Keeping Cool

I really should have taken that picture in the afternoon when the temperature was up. We have this on the wall in the kitchen and it tells us the temp and the humidity and also the last high and low, among other things. You can get one at Wall-Mart for about $50. I watch the weather here and also what it's doing back home. Many times the temps are quite similar. This week, it's in the 90's in both places. The difference is that it's also supposed to rain for a couple of days back home and it hasn't rained here since February. That low humidity, shown here at 16%, is the key to being comfortable out here. Any moisture from sweating immediately dries and cools us off, so while it can be in the nineties or better, we stay reasonably comfortable, as long as we don't spend too much time out in the sun.

The low humidity also makes possible the use of an evaporative cooling system, otherwise known as a "Swamp Cooler". This is what ours looks like.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia description of them:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Evaporative_cooler_annotated.svg

Basically, they use a squirrel cage fan to draw air through a wood fiber filter that is saturated with water that is supplied through a delivery system of tubes and troughs. In a low humidity environment such as we have out here they work incredibly well. A couple of weeks ago, it was over one hundred degrees outside. We had the cooler going and I was sitting at the kitchen table about 30' away from it and I had a fleece jacket on just to be comfortable.

This is all most older homes have out here. Newer, more modern homes have AC but places like my cousin's daughter's place up in Flagstaff, have no cooling at all. Just last week, the nightly lows in Flagstaff were in the mid thirties. They just open the windows at night and then close them in the daytime.

The coolers do have drawbacks. They consume water in an area where water is a precious commodity. Since much of the water comes from limestone aquifers, it is often hard and results in a scale deposit. This reduces the effectiveness of the filters and they should be replaced every year. The filters look like furnace filters but the media is wood fiber or excelsior as it wets better than spun glass.

Most of the coolers also are run from just an on or off switch as well. There's no thermostat or other regulation. You just run it until you get cold and then turn it off until you get warm. There are somewhat more sophisticated models available but the simple ones are what most people have. They run them into a window or cut a hole in the side of the house like folks back home do with room air conditioners.

Another problem is similar to that of heating with a wood stove. The heat, or in this case the cool, is all generated at a single spot, so the further you are away from the unit, the less effect you feel. And it's tough to get cold air to run up the stairs to the bedroom area. So we still want fans around to move the air. Ceiling fans are the norm and they're on most of the time. The capture of the cool night air is a critical part of keeping the house comfortable through the day. Open at night and closed during the day, shades on the windows, and awnings or porches to create shade over the window areas are all common techniques.

It all results in quite a comfortable environment inside even if it does mean some extra attention to detail. I still like the AC in the motorhome, however.