- 2 months ago
🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach:
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A hundred and twenty degrees, three days running, and not a soul with air conditioning to hide behind — and they came through it fine. Cool enough to sleep, cool enough to work, their houses bearable through the worst of it. Not by luck, and not by suffering it out, but by knowing the old ways of meeting a fierce heat that most folks today have clean forgotten. In this video I give you those ways — the whole of how a body keeps cool through a brutal heat wave with no machine at all, for almost nothing.
I am Elias, and on this Lancaster County place we keep no tie to the public power company — which means no grid air conditioning, ever. So when the heat comes, and it comes fierce some years, we meet it the way my grandparents met it and theirs before them. I made you a video already on placing a fan to move the air, so I will not tread that ground twice. What I give you here is the rest, and to my mind the better part — how you cool your own body, how you cook without turning your house into an oven, and the old summer wisdom that goes well past any fan.
In this video:
✔️ The one rule th
https://eliasyoder.com
A hundred and twenty degrees, three days running, and not a soul with air conditioning to hide behind — and they came through it fine. Cool enough to sleep, cool enough to work, their houses bearable through the worst of it. Not by luck, and not by suffering it out, but by knowing the old ways of meeting a fierce heat that most folks today have clean forgotten. In this video I give you those ways — the whole of how a body keeps cool through a brutal heat wave with no machine at all, for almost nothing.
I am Elias, and on this Lancaster County place we keep no tie to the public power company — which means no grid air conditioning, ever. So when the heat comes, and it comes fierce some years, we meet it the way my grandparents met it and theirs before them. I made you a video already on placing a fan to move the air, so I will not tread that ground twice. What I give you here is the rest, and to my mind the better part — how you cool your own body, how you cook without turning your house into an oven, and the old summer wisdom that goes well past any fan.
In this video:
✔️ The one rule th
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00120 degrees. That is the heat some folks faced not long ago, three days running, and not a one of
00:07them with air conditioning to hide behind. And do you know, they came through it fine, cool enough to sleep,
00:14cool enough to work, their houses bearable through the worst of it.
00:17Not by luck, and not by suffering it out, but by knowing the old ways of meeting a heat that
00:24most folks today have clean forgotten. I want to give you those ways today, the whole of how a body
00:30keeps cool through a brutal heat wave with no machine at all. Because you may need them, and because they
00:38cost you almost nothing.
00:39I am Elias, and on this Lancaster County place, we keep no tie to the public power company, which means
00:47no grid air conditioning, not ever, summer in and summer out. So when the heat comes, and it comes fierce
00:55some years, we meet it the way my grandparents met it, and theirs before them.
01:00I made you a video already on placing a fan to move the air, and opening the house to the
01:06night, and I will not tread that ground twice. You can find it if you want the fan and the
01:12air flow of it.
01:13What I want to give you here is the rest, and to my mind, the better part. How you cool
01:18your own body, how you cook without turning your house into an oven, and the old summer wisdom that goes
01:25well past any fan.
01:27Quick word before I go further. The old methods my family uses, there is more of it than fits in
01:34any one video. I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long
01:41version. If you want it, it is there. I will not mention it again.
01:45My grandmother could feel the turn of the day's heat the way some folks feel rain coming in their knees.
01:52By mid-morning, her shades were down without her seeming to think about it, the house gone dim and cool
01:58and quiet against the climbing sun, and not till the evening cooled would she go round throwing it all open
02:05again to the night.
02:06Her hot cooking went out to the summer kitchen, so the house never felt it. The butter and milk stayed
02:13down in the spring house over the cold running water, and on the worst evenings, she would hand each of
02:19us children a cold, wet cloth for the back of the neck and send us down to the creek before
02:25bed.
02:25I thought nothing of any of it as a boy. It was just how a summer was lived. Only grown
02:31did I understand she was working a whole art of keeping cool that her mother had taught her, an art
02:38with no machine in it anywhere, and it is that art I mean to hand on to you now.
02:43Start with the one rule the whole thing hangs on, and it is so simple folks overlook it. Shut the
02:50house against the day, open it to the night. Through the hot hours, when it is hotter out than in,
02:57you button the place up tight, every window and door, holding yesterday's cool inside.
03:03But shutting the windows is only half, for the sun through the glass is what truly bakes a house, so
03:10you must darken it too. The blinds drawn, the curtains pulled, and where you have neither, a sheet or a
03:17quilt tacked over the worst windows will do the job.
03:20Mind the west windows above all, for the low afternoon sun comes through them like fire laid right at the
03:28hottest time of day, and the east ones in the morning after, while the north windows trouble you least of
03:34all, and the south ones you can shade with an overhang.
