The city reached its top of 41.5 degrees on Saturday just before 3pm and remained above 40 degrees until 5pm as the Central Tablelands’ scorching summer continued.

Weatherzone senior meteorologist Jacob Cronje said it was the hottest day in Bathurst for at least 50 years, after which time the records were not complete.

The last time Bathurst had been anywhere near that hot, he said, was in January 2013, when the city hit 40.2 degrees.

It was still 27 degrees at midnight on Saturday and only got as low as 22 degrees overnight – which is hotter than the long-term average maximum for Bathurst for seven months of the year.

The NSW Rural Fire Service had just the one incident up until late Sunday afternoon: a tree fire at O’Connell just before 3pm that was put out within five to 10 minutes.

“We were on to that really quickly,” NSW RFS Superintendent Greg Sim said.

The scene of a grass fire that broke out at Georges Plains on Friday afternoon was one of three fire grounds – along with locations at Tarana and Gingkin, south of Oberon – that the NSW RFS crews monitored on Sunday.

The heat on Saturday was of such an intensity that it led to some people leaving their homes and paying for a cooler refuge in the CBD.

A spokesman from the Governor Macquarie Motor Inn in Charlotte Street said that some of the motor inn’s guests on Saturday night were Bathurst and district locals without air-conditioning in their homes.

One of those guests, he said, was a night shift worker at Bathurst Base Hospital who just needed a restful sleep after the long run of hot days and hot nights.

​A cool change arrived in Bathurst just after 3pm on Sunday, when the temperature dropped by five degrees in just over an hour.

But no wet weather is expected in Bathurst until at least the end of the week, leaving the city with an official total of nine millimetres for the year so far and two millimetres in February.