Summer Heat Tip to Keep Your Smartphone and Other Electronics in Tip Top Shape

A general rule of thumb when it comes to electronic devices is that your gizmo likes and dislikes the same temperature range as you do. That's especially true along the upper edge of the temperature scale, particularly where the battery is concerned. Too hot and the life of your expensive smartphone, tablet computer or netbook is reduced.

Take the iPhone's temperature range, for example. Apple says that the iPhone is happy working between 32 and 95 degrees Farenheit. That means that if your iPhone was on while you were outside on Thursday, when it was 102 degrees, you could probably count on having shortened the lifespan of your iPhone's battery. The same goes for other upper 90's days: They diminish your phone's longevity if you keep the phone on while outside.

Not all devices have the same operating temperature range, and if you live or work in a perpetually hot locale like Saudi Arabia, Death Valley, or the District of Columbia (sigh), you might want to get a Blackberry, which can happily make calls until it reaches 122 degrees.

All electronic devices produce heat when turned on: Turning off your device helps keep your smartphone, tablet, or other equipment cooler. The energy produced by the battery that's not converted into radio waves, vibration for the silent ring, light for the screen, or sound, becomes heat.

So, if you're not actually using your phone or other device when it's super hot outside, power the device entirely off.  An iPhone that's off can tolerate up to 113 degrees, and you'll probably seek shelter in air conditioning well before it gets that hot.

Winter Will Come Again, We Promise

December will be here again, even though on a day like today (and alas, worse tomorrow), it feels as if summer is endless and relentless. Today the thermometer will reach into the mid or upper 90's; tomorrow it's going to be even hotter.

Excessive heat is dangerous. And the precautions are pretty much the same as for a tornado or hurricane: seek shelter indoors.

On days when the heat is soaring, you can also do your part for the community to prevent the electrical grid from stressing out (which is a kind way of saying, help Pepco's fragile electric grid from failing) by waiting until the evening to run your major appliances, such as your dishwasher. Press the off button on your computer's monitor when you take a lunch break. Turning the lights out when they aren't needed helps, too. In other words, if it has an off-switch, use that off-switch.

During heat waves the air quality deteriorates. Code Orange is coming, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a Code Red day. The high pressure system that's the cause of this very unpleasant heat also traps bad air.  If you can't drive less --and fewer cars help a lot-- tell your yard company to put off using their gas powered leaf blowers until the mercury is at least back to the milder 80's. Leaf blowers contribute significantly to local air pollution.

The poll we ran a couple of weeks ago showed that Washingtonians are evenly split when it comes to winter versus summer. Does anyone who voted for winter want to change their vote today?

Meanwhile, we wanted to share some nostalgia for winter in Washington.

Washington Tweets: Special Heatwave Edition

Antarctia photo by Bill Adler

Washington tweets. A lot. The Washington Tweets column is a collection of the most interesting, recent Washington-area tweets. These tweets reveal a candid and fascinating portrait of what is on our collective minds: Twitter gives a snapshot of what we're doing, thinking and hoping for as a group. Washington Tweets is Washington in the raw. Bill Adler tweets at @billadler.

Washington Tweets is usually published on Monday, but this is a special heatwave edition of Washington Tweets. Why a special edition? Because we'll deploy any excuse to stay indoors in air conditioning.

Summer (and it's not even summer yet), how do we love thee? Not so much according to a poll on All Life Is Local. Fifty percent of Washingtonians prefer winter to summer. Consider: half of us would rather shovel snow than deal with the heat and humidity. That says a lot about how unkind May through September can be here.


Really DC? Heat advisory, air quality alert, AND high pollen levels? Why not just punch us all in the face and get it over with??

DC weather reporters, correct terminology is "97, but feels like 'being slowly lowered face first into a steam tray of mashed potatoes.'"

there's a heat advisory today in DC til 8pm n my new tattoos arent ready for submersion n water

It's so hot on this train the tourists are about to spontaneously burst into flames!

7:00...76 degrees, humidity is 2,428 percent, and there is a heat advisory for DC. Can we move the nation's capital to Winnipeg?

I absolutely hate #DC weather in the summer

Up again for another day in the blistering heat of DC.. bring it!! Leaving tomorrow :(

anything blizzard sounds nice about now. DC is around 105 on the heat index today...

woke up to a text from the DC government about a heat advisory warning till 8pm. FML.

