physics girl phd said:
Put ice on a napkin on top of the fan... spread out drooping slightly in front of the fan front... i.e. make a homemade swamp cooler.
Yes, this method (or other similar methods to get cool water into the airstream) work very well, but only over a very limited area - so you can be comfortable watching TV or whatever, but hot as soon as you move somewere else in the house.
A nice basement is a good place to spend summer afternoons.
Keep the sun off of the side of the house. That's a hard improvisation to make, but it is nice to have shade of some kind or another, whether it's trees or a roof over the back deck, or whatever.
The latter is a constant struggle for my house. I have 7 pine trees on one side of the house and
had three large trees in the back yard. Plus there were shrub like trees surrounding the back deck that didn't quite come up high enough to block the view, but did at least reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the house in the late evening. The house stayed cool most of the day and the sun only hit the side of the house for a few hours in the late afternoon (the idea was leave an opening so you could see Pikes Peak from the deck but, unfortunately, the neighbors behind us didn't get the message and a tree in their yard blocks the view without providing any shade for me). You could definitely feel the difference, but at least it was warming up from a cooler temperature.
First came the tree trimming disaster with my youngest son who turned what was supposed to be a small trimming task around the deck into the near destruction of the trees surrounding the deck. It took a few years for them to recover and they're finally back to how they were when we first moved in.
Second came the bug blight that damaged or killed a lot of elm trees along a diagonal swath through the neighborhood. All three elm trees took some damage, but the biggest of them died, which opened up a huge gap for the sun that just won't get filled now. The other two recovered the next year, although you can still see damaged branches in both.
I think I need some kind of awning over the back deck. It would cut the amount of the house exposed to the sun by more than half (the back bedroom on that side is always in shade and takes a lot longer to warm up than the kitchen/dining room).
But trees are the main reason I'd never want to buy a new house. It takes too long for them to grow from saplings.
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