Swamp Coolers, Once Effective Across Southwestern States, No Longer Work In Extreme Heat & Growing Humidity
“I just couldn’t think straight,” Albuquerque resident Becky Wood said, describing what it felt like attempting to get work done in an 85-degree house during the city’s hottest summer days. “I would find myself sitting on the couch, wanting to take a nap. I felt like I had brain fog, but it was just like working in a jungle.” Yet her swamp cooler, a popular cooling choice in arid environments like Albuquerque and other parts of the Southwest, was running on high. The 33-year-old, a remote worker at the time, begrudgingly replaced her two-year-old device with a refrigerated cooling air conditioner, a $12,000 upgrade she had not budgeted for, but saw as a necessity. “Just trying to get work done and be productive when it’s 80-plus degrees in your house is impossible,” she said.
Wood is not alone. Across the Southwest, more people are abandoning their swamp coolers as higher temperatures are pushing these devices to their limits. But proponents hope people will stick with them, as they use far less energy than other cooling methods. In the meantime, cities are looking to natural cooling methods to bring down outdoor temperatures in some neighborhoods, which could make swamp coolers indoors more effective.
Swamp coolers, also known as evaporative coolers, use the power of evaporation to cool indoor air. The units, which often sit on top of homes and office buildings, use a fan to pass outdoor air over a wet pad. As the water evaporates, it pulls heat from the air, cooling it before it is pumped into the home. Traditionally, swamp coolers have been the cooling method of choice for low-humidity environments in much of the Southwest, where the dry air facilitates evaporation. In ideal conditions, they can cool a home up to 40 degrees, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
But they have their limits. For one thing, they tend to perform poorly during the Southwestern monsoon—a rainy season that typically coincides with the hottest part of the summer—when the air is more humid. “In 2022, the year I got the AC, it was a pretty heavy monsoon year, and swamp coolers just don’t work when it’s humid and monsoony outside,” Wood said. “…It’d be 90 degrees but humid, and then it wouldn’t be working at all.” Now, swamp coolers are losing their cooling capacity as temperatures soar to record highs across the Southwest. “The average temperatures in Albuquerque have gone up considerably,” said James McAfee, a plumber who works on swamp coolers and has lived in the metro area for 35 years. “Swamp coolers, they tend to like [temperatures] of 90 degrees and below. Once you start getting up to that 95, that’s when the temperatures start to be too much for the evaporation to happen at a slow enough pace.”
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13052025/southwest-swamp-coolers-affected-by-high-temperatures/
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