01 May, 2013

Hot Summer Afternoon in Pune

Last few days have been incredibly hot in Pune with temperatures reaching 41 degree Celsius. Right now as I type in this blog post, it is 41 degrees and it feels like it. Just to give you some perspective if body temperature goes above 40 degrees, you will get at heat stroke. It means right now my body's temperature control mechanism and ceiling fan (and power supply) is working OK.

There are very few things that you can do when it is hot, dry, dusty and everything just looks tired under incessant energy from that big shiny ball at 149 million KMs away from here.

Some of the things I have been doing since morning are:
  • I wonder how they measure temperatures, I mean do they measure it in shadow or in sun shine?
  • I wish that my company office had more trees so that everyday at office I could park my car in shadow, so that when I use the car in the evening it does not feel like sitting in an oven.
  • I did some research (Google based) on use of tree shadows to lower the temperatures of areas around homes and offices.
  • Protect precious things: I don't use air conditioning at home, so I just put some wet cloths on the most precious thing in my home: my computer. If heat brings it down, it is an emergency for me.
  • Good things: I have tried to put a good spin on hot weather. With such high temperatures and wind, I have most powerful cloth drier in the world. Washed clothes are dried in 15 minutes. Thermo-regulation for computers.
  • Good things: Pune climate has advantage of wind from west that helps to reduce the temperatures in the evening. Make sure that you open windows of you house and let wind take away the heat (called as convective heat transfer).
  • Good things: Many places in Pune have good density of trees, not to mention river (they are very small) that flows through, helps cool down the air. However if "new citizens" of Pune are not sensitive to this fact, we could slowly loose this.
  • I wonder what happened to those "solar stoves" (called Suryapethi) that I saw in my childhood.  Using those stoves (flitted with lenses) cooking rice took few minutes.