As the UK swelters through some of its hottest June nights on record, people have been turning to increasingly creative methods to stay cool. From foil blankets taped to windows to bed sheets chilled in the freezer, the nation’s DIY hacks are as varied as they are resourceful.
Bethan Earley, from Rugby, covers the outside of her windows with foil blankets before closing them. “The house does still get warm,” she told BBC Your Voice, “but it takes much longer to warm up.”
“As UK swelters through hottest June nights on record, people share creative DIY hacks to stay cool.”
John Turbefield, 38, from Chichester, has gone even further. He placed white bed sheets on the windows of the hottest rooms, then bought a pack of survival blankets – typically used to help athletes regulate body temperature – for the rest. “They’re designed to reflect heat and they are large, so they’re ideal for taping to the window frame to reflect most of the light back out,” he says. He also stocks his freezer with two-litre plastic bottles of water, which he positions in front of and behind the five fans he has running around the house. But he warns others that large bottles may take a couple of days to freeze.
The UK Health Security Agency advises people to open windows only when the air feels cooler outside than inside, and to switch off non-essential electronics like TVs, laptops and chargers, which generate heat.
For Stephanie Reed, 39, from Chorley, staying cool is vital because extreme heat triggers her epilepsy. At night she wets a hand towel and lays it across the end of her bed, then sleeps with her feet and ankles on it. “It helps to regulate body temperature and it does stay cool all night,” she says. She also sprinkles her seven-year-old daughter’s bed sheet with water and freezes it for about half an hour before bedtime – long enough to be cool for falling asleep on, but not long enough to freeze solid.
Gordon Cooper, 73, from High Wycombe, takes a similar approach: he hangs a wet bath towel in his bedroom and places a fan nearby to cool the room. Others have found relief by changing where they sleep. During the last heatwave, Anabelle Holschuh, 30, found it so hard to sleep in her attic that she moved to a cooler part of her home – a reminder that sometimes the simplest solution is the most effective.