121 Degrees and No AC. 16 Ways Old Houses Stayed Cool.

Built to Last — my old-world household manual: https://ezrakaine.com How did people keep a house cool without air conditioning? Summer of 1936, still the hottest this country has ever recorded — a hundred twenty-one degrees in North Dakota, near five thousand dead of the heat. By 1960, air conditioning had still only reached one American home in eight. Most people lived through it, and their houses are why. Doors, windows, ceiling height, the trees. All of it was equipment. These are sixteen ways old houses stayed cool in summer with no AC, no fan and no electric bill, and every one of them still works in a heat wave or a summer power outage today. Number 14 you get wrong every summer: you open the window, and you open the wrong half. Number 16 is the opposite of opening a window, and it's the biggest one here. And number one you can't build at all. Not one of these is a machine that makes cold. Every one is somebody getting out in front of the heat before it arrives. Pick one this week. Free the upper half of a window that's been painted shut since before you owned the house. Open the attic hatch. Or close the place up at sunrise for a week and see what your afternoons do. If your people did any of these, I want to hear it in the comments, and I want the county. Especially if you slept outside as a child. Whose porch was it, and how long did it carry on? Nobody in this house ever beat the heat. They just never once let it get a full day's head start on them. #KeepCool #NoAC #HeatWave #PassiveCooling #StayCool #OldHouse #SummerTips #PowerOutage #Homesteading #OldWaysAreBest #OffGridLiving #LowerElectricBill