With summer here and temperatures getting more and more unbearable as the sun heats up everything around us, techniques to keep cool for cheap keep coming up. Some of them can be quite obvious and some of them are counter intuitive, but some of the more effective ones are out of the box and many are unaware of their existence. The one we are talking about today is in the last group and it is a bit strange if you have never considered it, but it needs a sponge and it may change your summer.
There is a whole host of things that can be put in a freezer in order to cool down the environment or your body, after all, cold compresses have been a thing for as long as we have known ice and snow. Most of us have always chosen to put in water bottles or water soaked rags, but sponges have not usually made the cut and that might have been a mistake.
The sponge trick that will revolutionize your summer
For this method of cooling down, it does not matter if the sponge is usually marketed towards cleaning the kitchen and other surfaces or if it is advertised for personal use in the bathroom, both will work about the same. The important thing is that the type of sponge that you use retains moisture well but not water per se, as it will need to we wrung out for the trick to work better and the less moisture it retains the less it will retain the cold.
The trick really is simple, just wet the sponge, make sure it is wrung out so that it does not drip as it defrosts, put it into a plastic bag before getting it into a freezer so that there is no chance of it absorbing any smells and just wait for it to freeze. One frozen this becomes just a tool that you can use to cool yourself, use as an icepack or toss in with other things that you are trying to keep cool in a cooler like drinks or food for a picnic.
Since we have been careful and have wrung it out, the drippage will be minimal as it defrosts and you will not need to worry as much about cleaning after it. The most important thing is that it does not take very long at all to put into the freezer again and it can be reused many times before it starts to disintegrate, which makes it fairly versatile. If you are worried about the environment, choosing a natural loofa or sea sponge may be a better way to have less waste at the end of the summer, as they are compostable and you will not be able to reuse this sponge as a cleaning product due to the repeated frosting and defrosting.
This is not the only way that you can keep cool this summer thanks to your freezer. If you have a small room that you need to cool down, you can use the laws of thermodynamics and freeze a few big plastic water bottles. Then, you can place them around the corners of your room so that when the hot air rises, it meets the bottles and cools down, coming back down again. You can also freeze a wet rag and put it in front of a fan so that the air hits the cold cloth and cools down before making its way around the room or place another frozen water bottle in front of it to achieve the same effect.
Not all tricks will work for everyone, but with a combination of them and a bit of patience, you will have a much more pleasant summer experience.