The sun is already scorching the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on a late July morning. Even a loose shirt rapidly becomes a sticky mess due to the extreme humidity in the air.
The stroll between air-conditioned museums will become a sweltering ordeal as the heat index reaches a peak of almost 103 degrees later.In the hottest part of the summer travel season, I’m riding my bike with the goal of locating tourists attempting to cool off with a strange device that has become more and more popular in recent years. It takes very little time.
Christa Seger, who is sitting in the shade near the Washington Monument with three of her children, adds, “These are amazing.”
A cooling neck fan is held up by her. It has the appearance of a space-age horseshoe, but it rests around your neck and blows air into your head and ears through dozens of vents. To aid in heat dissipation, certain models, such as Seger’s, also feature metal panels.
When Seger, who is traveling from Denver, comments, “I can’t believe how cold they get,”
Back in Colorado a few days earlier, Seger purchased two fans for roughly $25 each.
“They last somewhere between 4 to 6 hours on a full charge,” she explains. She bought a battery pack to keep the fans charged since she thought they could be useful for her kid while they march from Smithsonian museums to historic structures and the occasional ice cream truck.
“She thought it was fantastic yesterday. It was quite beneficial to her,” Seger explains.
These fans can go into the hundreds of dollars. Today, though, I’m experimenting with a very simple model. Air begins to whoosh past my neck and ears as it turns on. There’s a pleasant breeze. Is it actually cooling me down, though?
How the neck fans work
Think about the primary method our bodies employ to stay cool: perspiration.
Dr. Adam Watkins of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock states that “the heat of vaporization gets pulled from that sweat into the atmosphere,” “So you actually are losing heat that way.”
However, that isn’t always sufficient. According to Watkins, the number of heat exposure cases at the emergency room where he works has increased by 25% this summer compared to last year. He claims that this tendency has been increasing for the past ten years.
People may turn to a personal cooling fan during extreme heat waves. However, their effectiveness has its limitations.
According to Cecilia Kaufman, director of occupational safety at the University of Connecticut’s Korey Stringer Institute, “the biggest thing is being able to evaporate the sweat off your body.”
By accelerating the airflow over your skin, a fan can theoretically improve your body’s evaporative cooling process.
“The problem is when it’s hot and humid, the sweat does not evaporate as quickly off your skin,” Kaufman explains. “So that takes away your body’s ability to really cool.”
Surface area is key to effective cooling
A large amount of skin must be exposed for evaporation to be effective.
According to Chris Tyler, an environmental physiology researcher at the University of Roehampton in London, “the best way to cool down would be basically to take all your clothes off, expose the entire body to the air, and let all of the sweat evaporate.” “But you’d get arrested,” he continues, laughing, “so that’s not a recommendation.”
A neck fan, on the other hand, can only influence a tiny area of your body. Even if they are blowing humid air, using one could feel pleasant. This is partly due to the fact that the face and neck are extremely sensitive to heat due to the large number of thermal receptors on them.
According to Tyler, we shouldn’t consider these neck fans to be a form of therapy in general.
“It’s a bit like playing sport with a painkilling injection,” he jokes. “The problem still exists. Simply said, you can’t notice it for a while.
Because of this, Tyler and Kaufman claim that the little fans probably serve more to make us feel cooler than to really reduce our body temperature, which could increase the possibility that someone will overexert themselves without understanding the effects of the heat.
However, they also point out that studies are still being conducted on techniques to cool the head and neck and on the use of cooling clothing, such as hats and neck gaiters, in hot conditions.
Taking a neck fan for a test whirl
When I initially put my fan on down at the National Mall, I’m a little dubious. The air is still and hot in the middle of the day, after all. The flags surrounding the foot of the Washington Monument are listless and drooping. (Flags, I feel you.)
However, this small device does seem to make my time riding and walking a little more tolerable as it begins to blast air on my head and ears. I know that with this heavy plastic gadget around my neck, I might appear to be an extra in a low-budget science fiction film. However, it doesn’t feel overly burdensome or restrictive. In addition, even though I don’t have a lot of hair of any kind—let’s face it—many of the fans are bladeless, which makes them less prone to tangle.
I roll down to the Lincoln Memorial, past the Reflecting Pool. Along the way, I’ve noticed that the motor noise can be distracting when the neck fan is running at full speed. I meet Jeffrey Pagulong, a visitor from Boston, at the base of the monument steps. He wears neck fans, as does his 12-year-old son Christof.
Pagulong remarks, “It’s really hot,” as he stands in the scorching sun. He continues by saying, “And wearing this fan kind of helps a lot, it cools down your head, so it helps” to reduce the heat from walking.
I inquire if he finds the sound bothersome.
“The noise level is acceptable. The fan is audible, but it’s okay. You know, the noise is a lot better than the heat. The heat is too much for me, but I can handle the noise.
My casual observation of the Mall is that more individuals are wearing traditional parasols than cutting-edge ones. A street vendor has been selling umbrellas in yellow and red for $10, and it turns out that business has been good. One customer was Galilee Maldonado, 16, visiting from Texas.
“I bought it yesterday from a lady, but I really liked it,” she says.
The parasol might not help much to cool her core, like a neck fan. But it’s making Maldonado, who says she was surprised by the heat in Washington, feel better.
“It’s helping me cope with this weather,” she says.
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