Richard Smith

Fewer than 5% of homes in the UK have air conditioning. And British houses were specifically engineered to trap heat inside. Thick masonry walls, low ceilings, minimal ventilation. When a heatwave hits London, those homes become brick ovens that hold temperature for hours after the sun goes down. A fan pushes air that's the exact same temperature as the room. The cooling happens at your skin. Sweat absorbs roughly 2,400 kilojoules per liter when it evaporates, and airflow velocity across the skin surface determines how fast that evaporation happens. More air movement, faster evaporation, more heat pulled from your body. The bladeless design multiplies this. A small motor in the base pulls air through asymmetrically aligned impeller blades and forces it through a narrow slit shaped like an aircraft wing. Two fluid dynamics principles take over from there. Inducement: the accelerated air creates low pressure behind the output slit, pulling room air through behind it. Entrainment: air surrounding the edges gets dragged along in the same direction. The output is roughly 15 times the volume of air the motor originally pulled in. The horizontal mode is where the engineering gets clever. Tilted flat at bed height, it creates a continuous laminar sheet of moving air across your entire body surface simultaneously. Traditional oscillating fans hit you in pulses. Your skin's boundary layer, the thin film of warm humid air that clings to your body, reforms between each pass. Continuous horizontal airflow strips that boundary layer and keeps it stripped. Every square centimeter of exposed skin is evaporating at maximum rate, all night. Your body needs core temperature to drop about 1°C to initiate sleep. In a house designed to hold heat with no AC and ambient temps above 25°C, a horizontal air blanket across the bed is doing thermodynamically what a £10,000 AC installation would do. For about £150.

BREAKING: The Old Town Hall’s roof has partially collapsed. The South Yorkshire Victorian Society say the section that has collapsed is the roof of the 1866 courtroom. The collapse can be seen on the bottom right of this drone-shot photo, which was shared yesterday on Facebook.

I was confident I could of played a major part this summer for my country after the season I’ve had. I’ve been left shocked and gutted by the decision. I’ve loved nothing more than putting that shirt on and representing my country over the years. I wish the players, all the best this summer 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