A friend of mine whose family is from Arizona claims that many people there don’t have Air Conditioning, but instead have devices called “Swamp Coolers” to cool their homes. He mentioned something about having pans of water and air blowing across them, and while it sounds interesting, it also sounds like complete B.S.
Do these things exist, or is he pulling my leg.
If they do exist, why are we spending all this money on elaborate air conditioning systems if water and a fan will do the trick?
A “swamp cooler” is Arizona slang for an evaporative cooler. They work by fanning the famously dry Arizona hot air over water in a pan or something water soaked, cooling the air down through evaporation, and are cheaper than running the air conditioner. They work well from about March to June, when the heat and the humidity in Arizona finally become too much for them to make that much of a difference. Our local weathermen make sure to remind us when the dewpoint first hits 55 degrees during the monsoons, as that’s the upper limit that they can push out tolerable air temperatures with the increasing humidity levels.
Here’s a link: http://users.redrivernet.com/luhan/swamp.htm
Here in the Texas panhandle, most people use swamp coolers instead of any other kind of air conditioner. They work perfectly all summer, and the temp in the summer here is regularly 100 to 110 degrees.
They will not work for you if it’s humid where you live, because the whole principle is based on adding moisture to the air to cool it.
I grew up in western Colorado, in the desert. Swamp coolers were the main air conditioning units for most houses in the valley.
The model we used was a 3’ x 3’ x 4’ metal box on the roof. Water was pumped into the bottom pan of the box to about a depth of 2 inches. Three of the walls were removable vented panels with brackets to hold large straw mats. When the unit came on, it would pump water from the bottom pan to little troughs above the straw that would trickle the water through the straw. (Any excess would land back in the pan to be recycled.) The air pump would draw air through the panels and then down into the house to vents that were on the ceilings.
Every winter we’d have to put cardboard circles in the indoor vents to prevent heat loss (besides closing the metal shutters), and disconnect the water to the cooler and drain it (most houses had water stains running down their roofs from their swamp cooler units). Then in the spring, we’d usually replace the straw pads, since they kind of crumble after a summer’s use and a winter’s abuse (various sizes of which were available at all hardware stores).
Freon/refridgerant units would’ve worked too, but swamp coolers are much cheaper to use. My parents’ new house has a reefer-type unit, so swamp coolers my be becoming passe.
Nah, it’s West Texas slang for an evaporative cooler. Everyone in these here parts has one… well, except for me: I’ve got a normal AC, which costs more to run but doesn’t blow moist air into my apartment and make my carpet damp (as my swamp cooler did at my old place). Other than that, I have nothing to add; everything everybody else already said covered it. There’s really not much to 'em.
West Texas slang? Bite your tongue. We call em that in New Mexico, too. When it’s hot and dry, there is nothing nicer than cool air blowing through wet aspen pads. Mm, smells good, too. It’s a wonderful, simple design.
I think remember this kind of cooling set up. The disadvantage was that you had to leave the windows open (some or all of them?) and this seemed scarey if you lived in a place where you usually lock the doors???
My Grandma, in Northern California, has a swamp cooler. Hers was a boxlike contraption that was mounted into a window and extended out the back. It is really just a big fan-like deal that also spits out moisture. If you sit too close to it, you get beamed with high speed winds and little flecks of water. It’s pretty effective, though. She was the only person I know to have one, though. It doesn’t seem quite as standard as regular air conditioning.
I betcha didn’t know that if you throw a couple eggs into your neighbor’s swamp cooler panels in the Spring, you can get your neighbor to spend a LOT of money on a repair call in the Summer! The fix itself is simple (just replace the mats), but in the meantime, he’s sucked a ton o’ stinky air into his house, and can’t figure out what’s causing it.
I lived in Grand Junction, Colorado. Almost as hot as Phoenix but well, not quite AS hot 105ºF was not unheard of but the mid to upper 90s were pretty typical through the summer months.
The key to swamp coolers (aka evaporative coolers) is low humidity, during a rain storm they are virtually ineffective. Yes it does use water, I have a portable one that I use here in Colorado Springs and it makes a difference; on average about 15ºF cooler than the air inside without one, for a complete house model. And usually you only need two windows in opposite sides of the house cracked about 5-7 inches so the air will circulate.
Personally, I would crack only one window about 3-5 inches on the back of the house and it seemed to do its job well.
So yes, swamp coolers are a real invention, using water, a squirrel cage (similar to a forced air gas heater) and an aspen filter…but many of them are too friggin loud, require low humidity to work well and in the normal course of daily life can be a pain on the nerves but operate at pennies per day compared to AC.
Oh and BTW, when it’s chilly outside as it can get in Grand Junction at night, you can wake up to temps in the lower 60s in the mornings in your home if you leave it on all night and a cold front comes through. From personal experience…
And one more tidbit, I used to work in construction when I lived in GJ, about half the homes I worked with had swamp coolers the rest had AC.
The reasoning that evaporative coolers do not work in a humid environment is because the air is already saturated with vapor or moisture which the cooler puts out, cool moist air. When the air is already saturated, the cool air is not as easily distributed as when there is little humidity.
That’s the laymen’s terms of it as taught to me. I suspect this is correct as my limited education seems it to make sense.
I lived in Lancaster, CA in my high school years and for a few years thereafter. Our swamp cooler (yes, we called them that there too) was a box on the roof with four pads, Air was forced into the house through a vent in the bottom with a “squirrel cage” fan. For most of the time I lived there, the pads were “excelsior”, which I guess is straw. I can still remember the not-unpleasant smell when the cooler was turned on. The bottom pan of the cooler had a float similar to the one you have in your toilet that would turn on or turn off the water supply to keep about 2" to 3" of water in the pan. The pump supplied water to the “spider”, which had two outlets per excelsior pad.
Many is the time I had to go up on the roof to clean the spider. Little bits of excelsior would clog the small outlet holes in the tips of the spider. Also, deposite would form that inhibited efficiency. Cleaning was done at least once a week. Later, the excelsior pads were replaced by nylon ones, which required less maintenance.
The swamp cooler was effective all through the summer except for about two weeks in August. As someone else already said, evaporative coolers don’t work when the air is already saturated. Dad and I kept our windows opened a little so that the flow of cool air would go straight through our bedrooms. Humidity in the house would reach 100%, but it was better than cooking!
One huge advantage of the swamp cooler was that you would leave it on 24 hours a day, and it would only cost about $30 a month; much less than running refrigerated air.
The OP has been pretty thoroughly answered so I’ll throw out a little tangent.
Why the hell are they called swamp coolers? I mean swamps are damp places, and swamp coolers don’t work in damp places. It seems to me that the one place that would never be dry enough to use a swamp cooler would be in a swamp. West Texas slang, New Mexico slang, Colorado slang; whoever’s slang it is has some explaining to do.
Another tangent: AC cooling towers you see on buildings work on the same principle: They cool the water in the tower and the water is then used to cool the condenser.
The term “swamp cooler” comes from the humid coolness that is created by the machine. To us non-humidity types, the humid, cool air seems like a swamp, a cool swamp but a swamp nonetheless.
Imagine coming in from the outdoors where the temperature is over 100 and with humidity under one percent and then going into a house of 70 degrees with over 50 percent humidity.
Are making me really, really homesick. I moved from NM to Jersey, and I miss the hot dry summer days. My girlfriend had the same reaction when I explained the swamp cooler to her (she’s a NJ native) as the OP: Total disbelief. But it’s true, there’s nothing like the feeling of coming in from a really hot desert summer to a cool, damp air-conditioned house.
And oh to answer the original question…yes, swamp coolers exist