I was watching a TV show that takes place in the area around Washington, DC (DC, Virginia, etc.). There was a house with a swamp cooler on the roof and I thought, ‘Ha! Not only does the landscape look more like Santa Clarita than Virginia, they don’t use swamp coolers in humid climates!’
Then it occurred to me that I’ve never actually been to Virginia, and there may be parts that are dry enough for swamp coolers to be efficient. So do people use them there? Or was my first impression correct?
Not IME. Way too humid. They don’t even work that well in El Paso during monsoon season.
Some AC units are similarly boxy and can be roof-mounted.
That’s what I thought.
This was definitely a swamp cooler, though. (The show is filmed in SoCal.)
I live in South Carolina and have never even heard of a swamp cooler until they were mentioned on a thread here a few months ago. So the line where they are used probably doesn’t reach the top of SC.
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of a desert submarine either. 
(I never had either, until I saw this segment when it was first broadcast. The ‘submarine’ appears three minutes in (18:28).)
I won’t say that they don’t exist at all, because someone theoretically might have one, but I personally have never seen a swamp cooler on a house anywhere in the Maryland/DC/Virginia area.
Do they refer to the Beltway as “the 495” on the show? I’ve seen that on some shows. For you Californians, your “the <highway number>” is a strictly California thing. We don’t use “the” with highway numbers around here.
Also found in Canada, as in “the 401”.
Just a off subject which relates to the TV show taking place in a different place then the show tells, a TV crew for a show like law and order rented out a house on Long Island, NY to do a quick intro of a drug find (IIRC), they placed palm trees to make it appear like somewhere in Florida. My dad got some money for allowing them to use his driveway for parking. So such thing happen.
More true in CA than other places perhaps, but I grew up in Western NY and remember hearing “the 90, the 33, the 198” in addition to “the thruway, the X parkway, etc.”
My father was persuaded by a cousin recently returned from New Mexico to try a swamp cooler. In hot and humid East Texas.
I was a teenager before I learned that potato chips were normally crispy.
We tried a swamp cooler for a while – in Northern Virginia, near DC. Exactly as you suspect, the poor thing labored away, but the ambient humidity rendered it ineffective.
I had to Google swamp cooler.
But in doing so, I found this relevant map.
mmm
Was it Bones by any chance? That show had the worst continuity I’ve ever seen.
Nope:
www.google.com search?q=swamp+cooler&client=firefox-b-1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJgenp8qzaAhVi9IMKHcFmBfYQ_AUICygC&biw=1366&bih=603#imgrc=njXSg7zQ-sMLpM:"
Google search shows me different pictures than it shows you. (And I can see you use Firefox!)
I’ve lived in the Washington DC / Norther Virginia area for about 20 years now, and I’d never even heard of them, after shopping for and owning two homes.
After reading about Swamp Coolers, it’s way too humid here for them.
Thanks for the answers, everyone. As a former desert-dweller, I’m familiar with swamp coolers. I suspect the location scouts on the show are from the coast and/or they had refrigerated air conditioning and didn’t know they don’t work in humidity. If they noticed the big box on the roof at all, they probably thought it was an air conditioner.
NCIS.
Asked & answered. So now: home-made evaporative coolers!
I only add this because if you’ve never lived where they are, you’re likely wondering what all the fuss is about. I paid about $750 for a medium sized unit that cools the entire house and raises the humidity nicely. It costs peanuts to operate–it’s just an electric fan and a negligible trickle of water. As a bonus, you can run it in nice weather without the water feature and just air out the house in a couple of minutes. Compared to about $5,000 to add AC to a forced air system, plus another $100/month to run it, and no fresh air.
Wasn’t the plan to drain the swamp, not cool the swamp?
There is a swamp cooler of sorts (it’s a windcatcher with an ice bucket) on the roof of Mount Vernon. Does that count?
My brother-in-law noticed that even new homes in the Las Vegas area commonly have their central air conditioning units mounted on the roof. I’ve proposed two theories: 1) that it’s because that’s where the swamp coolers were back in the day; and 2) that perhaps it prevents desert snakes from crawling inside at night for warmth.