The problem is that when the air is more humid, less water evaporates (from the cloth, or us). The temperatur and humidity levels that this happens at are not as high as you may think. The usual figures quoted are 35°C at 75% humidity but that figure comes from a piece iof theoretical research.  Subsequent findings have shown the temperature to be as low as 31.5°C.

Our successes

We’ve tried everything over the years to save increased water costs and sky-rocketing electricity bills over Summer and have nearly everything we’ve tried that has worked covered for free on our website. We’ve got it pretty well right for our little block and back when the bills had the household comparisons on the back, usually came in as using as much water or electricity as a 2 person house. There’s 4 of us (3 humans and Athena) plus chooks and we also grow a huge chunk of our own food and medicine. That was before we had solar panels added to the house.

A lot of the ideas and projects on the website were done piecemeal over tome and on a very very tight budget. Many are applicable to renters.

Look for the Summer tab in the menu at the top of every page or follow this link –
https://ligayagarden.online/summer/

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