Breezing Through The Summer

 Whether it is climate change or just normal long-term cycles, the last three summers have had unusual patterns with rain coming earlier and our looked for late summer monsoon raining and cooling down being preempted by hot dry weather. So again this summer we are in August heat. The last two years Wife and I suffered mightily. We use evaporative coolers instead of central air conditioning because they are way more energy efficient in our desert climate. But the one we'd had since we bought the house wasn't getting the job done at all which made the environment for living and sleeping miserable (as #3 can attest to from current circumstances in Amsterdam). I'm still not sure why that was. It's a pretty freaking simple device. Just some pads (think giant size sponges), a system for pumping water over them so they get soaked, and a fan for pulling air through the pads causing the water to evaporate and thus cool down. How such a think could stop working is beyond me. But after a number of repair calls over the two years we finally threw in the towel.

So last fall me made the decision to get rid of the old thing. We were thinking of switching to air conditioning on account of wanting cleaner air with my asthma and Wife's allergies. That was going to be a big bill because we have two separate systems. Our upstairs evaporative cooler is working fine. But we couldn't have half the house on refrigerated air and the other on a swamp cooler (local parlance for the evaporative cooler). In shopping around, we found there was a new, much higher efficiency swamp cooler now available Two out of three vendors recommended it even though it was a lower cost product. They claimed that not only would it produce good cooling but was in fact better for air quality as they claimed that central air keeps all your air locked up without replacement and that's bad evidently.

Whatever, we bought the new unit which is a Breezair. With the summer mostly over,  I will report the product is everything that the vendors promised. It provides great, consistent cooling with much lower fan speeds than the old style units. Most of the time we hardly even know it is on. But despite days in the high 90's, we are enjoying the best cooling since we've owned this house.

With our new solar system, even with the coolers going all day, we still produced surplus electricity (this being the time one would be expecting maximum electricity usage).