03:37Learn which of your windows the sun actually strikes through the day, and guard those hardest, for there is no
03:45sense darkening a window the sun never reaches while leaving the blazing one bare.
03:50Better still is to stop that sun outside the glass, an awning, a shutter, a shade, anything that turns the
03:57sun back before it ever passes through, for once it is through the glass, the heat is already yours to
04:04deal with.
04:05Then, come evening, you wait. You do not throw the windows wide the moment the sun drops, for the air
04:11out there may still be hotter than your guarded indoors, and you would only undo your day's work.
04:17You wait until the night has truly cooled below your rooms, often well after dark, and then you open everything,
04:24and let the cool flood through till dawn, and shut it all up again early, before the new day's heat
04:31can climb.
04:32Shut and shade by day, open by night, in that daily rhythm, and you have won half the battle before
04:40you have done one thing more.
04:42And there is more to a house holding its cool than just the air in it. The very walls and
04:49floors drink up the cool of the night and hold it, then give it back slowly through the hot day,
04:55which is why a heavy old stone house or a deep cellar stays cool when a flimsy modern box bakes.
05:03So the longer and wider you open the house to the cool of the deep night, the more that cool
05:10soaks into the bones of the place, and the longer it carries you through the next day's heat.
05:16The small hours before dawn are the coolest of all, so do not shut up too soon in your eagerness.
05:23Let that coolest air of the night fill the house right up to morning, and only then close it against
05:30the day.
05:31There is a small habit that goes with this, and saves you more than you would guess, and it is
05:37to mind your doors on the worst days.
05:40Every time a door swings open in that heat, a great gush of the hot outside comes flooding in to
05:47spoil the cool you have hoarded.
05:49So on a brutal day, you go in and out as little as you can, and when you must, you
05:56do it clever.
05:57I have heard of families coming home from the store on such a day with a plan worked out.
06:03Every soul grabs an arm load at the car, and they open that door but the once, all of them
06:10through together quick, and shut it fast behind,
06:13rather than a dozen lazy trips, each bleeding the cool away.
06:18And if a door must be used through the day, use the one on the shaded north side, where the
06:25air against it is coolest.
06:27A small thing, but on the hottest day, small things are the whole of it.
06:33And the same goes for any other way the hot air sneaks in, or the cool leaks out.
06:38A door left ajar, a gap under a sill, the attic baking overhead and pouring its heat down through the
06:47ceiling.
06:47The old houses were built with deep porches that shaded the walls and windows from the high sun,
06:54and a vented attic or a cupola to let the trapped heat escape out the top, rather than press down
07:01into the living rooms.
07:02For the heat rises and gathers up high, and wants a way out.
07:07If your upstairs or your attic bakes, getting that hot air vented out the top does the whole house a
07:15kindness.
07:16Now here is the heart of it, the thing I would have you remember above all else, and it is
07:22a turning of how you think.
07:24You do not, in truth, need to cool your whole house to be comfortable.
07:29You need only to cool your own body.
07:33And that is a far smaller, cheaper, easier thing.
07:37Think on it, the machine labors to chill every cubic foot of air in a great house, all of it,
07:44just to comfort the few souls living in it, which is a fearful waste.
07:49But cool the one body that matters, your own, and you are comfortable while the house may stay warm as
07:57it likes.
07:58And cooling the body is the simplest thing in the world.
08:01You take a cloth, wet it, chill it in cold well water, or the cold of your cellar, and lay
08:09it on the back of your neck.
08:10You will marvel how fast the whole of you cools.
08:14The neck is the place because the blood runs shallow there, close under the skin,
08:20and the cool passes straight into the blood and is carried round your whole body in a moment.
08:25The wrists are such a place, too, and under the arms, the spots where the blood runs near the surface.
08:33Lay your cool cloth there.
08:36Keep a few of them chilling and trade them out as they warm against you,
08:40for one cloth alone warms quick against your skin and loses its use,
08:46but three or four in rotation keep you cool as long as you please.
08:50On a night too hot to sleep, a cold cloth at your neck or laid on your chest with a
08:57fan playing across it
08:58will carry you off to sleep where you tossed before, and there is no mystery in why it works.
09:05It is the very thing your own sweat does, for when water dries off a surface, it carries the heat
09:11away with it.
09:12That is how the body cools itself, and a damp cloth in moving air is only that same cooling lent
09:20a hand.
09:21I learned it young, laboring in a place hot as a forge, where a wet rag round the neck was
09:28the one way to last the day,
09:30and the old hands in the hayfields knew it long before me,
09:34a wet kerchief at the throat through the burning work of the harvest.
