Tips for dealing with hot pets and hot cars

The National Weather Service is predicting a high of 92 degrees in Charlestown tomorrow and has continued its Hazardous Weather and Air Quality Alerts.

Please be careful out there. Also be careful of your companion animals. Hot weather like this can sicken or kill animals just as it does humans. Older, younger, overweight and in dogs, pug-nosed critters are most vulnerable.

They can't change what they wear like humans do, nor can they communicate their distress very well. So it's up to you to make sure they have shade, lots of water and care. Here is a tipsheet of the ten major things you need to do to keep your pets healthy during a heat wave.

I saw an interesting piece on Consumerist.org on how to drastically lower the temperature in a hot car quickly. They even provide a video (in Japanese with Chinese subtitles - but you'll get the drift) on how its done.

As we all know, a car sitting in the sun can turn into a mini-bake oven, easily 20 or more degrees hotter than ambient air. Now, at least one person I know thinks that lowering the air conditioning as far as it will go, and turning the fan on as high as it will go is the best method to cool the car quickly.

Nah-uh. According to Consumerist and demonstrated in the video, the way to do it is to lower one window of the car, then go to the other side of the car. Open and close a door opposite the side with the open window will act like a bellows, drawing out the hot air inside and replacing it with ambient air.

Sure, on a blazing hot day, that's still hot, but the drop in temperature shown in the video is just over 8 degress Celsius or close to 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Click here for the YouTube video.