Currently living in AZ and it’s starting to get hot outside. In the winter, I open the windows and have 3 fans rolling. The fans are placed as follows: ceiling fan overhead, Vornado on the face, and oscillating fan rolling back and forth over the body. Two years ago had an incident where I almost had a heat stroke and have been running hot during workouts ever since.
My pain cave is small. 10 foot x 12 foot room. I blast our AC but the vents in the room are very crappy (aka its always about 5 degrees warmer in that room naturally). I have found that I have failed workouts because I overheat rather than legs giving out. I have been checked out by my doc and cleared to workout hard.
Anyone have some suggestions about the best things to do to cool down the room? I have been looking at portable AC units or a portable swamp cooler. I am not sure we are going to be in the house long-term so thinking a mini-split is too expensive for a potentially short-term house.
Let me know if you wind up trying the swamp cooler idea. I am an AZ native who has lived in both Phoenix and Tucson (living in California now) and was always curious to try that route. Maybe something like this directly in front of the trainer blasting away.
I struggled with cooling when riding a trainer in AZ as well and I can’t imagine that throwing additional AC on the problem would be an efficient solution. I imagine evap cooling with tons of air circulation would be amazing and could pull double duty as a patio cooling solution during the summer months.
If you’ve never used a swamp cooler, it might not work on the muggiest of days during monsoon season (to the extent monsoon season even happens any more) and on the hotter days (105 plus), but feels great otherwise. While living in Tucson (where swamp coolers are much more common than in Phoenix) I had only evap cooling and grew to prefer the feeling of evap cooling to AC on all but the hottest days.
Since you live in AZ, that would be my first suggestion. I ordered one last year…haven’t tried it yet since it arrived in the fall, but since I am in Chicago, I doubt it will help much (if any) since the summers are so humid.
In such a small room, I would think it would help a decent amount…in addition to the usual fan suggestions.