An easy, but potentially life threatening, mistake to make

This morning I caught a segment on a morning TV show about heat stroke in Japan. I will get into the findings of recent research in another post, but first I wanted to share an important issue they highlighted in the show.

Reportedly, there have been cases of death by heat stroke from people accidentally turning on the air conditioner's heating function rather than the cooler. An easy mistake to make, even for people who read Japanese it would seem. A lot of the controls are like the photo below, where the functions of an air conditioning unit are identified by color. Blue for air conditioning, yellow for dehumidifying and orange for heating.

However, as you can see in the photo below, sometimes the color is only a thin line under the Japanese word. It would be easy to miss it. According to the TV segment, that’s exactly what has happened: people thought they were turning on the cooler, but the unit was actually set to heating. In a closed room during a heatwave, that mistake can quickly become dangerous.

Statistics show that 6.5% of heat-stroke-related deaths occur when an AC unit is on. But that is for two main reasons - the AC is set incorrectly or its not functioning due to dust or mechanical issues. The researchers stressed that even when the air conditioner is “on,” it’s crucial to check that it’s truly set to cooling - not heating, not dehumidifying, and not a mode that isn’t blowing cold air.