heat Archives

Folks, as I am writing this I’m in the stands of a jiu-jitsu tournament in Kissimmee, Florida, waiting for it to start. My two nieces and sister-in-law flew in from Manila, Philippines, for the young ladies to compete. Of course, we also had to visit the Disney World parks on some of the hottest days of tghe year.

When we took them to the parks, it was 93 to 95 degrees. With the humidity and what have you, the “feels like temperature” according to weather.com ranged from 103 to 110. It was unreal.

It was scorching hot at the Animal Kingdom at 3:03 p.m on 7/22/2023. Whew!!!

I grew up in Michigan. I’m used to occasional 90° days and what have you but we were at the Disney parks and the heat was something else. Before we went, I talked to some colleagues who worked in Fort Myers, Florida, and they recommended cooling towels and handheld portable misting fans.

This was good news to me because years ago we did something very similar and still had the towels. We donated the misting fans we bought way back when several years ago. They worked but they went through the batteries and water pretty fast.

This time we went with slightly larger rechargeable newer generation misting fans we also had a big new solar battery recharger with us. I had one from 5 years ago that I still use but the battery it’s probably starting to reach end of life and I didn’t want to find that out in a park so I bought a new one.

This is a newer generation charger from the one I had bought years ago. The only difference that I could tell was that if you wanted to recharge it with a cable it had a slot for USBC other than that everything else that I liked about the old charger was the same. We use this 3 days straight in parks and those solar panels are big enough to actually work. The little charger should just have one solar panel on top of the battery pack really don’t make a difference. This design with four exposed panels actually can recharge the charger. Whenever we stopped I would open it up and let it top off even though it has a huge battery pack. I used my old one all over the place on trips, hiking, power outages, you name it.

Folks, these three things were a godsend. I kid you not. We kept the cooling towels wet and would occasionally swing them through the air to cool them off and put them back on our necks. The misting fans were running almost non-stop. We had three of them and I really wish I had bought four or even five so each person could have one versus handing them around but we may do with what we had.

By the way, a misting fan works by letting a little water out that becomes a mist and as the mist evaporates it cools off the surrounding air before it hits you. The model we used has three speeds of fan and you can turn the water on or off.

These fans are the second generation from the vendor that sold me the old ones period they have rechargeable batteries via USB-C slot, a larger water reservoir in the top clear plastic and they worked great.

The fans can fold if you need them to be shorter for some reason and you can see the USB slot. The little hand strap is included and we chose to install them given we were going to be walking around the parks.

Refilling is easily done by removing the little rubber plug and putting it under a faucet, drinking fountain or using the little supplied spare water bottle. The little spare bottle is good for one refill and we did use them multiple times when we were waiting in long lines or whatever and notice we had run out of water in a fan.

The fans came with little extra bottles to refill the fans and we would fill both the bottles and the fans as needed at drinking fountains, bathrooms, Etc. They made very efficient use of their batteries and their water – I was actually surprised. The fans ran a great deal maybe at least 4-6 hours and the batteries didn’t need charging. I can’t say how long they would last bu tthey didn’t let us down.

We’ve used the Frogg Togg brand of cooling towels for a number of years. We bought three more so everyone would have one. Basically they are like a man-made Chamois cloth that you get wet under a faucet or whatever. When you twirl it in the air for a few seconds, some of the water evaporates and it cools off the towel. You then put the towel around your neck and it cools you down. When it gets dry, you get it wet again. Dipping it in ice water is an even faster way to cool off.

Summary

If you are reading this and are going to a hot area where you need to cool off but I can’t recommend them enough. Going to the Orlando,Florida, Disney parks at the end of July in such hot weather would have been absolutely brutal without them.

On the Amazon listing for the fan, be sure to get a model that says “Upgraded” or you may get an older model. To be specific, we had the upgraded royal blue model.

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