How to cool a room in a heatwave - we bet you've been using your fan wrong!

Summer 2019 seems set to be a hot one.

With temperatures soaring to 38 degrees this week, how to cool a room? Here's how to stop your home from feeling roasting in these hot summer evenings.

After last year's heatwave, this year we want to be prepared, so we’re all looking for any type of respite possible.

Read more: How to cope with a heatwave: Heat exhaustion and heat stroke symptoms

Electric fans are on order, we have plans to shove our duvets into storage and the supermarket ice cream freezers are set to empty so fast that even the value Choc Ices are gone.

But even though the whole nation will be scrambling for whatever fans are left on the Homebase shelves, it actually may not even be worth it.

While electric fans do a somewhat good job of creating a breeze, if the room is hot anyway they’re essentially just moving the hot air around.

So we’ve discovered a trick on how to cool a room that will keep it cold enough to actually wear PJs at night. It turns out the trick to keeping your room cool with a fan is to face your fan away from you, rather than towards you.

Sounds dubious? Well, it only works if the fan is facing out of an open window. Facing the fan out of the window means that all of the hot air from inside the room is being blown outwards, leaving only cool air in your room.

And it works even better if you have a second window that you can keep open in the evenings to let the cool outside air into the room at the same time. Top this up with another fan in front of that window but facing inwards and you’ve got the makings of a breezy DIY A/C.

Facing the fan away from you will also stop your skin and eyes from drying out with the dry air being blown towards you while you sleep.

A cooler room and dewier skin? Win, win in our eyes.