In the scorching summer, people are seeking ways to cool down. Those who don’t have or don’t want to use air conditioning have to look for alternative methods. In the UK, a civil engineer tried using yogurt to keep the indoors cool and it turned out to be successful.
According to the BBC, a 42-year-old woman named Emma Kent took a unique cooling approach by applying yogurt on her home windows to maintain a cool indoor environment.
Kent was inspired by an experiment conducted at Loughborough University last year. Researchers from the university carried out an experiment on two identical houses, with one house having Greek yogurt with about 10% fat content applied to the windows, while the other house remained untreated.
The results showed that the house with yogurt-coated windows had an average temperature reduction of 0.6 degrees Celsius indoors, and in clear hot weather, the cooling effect could reach up to 3.5 degrees Celsius.
Researchers explained that the yogurt forms a thin film on the window surface. Due to its light color, this film can reflect some of the sunlight radiation. This means that the heat entering through the window is reduced, thus achieving the cooling effect.
Kent mentioned that on a scorching day in June, she used a paint roller to apply 1 kilogram of yogurt on the outside of the windows of her residence in Hitchin. The whole process took about 10 minutes, and the change in indoor temperature was quite noticeable.
As reported by the Mirror, Kent saw the results of her yogurt application the very next day. It did indeed help prevent the accumulation of heat.
Kent noted that the yogurt emitted an odor for about two minutes during application, then dried into an opaque hardened coating without any odor. It did not attract flies or cause any other issues as one might imagine.
She observed that in her attic room where she applied the yogurt, the room temperature dropped by 1.5 degrees Celsius, and the glare and discomfort from sunlight were also reduced. The yogurt layer could last for several weeks until it was washed off.
She expressed satisfaction with the effectiveness of this cooling method, noting it as a cheap and convenient temporary solution, while acknowledging that external shade structures like blinds, sunshades, or awnings would definitely provide better results.
Apart from yogurt application on windows, the BBC also featured other inventive cooling methods employed by people in the UK.
Bethan Earley from Rugby mentioned that she attached aluminum foil blankets outside her windows to keep the indoor space cool. Although the indoors still got warm, the time it took to heat up was significantly longer.
John Turbefield from Chichester covered windows in the hottest rooms of his house with white bedsheets and used emergency survival blankets on the remaining windows.
He highlighted that the emergency survival blankets are designed to reflect heat and come in large sizes suitable for sticking on window frames to reflect most of the light.
In addition to preventing heat from entering indoors through windows, Turbefield also filled several plastic bottles with water, froze them in the fridge, and placed these bottles in front and behind the five electric fans placed around his house.
Alice Jenner, living in the southern coastal region, was unable to find a cool place and sought permission from Marks & Spencer employees to sit in an air-conditioned area in the store for a while. She was fortunate to be allowed to read a book for an hour and a half near the fitting rooms, which greatly helped her as the medication she was taking made it difficult for her to regulate body temperature.
Across the English Channel in France, locals also have a similar cooling method akin to the yogurt application. They apply a white clay powder called “Blanc de Meudon” on windows.
Mixing this powder with water and applying it on the glass forms a translucent, heat-reflecting milky white coating that helps lower indoor temperatures.
These innovative cooling methods show that creativity knows no bounds when it comes to beating the heat during the summer months.