No air con? Here's how to get the most out of your electric fan

By Esme Stallard , Climate and science reporter  and  George Sandeman Published 4 minutes ago Struggling to work and sleep without air con? Your trusty electric fan could help more than you think - but only if you put it in the right place. During the last heatwave, social media was full of advice on how to make your fan work harder - but some of it was conflicting. So, to try to clear up any confusion, we asked experts to separate fact from fiction - from which part of your body to direct your electric fan at, to the best room in the house to put it. Keep windows open or closed? The first thing most people will want to know is if opening a window and using a fan at the same time will cool down their home. It depends, says Becci Taylor, a specialist in building physics at the engineering firm Arup. She says it's best to try to keep the air in your home as cool as possible, so you should keep the windows closed during the daytime, when temperatures outside are likely to be at their highest. She recommends drawing curtains and blinds in rooms facing direct sunlight to stop the air inside heating up. "If the air is cooler than your skin temperature, it's going to cool you down even without sweating," she says. You could place a fan in the coldest room and use that to direct its air towards the rest of your home. Though she advises only doing so if you have a reasonably large or powerful fan. If you have a small fan, then it doesn't particularly matter where in the room you place it on a hot day, says Taylor - provided you keep your windows shut. "You just want it to be near you." At night-time, when the air outside is likely cooler than the air in your home, you should consider opening a window and using a fan to bring in the cooler air. Placing the fan next to the open window and pointing it inwards, towards the rest of the room, can help. But pointing the fan towards the window - to try and blow the hot air in your home outwards, as some social media posts advise - isn't particularly useful as you would not get the cooling benefits of having it pointed towards you. Body or face? Where you should point it Pointing the fan directly at your face may be tempting during periods of extreme heat, says Prof Mike Tipton from the University of Portsmouth. But he says that will only give you the perception of "thermal comfort" - in other words you will feel cooler but you're not actually cooling as much as you might think. A specialist in human and applied physiology, he says a fan should be directed more broadly at your body and, crucially, placed far enough away so it "provides air movement over the [whole] body". That air movement improves the effectiveness of your sweating, he says, which is caused by your body naturally trying to cool itself down. Using a fan this way works particularly well if you combine it with other methods of keeping your body temperature down, adds Prof Tipton, such as keeping your hands cool and taking tepid showers. However,