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Comment by darkpuma | Hacker News Reader

> "[fans don't] help when it gets above the 98.6 degree body temperature."

I'm not sure about that. It would be true with a spherical cow, but I don't think it's true when real people are involved because people sweat to cool down. I believe that phase change of water evaporating off your skin should continue to cool you down no matter how hot it gets, like a swamp cooler in Arizona. A fan should help this by rapidly replacing the humid air around you with more dry air.

(However my understanding is that evaporation cooling stops working once humidity hits 100%)

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I would say that if the fan is used as part of a ventilation scheme, yes the dehumidification, and moving air displacing hot air coming from your skin is helpful. If you're in a closed room you just get the benefit of moving air, which tends to be marginal.

As for humidity, the evaporative cooling from sweat should aid cooling until you hit 100% humidity (at which point sweat can't evaporate). But we're just talking about the mechanics of cooling here. If we're talking about human thermal comfort, which has been (with some debate) empirically quantified, thermal comfort only exists within a narrow band of temperature and humidity. So for example, a person sitting indoors clothed with typical summer clothing, will only be comfortable at a temperature of 27C at a humidity of approx 55% or lower (see this tool for more info: http://comfort.cbe.berkeley.edu/)

Humidity is the real killer. You can easily handle temperatures above 60C as long as the air is bone dry.

It's not 100% humidity, it's a flowing scale that depends on how much cooling you need to do via sweating.

If it's 10C outside, you don't need any sweating at all and the air humidity doesn't matter.

If it's 30C outside and 50% humidity, you're going to feel miserable, older folks could suffer under the stress.

From my experience, keep the sum of humidity in % and temperature in C below 100, better 80, to be comfortable.

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