[Rolebama]

I just could not get to sleep last night, because of the heat. In the end I gave up and decided to have a bit of a drive round with air con on. When I returned, it felt like the house itself was acting as a giant storage heater. Whilst out, I occasionally glanced at the outside thermometer. It was showing 20 C at half past one this morning.

[Drivingforfun]

Is it illegal to be asleep in a car with the engine on (for the aircon)?

My dad told me there was a precedent case with a woman who was considered guilty because she was found sleeping in her car with the heater on because she had been drinking; though was complicated (mitigated) as she'd had an argument with her husband and felt unsafe to go back into her house & it was below zero temp

It's illegal to be asleep while actually driving but I wonder if it's legal to be asleep with the engine running and car stopped... I imagine if not willing to claim charge of the car you'd be admitting to a quitting offence instead?

[Beelzebub]

Having the engine running is illegal. Construction and Use Regs 1986 s98(1): "Save as provided in paragraph (2), the driver of a vehicle shall, when the vehicle is stationary, stop the action of any machinery attached to or forming part of the vehicle so far as may be necessary for the prevention of noise."

That offence is committed at the point the car is stopped, when I imagine the driver would still be awake: if so, I don't thing the sleeping makes any difference. If he/she were in fact asleep when parking, a more serious offence would have been committed.

Alternative views welcome!

[Lily]

@Rolebama when it gets above 30 degrees, I feel tempted to throw an inflatable mattress in the back garden and call it a day. Or is it a night? 😅 Because it is impossible to get a good night's sleep in this weather.

Any tips (preferably ones that don’t involve sleeping in a car and breaking the law) are very welcome!!

[Beelzebub]

Originally Posted by Lily

@Rolebama when it gets above 30 degrees, I feel tempted to throw an inflatable mattress in the back garden and call it a day. Or is it a night? 😅 Because it is impossible to get a good night's sleep in this weather.

Any tips (preferably ones that don’t involve sleeping in a car and breaking the law) are very welcome!!

I'd recommend a ceiling fan.

[Lily]

@Beelzebub thank you! I really do need to get something better than my current fan.

Funny anecdote: I was once on holiday and our room had a ceiling fan. Around 6 am, I was still sleeping when an earthquake started and woke me up.

Strong enough to shake things and move furniture, but not strong enough to cause serious damage, the only thing I remember is looking up and seeing the ceiling fan dancing like crazy, I remember thinking "well, there goes my head".

I think I am OK with ceiling fans now, but for a long time I couldn't stand under one. 😆

[olduser]

Once in a hotel trying to get to sleep, too hot, I started looking at the ceiling fan one blade was bent up wards, there was a mark where it had possibly hit the ceiling as the damage was done. I spent an awful lot of the rest of the night creating stories in my head about how the fan was damaged, by who, and what happened next.☹

When I turned up at the job I was going to in the morning, there was lots of banter, "good night then", and so on?

Another time in a hotel with the family, my wife and I in one room and the children in the next room, another hot night.
After midnight, one of the children came into our room. "we can't sleep dad, the fan makes a noise and we can't turn it off". I go and turn the fan off in their room but about half an hour later, "dad we can't sleep, it's too quiet, can you tell us a story"? I ended up telling them a fantastic story about a hotel room that flew around the world because the ceiling fan was spinning too fast, and it got on the news, so everywhere it landed there were lots of fans waiting to greet them. Corny, well yes but it worked.

[Santa]

We had ceiling fans fitted in all the bedrooms and the living room when the house was rewired about fifteen years ago. The rewire was necessary because the lighting circuit needed an earth for the fans, and our old wiring did not have this in place.

The fans have all been replaced since, by quieter models with remote controls. A great improvement.

[Lily]

@olduser I do wonder why our minds decide to come up with the worst -and usually, gruesome- possible explanations in the middle of the night. 😅

Thanks for sharing such a nice memory. I bet they loved listening to you. I loved when my mom told me stories and I want to carry on with the tradition with my son. For now, he is obsessed with "We are going on a bear hunt". 💛 Have you consider writing something?

@Santa after the week we just had, your house sounds like a fantastic place to be!

[olduser]

Originally Posted by Santa

We had ceiling fans fitted in all the bedrooms and the living room when the house was rewired about fifteen years ago. The rewire was necessary because the lighting circuit needed an earth for the fans, and our old wiring did not have this in place.

The fans have all been replaced since, by quieter models with remote controls. A great improvement.

I wonder if Fantasia is your favourite piece of music Rolebama? 😃

Sorry, I blame the sun, my room is at 26C at the moment.
They have offered a fan but I haven't a spare socket anyway and these are small rooms.

Thinking about a fan, it runs on electricity converted into work in the motor, this work then turns the fan to move air from within the room to elsewhere in the room. The moving air eventually comes to rest due to friction against the none moving air. The moving air may help to evaporate sweat cooling me but where doe's the moisture from the sweat go, it is absorbed by the air but air at a given temperature can only absorb a finite amount of water?

So looking at this overall, the electricity (say 60 watt) suffers loss in the motor windings, (converted to heat) friction in the motor bearings, (converted to heat) losses in the fan, slip + friction + turbulence, (converted to heat) and finally the moving air gives up its energy due to friction. (converted to heat) Overall then, the 60 watt fan is really a 60 watt heater!

It's a funny old world.

[Rolebama]

I think I am right in that the rotation of the fan becomes kinetic energy, which is transferred to, and dissipated by, the movement of the air.
I was taught tthat energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can be converted or dissipated.

[olduser]

Yes, our school physics text books said something similar but our science master got angry if we used dissipation in any calculations. He insisted that dissipation was short hand for, 'cannot be bothered', the energy still exists, it is spread through a large volume/mass and therefore difficult to detect but however small, it add too or took from the energy of the mass.

One way of loosing a science period was to set him off on this tack. He would then have us set up 3 or 4 lab condensers, feeding them with steam, and running the cooling water in series through them, as the cooling water left each condenser we arranged to measure it's temperature. The flow rate was set to condense the steam.
The idea was to detect any changes in temperature of the cooling water.
With normal lab thermometers, after the first condenser, there was no measurable change.
Second condenser, no longer confident there was no change.
Third condenser, now certain there was a change.
Forth condenser, a definite measurable change.

Simple but the steam boiler had a safety valve, which could be made to blow if the gas was too high. The cooling water was from the mains, and would blow cooling pipes off the condensers if tap turned up too high.
So a good time was had by all.

The point that sir was making was, if we reduced the size of the sink and added dissipated heat input we can measure the heat change, therefore the rule, energy cannot be destroyed was validate.

We all thought it was a good laugh but he won in the end, he usually made us write it up as an experiment and of course dry up the lab for the next period.

[Rolebama]

@olduser It sounds like we had the same science teacher. Ours was a great guy. He was very serious about anything related to safety, but we always left his classes with a smile.