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My room is too hot
Space Pickle
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hello, I am a musician and living in the city I can't play at home so I rent a small, crappy room in which to rock out at all hours without having the police called. However, being small and crappy (170 square feet) it gets hot fast, and when the building turns the heat on in the winter it gets *really* hot. Like, I'm taking off my shirt and pants and practicing drums in my underwear. There's two vents in the ceiling, I assume one is the intake and the other the...outtake? I don't know what it's called. Could I just block off the vent that pumps warm air into my room to keep things cooler?
There is no thermostat or anything in the room, and I'm thinking of adding a humidifier to help cool things down. In addition to my own comfort I want to move some acoustic instrument into the space but I'm worried about them getting wrecked due to the heat. I will talk to the super but I doubt they will care.
There is no thermostat or anything in the room, and I'm thinking of adding a humidifier to help cool things down. In addition to my own comfort I want to move some acoustic instrument into the space but I'm worried about them getting wrecked due to the heat. I will talk to the super but I doubt they will care.
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1. Honeywell Zeta ( https://honeywellaircomfort.com/zeta/ )- A portable air conditioner. This thing does not spit out hot heat in one end: you fill it with water and it will gush a ton of cool air. It has strengths 1, 2, 3, and a night time setting that is quieter than 2 but more powerful than 1. I use this in my home office in the Texas heat, so I'm only cooling one room instead of my entire apartment. This thing is sweet. I imagine you will fill it once in the morning and once before bed time. When you hear it gurgling, that means its running out of water.
2. Chilipad, a more expensive purchase, you lay it on top of your mattress (but underneath a regular bedsheet, fill it with distilled water and it will transfer your body heat to a radiator. I loved it but I'm handing it down to a sibling, as I've purchased an entire smartbed.
An "air cooler" is only a good idea for a limited number of circumstances, but they do release more moisture into the air so if OP is looking for a humidifier they kind of serve as one...
Technology Connections did a very informative video about the so-called "portable air conditioners" aka "swamp coolers," and another one on humidifiers.
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I assume it has ventilation but it's a windowless music dungeon.
If the ventilation is what you described in your OP that probably rules out covering vents. Maybe less so if the door isn't air tight but the kind of room you seem to be describing leads me to think that blocking off vents isn't a great idea.
It also means a swamp cooler is really only ok if you're going to be there for a pretty limited amount of time because eventually humidity becomes worse than heat if you're getting too warm because of physical activity. If the air gets too humid even sweating stops helping much.
If there's no windows your best bet is probably something incredibly low tech.
And I mean low tech like a large tub of ice, a lot of duct tape, and a box fan.
Like dispatch.o said figuring out the relative humidity might help you decide on a course of action but at the end of the day either something in the room needs to absorb the heat or the heat has to leave the room. There's really not much wiggle room there afaik.
Here are two pictures: The picture with the uncapped metal vent is what I assume the air in/out is, although I'll try to figure that out next time I'm there, but there are also two identical vents above the door. All 4 vents go into the ceiling, they don't lead out into the hall or other another room.
Short of capping those diffusers off there won't be an easy way to keep the room cool. You'll want to keep the intake open and ideally have at least a little air coming from the system since it is likely circulating in fresh air from outside.
Thank you, as a southern swamp dweller I have no grasp on household humidity control. That said, the Zeta is good for my purposes, not necessarily the OP.
Maybe I will look into dehumidifiers.
You can use a humidifier, just set it to like 40-50% humidity.
The issue with swamp coolers is they keeping pumping out more humidity the longer they run. 40-50% humidity is generally fine. I actually keep my room at 45% in the winter because I'm not much further south than you (North Dakota) and low humidity in the winter is murder on my sinuses.
Once you hit about 65% though it starts to feel muggy and from that point on sweat has an increasingly hard time evaporating until you hit about 90% where it more or less stops evaporating and becomes far less effective at cooling you off. Think playing drums but with sweat flying off of your arms. Awesome in a music video less so in an enclosed practice space :P
Any chance you could talk to the landlord and see if the rooms do actually have a central HVAC control room where maybe the temp could be adjusted? It's a long shot but from what you're describing for the vents it may not be entirely impossible.
Anyways my hygrometer came today so I'll fire that up this evening and see what the deal is.
One central HVAC for an entire apartment building fucking sucks. Washington DC was my first time experiencing one.
In the winter, all air conditioning was changed exclusively to heat, and in the spring, all heat was changed to air conditioning. That makes sense until you find out you don't get a say about when that transition happens. The heat of the autumn and spring when all I had a heat was a nightmare. Never again.
Yeah especially with apartments if it has central air but it's not central air for each unit it's basically a nightmare.
However a friend in high school had a foster parent that was living in an apartment with an actual central air unit specific to his apartment that allowed for settings in each room and it took exactly one sleepover with our mutual friends (though sleepover feels inaccurate because it was actually a drink caffeinated sugar water, possibly with baby amounts of booze, and watch premium cable channels/play video games until we all passed out) for us to all mutually decide that's were doing this at his place from now on.
Until a month went by and his foster parent was like no, you cannot all live here every weekend, you monsters. Also you shits owe me a fifth of vodka.
The vents over your door may be louvres to keep the air pressure between rooms constant.
It’s tough to say without more info.
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Unfortunately yes. Music rehearsal joints would rather rent rooms out by the hour to guys who just want to jam, instead of doing monthly leasing. My spot is really close to the downtown core, I'm actually amazed that it hasn't been bulldozed for condos yet. Since covid started I've noticed more vacant rooms in my building, but under normal circumstances it's really hard to even get a space. I'm fortunate to have this room, quite honestly.
So last night the temperature was 29 C and relative humidity around 20%. I'm going to purchase one of those programmable humidifiers and see what that does. I'll also try to figure out which vent is blowing hot air in.