Swamp coolers are more energy efficient than AC. As Southwest gets hotter, they're less effective

Phoenix last year went nearly four straight months without seeing high temperatures dip into the double digits; things weren’t that much more comfortable in the fall, either. So, we’re asking some questions about this, like how do we adapt to live more comfortably as these elongated summers become the reality? And, how can we better address extreme heat to provide communities with more shade?

There are a number of ways to provide shade — from planting trees to planning buildings and other structures. And, we’re talking about this as part of The Show's ongoing Throwing Shade series.

Today, the relationship between shade and one method to cool down our homes and offices: evaporative coolers. Tina Deines, an Albuquerque-based reporter, has written about this, and joined The Show to discuss.

Full conversation

MAKR BRODIE: Tina, for some newer residents of the Southwest, they may not be familiar with these devices. How exactly does an evaporative cooler, or swamp cooler, work?

TINA DEINES: Yeah, so it's in the name. So basically it uses evaporation to cool air. So most of the time what I've seen here in Albuquerque is, it's a box shaped unit that sits on top of a house and it has a fan that pulls in the air from the outside. That air runs over a wet pad, and as that water evaporates it cools the air down and it's pumped into the house.

BRODIE: So it would seem as though for this to really function at its best, it would need to be in a place that is not already terribly humid, and be in a place that is not super duper hot.

DEINES: Exactly, and I think that's kind of the change that we're seeing in Albuquerque is it's getting hotter, and I've read, too, that it seems to be getting a little bit more humid as well.

BRODIE: So what are you seeing in Albuquerque in terms of people maybe using them or not using them or using them in conjunction with an HVAC kind of unit?

DEINES: Well, I will say I'm not native to Albuquerque. I moved here in about 2011, and the consensus over the years since I moved here has just been a lot of complaining about swamp coolers. So every time I talk to anyone about swamp coolers, it's basically they're complaining about how they aren't keeping their houses cool.

And in some cases this is resulting in people moving to refrigerated cooling units, which is the more traditional way of cooling across much of the U.S. And in some cases people just complain because they either don't have the money to upgrade or I think it's kind of culturated in the society here to kind of just deal with it. So yeah, I think it's a range of different solutions that people are looking at.

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BRODIE: So you're hearing from people who have swamp coolers who have used them in the past, but maybe they're not, they're not finding them cutting it anymore.

DEINES: Yeah, I mean, this is what I've heard from a lot of townies, I would call them. Becky Wood, for instance, is one of the people I interviewed for this story. She grew up in Albuquerque in the ‘90s and early 2000s and she said, you know, it always worked well enough. And when she moved back to Albuquerque a few years back, she just found that it wasn't tolerable anymore and she had a relatively new unit, which was concerning.

BRODIE: And we should point out that in general evaporative coolers use much less energy than traditional air conditioners, right?

DEINES: Exactly. That's what the energy efficiency specialist Neil Cauley with Sweep Up in Boulder told me. He said up to 25% to 50% more energy efficient than regular, regular cooling.

BRODIE: So in theory then, city leaders and environmentalists, I would imagine, would want to try to encourage homeowners and other people to use these instead of turning to air conditioning. Are there ways to sort of turn back the clock and to make them maybe work the way they did in decades past?

DEINES: Well, I'm not sure about that just with the trajectory we're on in terms of heating here in the Southwest, especially, but I know that across the Southwest communities are coming together to try to find ways to cool neighborhoods, which would in theory take some of that pressure off the swamp coolers and at least make them more effective than they are right now, hopefully.

BRODIE: How big of a role does shade seem to be in those efforts?

DEINES: Yeah, so in cities like Albuquerque, El Paso and Tucson, I know there are some pretty big tree planting efforts, which would provide a lot of shade, and shade can obviously provide some cooling benefits to neighborhoods. In Albuquerque, they, they did a project with NASA that found that neighborhoods with more tree canopy had up to 17 degrees cooler temperatures than other neighborhoods.

BRODIE: So is the goal then to try to cool down neighborhoods enough to make swamp coolers effective again?

DEINES: I don't really think that that is the main goal of these efforts from what I understand, just talking to the city a little bit. I'm not sure that the swamp cooler part is really on their radar. It's more about cooling the communities as much as possible.

BRODIE: Does it seem from, you know, talking to folks who've lived in Albuquerque for a while and other folks sort of in this space, does it seem as though at some point evaporative coolers will be things that we just generally talk about in the past tense?

DEINES: Well, I can't predict the future, but it is looking that way, and you know, I did speak to a plumber here in Albuquerque who services swamp coolers. He's been in the area for over three decades, and I believe the quote was, “swamp coolers are going the way of the dinosaurs ... So that's his belief.

BRODIE: Interesting. And that's somebody who, who would know, right? I mean, I would imagine if he services them, he sees the number that he's servicing and maybe people who ordinarily would call to get them repaired or just saying forget it, we'll just get it, we'll just get a regular air conditioning.

DEINES: Right, and I can tell you just through my experience as well, I worked in an office for seven years that had a swamp cooler at first, and it was almost impossible to get work done. And this was kind of what I talked about in the story with, with Becky Wood, who worked from home. It's nearly impossible to get work done when it's 85 degrees in your home or in your office, and because of that, the office I worked in, they transitioned to a different cooling system.

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BRODIE: I imagine that was a better situation for you and your coworkers.

DEINES: Yeah, it was a much better situation for getting work done, but I do have to emphasize again that that's unfortunate in terms of, of the energy usage.

One thing that I think is really important just to put everything into perspective, is there are a number of people across the Southwest that lack any type of cooling, and I think when we talk about this, it's important to note that having a swamp cooler is still going to be better than having nothing. So I think that's one important thing to note.

And I also wanted to talk about, you know, if you look at heat mapping for a lot of cities, the hotter neighborhoods often coincide with the poorer neighborhoods. So I think that makes this issue even more important because this becomes an equity issue for communities that can't necessarily upgrade their cooling units. So I think that's something that government officials really need to keep on their radar when they're thinking about this.

BRODIE: Does it seem as though there are efforts to try to make air conditioning more energy efficient? Like, is that something that people are trying to do?

DEINES: It's definitely something that people are trying to do, and I couldn't quote any specific studies for you, but I think there is a lot of really important work going on right now, and a lot of this, I think, is aimed more for the global South, but I think a lot of the findings that they're making could be applied to the Southwest and other parts of the U.S.