How many of you have had to do without air

97* and high humidity here today - no AC. It is very oppressive this time of year. We have fans blowing - which is better than not having them, and I have a portable dehumidifier, which draws out several gallons of water from the air a day - it does help by lowering the humidity some. Today I put a wetted dish towel in the freezer to wrap around my neck. it is important to remian hydrated as well - but if you are going to drink a lot, make sure it has something more in it than just water - add a little salt or something for electrolytes.

I have used that technique of using the fans facing opposite, I have also had to do without air conditioning alot and I have taken 1/2 -1 gallon jugs and filled them with water and freeze them solid in freezer and set behind the fan and it would draw some cool air off of the icy jug and works for me I still use that trick today. My hubby is supposed to put our air condition in tomorrow "fingers crossed and knocks on wood." I also use a misting bottle or spray bottle and I will spray myself down and set in front of the fan and it feels really good and cooling but you will have to spray every so often after the water dries up. I use this technique still also every night especially since I can't get to sleep without being cooled off since my trailer can be hotter inside then it is outside it builds up so much heat during the day.

We use fans. We have a house fan. No AC here. The part about catching the breeze is good but I find it difficult to rotate my house to catch a breeze. Some day I hope to move where I don't need air conditioning.

If you have windows at opposite sides of the room...put one blowing out and one blowing in and create a cross breeze like you said. On really hot days, pull the shades and keep the windows shut to keep the hot air out. Actually, I don't have an air conditioner and to be honest...probably won't. It is uncomfortable on really hot days but the ones that are extreme are usually short-lived. Your body does adjust to the heat but if you have an air conditioner...it just makes it all that much more painful to go back outside.

I don't even own an air conditioner anymore. We had a room sized one we used to use in our bedroom, but we left it outdoors when we moved, and it got rained and snowed on. We haven't gotten around to buying a new one. This place is so small that we could probably buy a large room air conditioner, close off a few doors, and have it cool the whole place, it's just a matter of having the money for that.

I've had to do too..I hate when the windows are open and bugs fly in and then surprisingly are like on your leg or in your bed, i use 2 fans both are in another room and it helps a bit when they are just next to the open window, they like force the cool air from outside to inside.

Cairo is very hot most of the year and even the nights can be up above 30 a lot of the time. Leaving windows open is a real issue too because it's so dusty. We have no air conditioner in the apartment though and rely only on a stand up fan. It does the job I guess, but air conditioning would certainly be a nice addition! I've considered buying one, but I'm renting and I move a lot, so I don't want to fork out money for something that I'm just going to leave behind.

No air conditioning here either.I recently purchased one those dual fans for our kitchen. It has 2 fans. You can set both fans on intake,both on exhaust or one on intake and one on exhaust. Putting in on exhaust sure does help when your cooking. Jumping in the pool with boxers,t-shirt and sleeping on our damp towels helps us to sleep at night. I know it sounds crazy,but I can't sleep when it's hot.

You would post this conversation and I am sitting here sweltering in the new apartment lol. I wasn't able to get a truck, so I had to move in shifts. The last things I have left out there are the air conditioner I had already when I moved in to grandma's, and the one my grandad is going to rent to own me lol. Both are too heavy, and my grandad's needs to be taken out of the window. I am waiting on Friday to take a trip to either Sam's or Wal-Mart, and getting a whole mess of fans, I'll pick up my AC's and mount them for the days where it gets to be too much. I do have asthma and allergies, the kids as well, so some days it just isn't worth it to save the money when we're sneezing, snotted up, and narrow-eyed lol.

Tell your husband to pay for the AC. Sheesh! Being without AC is't something to which I normally subject my family. The only times I can really recall oven-baking my family was when the power was out for two weeks. Even at that, we had a generator and fans. (Although, I should pick up window AC units for emergencies.)

In lieu of air conditioning at least in a house, I have used portable fans and ceiling fans, a portable swamp cooler, etc. I have a nightmare story from hell regarding no air conditioning - ours broke a couple years ago but it broke BEFORE it had begun getting hot here. We live in So Cali where triple digits are the norm. It's dry, so it's usually bearable without ac up to about 88ish outside. It was still in the low/mid 80s when the central cooling took a dump, so we contacted Sears and made an appt for them to order the parts and come in a week. Well... when they came, they found out they had the wrong SIZE parts! They could not be ordered and brought out for another service call for another week and a half. That whole week and a half it was about 104-111. It was 90-92 in our house! We used fans, and I would lay a wet towel on myself and wrap my daughter in a wet towel. She was around 18 months old and she had STOPPED NAPPING because it was too hot to sleep. Imagine our relief when our new unit was installed and working and we got the house temp back to about 77 where it belongs, she started napping again. We do have a pool so we were in and out of the pool a lot, we spent time at the mall or other air conditioned places, and the wet/damp towels coupled with a direct blast from a portable fan plus a ceiling fan definitely helped.

I have had to do without air conditioning, and it really stinks. I have used the fans, and even went so far as to use a cooler full of ice behind the fan to pull some of the cool air off of the melting ice. I am glad to have my air conditioning working this summer, especially since the temperature has been around 110 degrees here for the last couple of days, and that is without the heat index.

I grew up with no AC. We lived in an area that there was minimum wind. Actually it seem like there was no wind. What worked with for us is we purchased the dual window fans. The type that sits in the window. The type we used rotated so we set the fans rotating in different directions and that seemed to cool the rooms down. Another thing that we did was have dark curtains and curtains that are designed to keep the sunlight out. This kept the house nice and cool, so that helped too.