Hot: 7 DC Ambulances Out Of Service In Extreme Heat

Hate the DC heat? Imagine what it must have been like in 1925- 100 degrees in early June, 25 years before air conditioners!

Heat wave in DC causes power outages. Crazy huh?

Finished run yesterday in the 90 degree heat and found myself muttering to myself afterwards...Soooo hot in DC

So the power out in parts if DC because of the ....... heat? Really!!??!!?? Explain...

It's 90 degrees in my apartment because brick holds heat. 79 out, but already sticky. And pollen-y.

Rain, Rain, Rain

If you didn't see the sky on Saturday, that may have been your last chance until Wednesday. Both Monday and Tuesday are going be rainy, with a chance of thunderstorms, especially on Tuesday. The thermometer won't break past the low 70's on Monday, but on Tuesday it will warm up a bit, to about 79 degrees.

How much rain? As much as two inches is possible. (That would be 20" of snow if it were winter.)

I'm personally opposed to the editorializing that goes on a lot with weather forecasts: "Today's going to be a beautiful day, upper-80's and sunny" is not nice weather for those of us who melt at temperatures that are at least 20 degrees cooler than the melting point of M&Ms.  But if warm sunshine is your preferred climate, it's going to be in the 80s and mostly sunny in Athens, Greece all week.

I'm still waiting for autumn.

Friday's Forecast: 95 F, But We Have Good News About That

That's right: 95 degrees. Maybe a few degrees cooler and some places and maybe a few degrees warmer in others.  That's hot for any day, but it's especially hot for the middle of September. Friday is not the day to show off your new, wool Armani suit. In case you're curious, we're only two days away from breaking the record for 90+ days: 67 in 1980, according to the Capital Weather Gang.

Besides using the heat as your excuse to eat lots of ice cream, you can also use Friday's searing temperatures to destroy any bedbugs that are inhabiting your sheets, blankets, stuffed animals, clothes or anything else, by putting that stuff in your car, rolling up the windows, and letting the heat work some wonders.

Of you could just mentally convert the temperature to celsius and imagine that it's a lot cooler.

How to Win the Bedbug War

There's a simple tip for thwarting bedbugs that can save you from untold misery. Bedbugs are proliferating: And when you get them, getting rid of them is difficult and expensive. It's so much better to prevent a bedbug infestation than to deal with one.

Leave your luggage in a car in the sun after a trip. Bedbugs can't survive summer's baking hot car temperatures. (It's only September and we'll have enough warm days for this before autumn takes hold.) The trunk won't do the trick: You want to let the greenhouse effect work its magic on bedbugs, which have a hard time surviving temperatures above 120 degrees, a temperature that the interior of a car can easily reach in the summer. (That temperature is well beyond the melting point of M&M's, so before you do this, remove candy, medicines, lotions, shaving cream, souvenirs, and other objects that won't withstand the heat.)

Is it News? Area Businesses Go to Night Schedule Due to Heat

With the relentless heat wave forecast to last until Halloween, area businesses and government agencies are switching to a nighttime schedule.

The first to make the switch will the be US Postal Service, which will start its mail delivery rounds at 10pm. "It's unbelievably hot, and when you're carrying several Amazon boxes, you're near collapse," said letter carrier Jim Doyle, who delivers mail in 20016. "And by the time I've gotten to two or three houses, I've dripped sweat on a lot of people's mail."

Is It News? DC Switches to Celsius to Cope With Heat

In an emergency effort to reduce electricity consumption during this extraordinarily hot summer, the Washington Metropolitan Council of Governments will be making all future weather announcements and forecasts in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit, Maxine Roberts, WMCOG spokesperson announced today.

This is the hottest summer in 50 years and electricity use is at an all-time high.  "By converting to Celsius, people will perceive a lower temperature and not feel like they have to turn their air conditioning up so high," Roberts said.  "97F is 37.1C, for example.  Even 90F, which often feels hot, especially if you're a transplant from New Hampshire, is only 32.2 Celsius.  'Mind over matter' matters when it comes to heat and humidity.  Everyone here knows that visualizing icebergs, thinking about cool waterfalls, and seeing a lower thermometer reading in your mind's eye is all you need to feel better in this heat."