It is officially that time of year again: the annual British summer heatwave, where a few days of warm June nights throw the entire country into an absolute state of emergency. As the media sounds the alarm over some of the warmest June nights on record, normal citizens are ignoring the hand-wringing and getting highly creative with their cooling methods. While some are content staying locked away behind blackout curtains, others are fully ascending into DIY engineering territory, deploying some of the most unorthodox—yet undeniably based—hacks you will ever see.

Let’s face it: UK houses are built like brick ovens, designed exclusively to trap every single thermal unit of heat. When summer actually hits, the average home becomes a literal sauna. Rather than waiting for some government department to save them, people are taking matters into their own hands with some top-tier backyard physics.

Take Bethan Earley from Rugby, who has gone full survivalist mode by plastering metallic foil survival blankets onto the outside of her windows before shutting them. Sure, her house still gets warm, but it takes way longer to heat up. Over in Chichester, 38-year-old John Turbefield is running a massive operation. After initially hanging white bed sheets outside his hottest rooms, he went out and bought a pack of Mylar survival blankets—the shiny ones they give to marathon runners so they don’t freeze—and taped them to his window frames to bounce the solar radiation right back into space. John didn't stop there; he’s got a five-fan setup running around his house, completely surrounded by frozen two-liter plastic bottles of water. Protip from John: you need to plan ahead because those big bottles take a couple of days to freeze solid.

Meanwhile, the geniuses at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) are out here giving their usual high-level advice: only open your windows when it's cooler outside, and—get this—turn off 'non-essential electronics' like your TV, laptop, and chargers because of the microscopic amount of heat they generate. Thanks, guys. I'm sure unplugging my iPhone charger will really offset the giant ball of plasma in the sky.

Instead of listening to the bureaucracy, real people are inventing actual solutions. Stephanie Reed, 39, from Chorley, has to stay cool because extreme heat is a literal trigger for her epilepsy. Did she petition the government for a free AC unit? No, she wet a hand towel, laid it at the end of her bed, and slept with her feet on it. According to Stephanie, it keeps her cool all night. She also started sprinkling her seven-year-old daughter’s bed sheet with water and chucking it in the freezer for 30 minutes before bedtime. It’s cold enough to help her fall asleep, but doesn't turn the sheet into a frozen sheet of plywood. High-IQ parenting right there.