09:39One honest thing to know about it, this evaporating cooling works best in a dry heat,
09:46where the air is thirsty and pulls the moisture off you fast,
09:50and it works less well in a heavy, wet heat, where the air is already so full of water it
09:57can take little more,
09:58which is the same reason a dry 100 degrees is bearable and a wet 90 is misery.
10:05In the dry country, a wet cloth and a breeze will cool you wonderfully.
10:11In the soaking humid country, it helps less, and there you lean harder on the shade and the cool cellar
10:19and the moving air.
10:21Know which heat you fight, and you will know which tools serve you best.
10:27So, light, loose clothing, cool water on the wrists and the feet, a wet cloth at the neck,
10:34and you are a comfortable man in a warm house having spent next to nothing.
10:39That is the old way of it.
10:41You tend the body, not the building.
10:44And it is a freeing thing to learn, for it means the heat holds far less power over you than
10:50you feared.
10:51You are not at the mercy of a machine that might fail you or a bill you can scarce pay.
10:57You carry your own comfort in a wet cloth and a bit of knowing wherever you are.
11:04The next thing folks never think of is the furnace standing in the middle of their own kitchen.
11:10Your stove.
11:12Your oven.
11:12In the dead of summer, baking and boiling all day pours heat into your house and holds it there for
11:20hours.
11:21And on a hot day, that is the last thing you want, however welcome it would be come January.
11:28So the rule through the heat is, do not cook your house hot.
11:34Where you can, cook by the gentle, slow ways that do not blast out heat.
11:40And if you must run the big heat of the oven, do it of an evening, never the morning.
11:46For heat laid into the house at morning, bakes there all the long day.
11:52While heat made at evening, you can carry straight back out the open windows into the cooling night.
11:59But the finest answer, and the old one, is to put the cooking out of the house entirely in the
12:05hot months.
12:06The old farmhouses had their summer kitchen for just this, a little outbuilding or a porch set apart,
12:15where all the hot weather cooking and the canning was done, so the heat never came near the rooms where
12:21the family lived and slept.
12:23You can keep the same wisdom in your own way, by cooking outdoors, a fire pit, a grill, an outdoor
12:32hearth set in the shade or the breeze,
12:34where you cook your meals and even bake in a Dutch oven over coals without sending one degree of it
12:42into your house.
12:43The canning, especially the old folks, took outside, for putting up the summer harvest means hours of boiling kettles in
12:52the hottest stretch of the year,
12:54enough to make an oven of any kitchen.
12:57And do not forget the cool suppers of summer, either, the cold meats and breads, the salads, the ripe fruits
13:06of the season,
13:06for a cold plate on a hot night is no hardship and heats the house not at all.
13:14The old people ate light and cool in the heat and saved their heavy baking for the cold of the
13:20year,
13:21which is both the wholesome way and the wise one.
13:24Set yourself up a proper outdoor spot for it, a table to work at and your fire or your colds
13:32in the shade,
13:33and bring everything you need out at once so you are not forever running back into the house and letting
13:40the heat in each trip.
13:42There is a real pleasure in it besides, cooking out under the trees of a summer evening with the breeze
13:49moving,
13:50the family about, rather than shut sweating over a hot stove indoors.
13:56The thing that began as a way to spare the house turns out to be the sweeter way to pass
14:02a hot evening anyhow.
14:04Some of the best cooling is the kind you plant and wait years for,
14:08and that is a shade tree set on the hot side of the house,
14:12the west and the south, where the afternoon sun is cruelest.
14:17Such a tree will shade your roof and walls from the worst of the heat,
14:21better than any machine ever made.
14:24And here is the old cleverness in it.
14:26You choose a tree that drops its leaves in winter.
14:30Then in summer it stands thick with leaves,
14:34and throws its shade across your house through the blazing afternoons.
14:38But come winter it has shed them bare and lets the low sun through to warm you when you want
14:45warming.
14:46The one tree cools you in July and warms you in January.
14:51It is the longest lasting comfort there is,
14:55planted once and shading your house and your grandchildren's house for a hundred years.
15:01It takes its time to grow, so the wisdom is the old wisdom.
15:06The best day to have planted it was long ago,
15:09and the next best day is this one.
15:13And it need not be only a tree,
15:15for a vine will do the same and faster.
15:19The old climbing things,
15:21trained up over a sunny porch or a trellis by a hot window,
15:25leafing out thick to shade you through summer,
15:28and dying back to bear in the winter to let the sun return.
15:32A grapevine, a hardy climber over an arbor by the south wall,
15:37gives you shade in one or two seasons where a tree wants ten,
15:42and fruit besides.
15:44The old people grew their vines over the porch for just this,
15:48cool green shade in the heat,
15:51and bare sticks letting the winter sun through.
