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Our house is pretty well designed for passive cooling - so it does
well until temperatures rise over 38 degrees. Then we're stuffed. Or rather
par boiled.

But we don't have air con - so in the heat wave of the past few days

I've been looking around for ideas to keep cool when you could fry
eggs on the footpath outside. Heres some of the ideas we tried:

1. Pin up a bed sheet or blankets outside your windows. The key is to
do it outside rather than inside - you want to stop the heat before it
enters the your house - not afterwards. Also try to leave a gap
between the barrier (sheet, blanket etc) and the wall or glass of your
home - that way you'll get less heat transfer. Here's a guy who used
$5 reflective blankets to keep his home cool (just make sure you don't
position the blanket so that it bounces the heat somewhere you don't
want it - you might end up frying your garden).

2. Put a wet blanket over the top of the car and cover all the windows
(this didn't harm my duco at all - but try it at your own risk).

3. Cut the bottoms off water bottles, dig them neck down in the soil
beside sensitive plants and fill with water - this should drain into
the soil gradually throughout the day. You can cover plants likely to
burn with bed sheets too - pick a light colour to reflect heat. Of
course you can always take the attitude of my friend Tim, and see days
like Friday as a form of natural selection - let the heat kill of the
tender ones, and replace them with some tougher plants.

and the best one of all...

4. Run away. Go stay in a 5 star hotel with a pool and air con. We did
this on Friday night, and it was fantastic. I figure that the hotel is
cooling the whole building anyway - and for the 5-6 nights of the year
that are so ridiculously hot that good passive design and fans can't
cope - it's a better option than shelling out for an air conditioning
system which is just going to contribute to pushing up peak demand and
blackouts.

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