Evaporative cooling, and refrigeration, in old-time Phoenix


Growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I never experienced air conditioned air. Mostly there you don't need it, and I really don't recall if anyone had in their house. I suppose the theaters had it, but it would only be necessary when it got really hot, in the summer. And since Minnesota has four seasons, it can get very cold, and moderately hot, and only very rarely very hot.

On the other hand, Phoenix, where I moved to when I was 19, gets ridiculously hot. Not kinda hot, not "we're havin' a heat wave" hot, but brutally hot, like don't touch anything chrome on your car or your fingers will get burned. Living without a way to cool the air hardly seems possible to me, although people did it for a long time in Phoenix, even before electricity was available. And even then, mostly what you can get would be a fan. If you've ever tried to sleep when it's over 90 degrees with just a fan, well, it's awful. I've only had to do that when my A/C broke down, which was a rarity, and I would hardly sleep at all. Yuk!

From what I've read, in very old-time Phoenix, people would soak blankets and hang them up on their porches, and sleep there. This is what's known as "evaporative cooling" - I'm no scientist, but I understand that when water evaporates, it feels cool as it blows on you. Not cold, but cooler than it would be without it. Eventually this concept was built into machines that had a blower that blew cool air through a water-soaked filter. Technically this is called an Evaporative Cooler, but most of the people I know called it a swamp cooler. And this gives you can idea of how it felt.

I've been lucky, and have always had refrigeration in Phoenix. No, I don't mean that I slept in a refrigerator, it's just that in old-time Phoenix it was a way of describing an air cooling system that ran on freon, not dripping water. Many of the older houses had both, as the swamp cooler (evaporative cooler) was much cheaper to run than the regular air conditioning (refrigeration). The tiny converted garage that I lived in while I was going to ASU had an actual air conditioner, which worked well. My next door neighbor had a swamp cooler on the roof, and that was all.

True refrigeration air conditioning is much more comfortable than swamp cooling, especially in the monsoon season, when the air is humid. And from what I've heard, having wet air blowing through your house isn't good for the wood furniture, causing it to warp, but it's better for your skin than the drying effect of refrigeration.

As I write this, it's gonna be 106 today, and I can hear my air conditioner on the roof of my house, working like a champ (insert commercial here!). I was out early this morning, when the temperatures outside are comfortable, but I'll probably not be going out again until tomorrow morning. I have a thermostat that keeps my environment in here at exactly the temperature that I like, which is a piece of technology which to this day impresses me, like living in a space ship.

This type of technology made Phoenix a very attractive place to live, and without it, I wouldn't want to think about it!
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