15:55And there is always water which cools a body like nothing else on earth.
16:00A creek, a pond, a stock tank,
16:03the cold of a deep cellar you can step down into,
16:07a basin of cold well water for your feet of an evening.
16:11The feet cool the whole of you near as well as the neck,
16:15so a body soaking his feet in cold water on the porch of a summer evening
16:20cools all over more than you would think.
16:24Seek the cool low places on the worst days,
16:28for the cellar and the shaded north of the house
16:31and the deep shade of a tree run far cooler
16:34than the open yard or the upstairs where the heat gathers and sits.
16:40Live low and shaded when it is fierce.
16:43Rest in the coolest room,
16:45and sleep downstairs or out on the porch if your upstairs bakes,
16:51as many an old family did,
16:53carrying the bedding down to the cool on the worst nights
16:56and thinking nothing of it.
16:59And do your hard work,
17:01if you have work that must be done,
17:03in the cool of the early morning or the evening,
17:06and rest through the worst heat of the afternoon.
17:09For the old farmers were up and laboring at first light,
17:13and took their ease in the shade through the burning middle of the day,
17:18working again as it cooled toward evening.
17:21That is plain sense,
17:24to spend yourself when it is cool
17:26and spare yourself when it is hot,
17:29rather than laboring through the furnace of noon
17:32and wearing yourself down.
17:34The country that knows real heat
17:36has always lived that way,
17:39early and late,
17:40and resting in the shade between.
17:43I will say a plain word, too,
17:46on why all this got forgotten,
17:48and it is not a wicked plot,
17:51only the plain way of things.
17:53There is money to be made selling a machine
17:56and the power to feed it all summer long,
17:59and none at all to be made
18:01teaching a man to shade his windows
18:04and wet his neck
18:05and cook out of doors.
18:07So the machine got all the telling
18:10and the talking and the selling,
18:12year upon year,
18:14until folks half believe
18:15a body cannot live through a hot day without one.
18:19But that is plainly false,
18:21for whole generations lived through worse heat
18:24than most of us will ever feel,
18:27with not a machine among them.
18:29And they did not perish.
18:31They kept cool
18:32and slept sound
18:34and went about their work
18:36by nothing but the knowing.
18:39The knowing was simply allowed to slip away
18:42because no one stood to profit
18:44by keeping it alive.
18:46So that is the whole
18:48of meeting a fierce heat
18:49without a machine.
18:51Shut and shade the house through the day
18:54and open it to the night
18:56and guard your doors.
18:58Cool your own body before your house,
19:00a cold wet cloth at the neck and the wrists
19:03and let the drying of it carry your heat off,
19:06a fan playing over you at night.
19:09Keep your cooking heat out of the house,
19:11cooking cool or late
19:13or, best of all,
19:15out of doors the old summer kitchen way.
19:18Plant your shade tree for the long years
19:20and go to the water
19:22and the cool low places
19:23when the heat is at its worst.
19:26Do these
19:27and you will be a cool and easy man
19:29through the fiercest summer,
19:31your house bearable,
19:33your sleep sound,
19:34and your bill
19:35a small fraction of your neighbors
19:37who never learned
19:38there was another way.
19:40I would dearly like to hear
19:42how the heat treats you
19:44where you live
19:45and how you fight it.
19:46Write me below
19:47and tell me how hot your summers run,
19:50whether your nights cool off kindly
19:52or stay close and warm,
19:54and whether you will give the cold cloth at the neck
19:57a try the next sleepless hot night.
20:00Tell me what part of the country you write from
20:03while you are at it,
20:04for the dry heat and the wet
20:06are two different beasts to fight,
20:08and I learn a great deal
20:10from where you all sit when you write.
20:12I have it in mind
20:14to show you next
20:15a good deal more
20:16about cutting that summer power bill down,
20:19well past the cooling alone,
20:21all the quiet little ways
20:23a house bleeds money and power
20:25through the hot months,
20:27and how the old people
20:28kept their costs down near to nothing
20:31through a long summer.
20:33Through every brutal summer that ever was,
20:36before there was a machine to run from it,
20:38folks shaded their houses
20:40and wetted their necks
20:42and carried their cooking out of doors
20:44and planted their trees,
20:46and they came through cool and whole
20:49and unafraid of the heat.
20:51There is a quiet strength
20:53in knowing the summer cannot beat you,
20:55that you can meet the worst it brings
20:58with your own two hands
20:59and a little inherited sense,
21:01and never once depend on a machine
21:04or dread the bill it brings.
21:07The people who built this country
21:09with their hands knew that,
21:10and we are only just starting to remember it.