Probably the earliest form of Air Conditioning, according to that indisputable source, Wikipedia, in extremely dry climates, evaporative cooling of air is not only less expensive to operate than traditional A/C, it has the added benefit of conditioning the air with more moisture for the comfort of building occupants. We were very fortunate in that the home we purchased was equipped with both swamp cooler and central A/C. In those delightfully dry, sometimes even with triple-digit temperature, we can open a window or door on the shady side of our house, flip on the swamp and bask in water-cooled comfort. In fact, lacking intakes, swamp coolers are designed to work with an exterior door/window open. I've heard stories of swamp newbies who have run their coolers with the house shut tight, left for the day and returned home only to find that pressure had built up in their domicile to the point where pictures actually popped off the walls!
For me, a swamp cooled home is a happy home. That is, until the dew point rises. Dew point, you say? What about humidity percentage? Well, oddly enough, the percentage of humidity doesn't really tell the full story here. Dew point (and I simply refuse to look up the Wiki definition) is essentially a measure of what the humidity "feels like" and is measured in degrees. For instance, a dew point of 20-degrees says "swamp me, baby", where at 50-degrees or higher, the house tends to feel like late afternoon in the local laundromat and I'm shutting windows, flipping off that moisture pusher and reaching for my old familiar whole-house, dry-cooled refrigeration system. You don't run both swamp and A/C at the same time. They work at cross purposes, don'tcha' know?! As we approach summer in the desert, the temperatures rise to triple digits - including a term I'd never heard before living here; the "one-teens". The winds often blow from the southeast, bringing with them "monsoonal moisture" and high dew points.
As I stated earlier, I spent most of my life in a region where summers meant hot, sticky, buggy and icky. Walking inside a hot dog's mouth. Now there's an image for you! My tolerance for humidity was slim to none, then. Now that I call home thousands of miles away from that bayou-like summer climate, my tolerance for damp has all but disappeared. So much so that I seem to have developed a kind of dew radar (dew-dar?) enabling me to detect higher than tolerable (for me) dew points without benefit of weather caster or even Weather.com (though I often verify my senses online and am almost always correct). Try as I may to place economy over comfort, when the laundromat opens, my cranky meter has a mind of its own. My greater dilemma is trying to find tolerance and compromise between my admittedly narrow internal thermostatic window with those closest to my heart and home. One, whose thermostat is somewhat close to mine and just would rather not see the dollars flying out the A/C intake. The other who's climatic comfort zone is in near opposition to my own, happy to curl up on a leather sofa with an inside temp. of 80+ degrees.
As my years living in the desert begin to outnumber those on the other coast, will my thermostat reset? Will my dew-dar go dormant? While it's true that these days, a forecast of 105-degrees doesn't initiate a panic response as they used to back east. Here, I shrug it off, confident in the fact that a la
te afternoon thunderstorm won't knock out our power (and A/C) for hours or days. Unless that damned dew point....well, you get the picture. The answer? Hmmm... maybe a mountain escape for a day, a week or six during the height of what I often refer to as Palm Springs Winter? Yeah, that might just do it!
