“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.

Evaporating Advantages

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.”

That’s because at this temperature, the system cannot get enough water on the pads to keep them wet, so there’s not enough water evaporating to keep up with the heat.

In 2023, Albuquerque hit triple-digit temperatures 17 times, according to National Weather Service (NWS) data. The city experienced 100-degree days earlier than ever in 2024, when a heat wave hit the region in early June. Last year went on to be the second-warmest on record for the city, according to the NWS.

Other Southwest cities that depend on swamp coolers are heating up, too. El Paso experienced its warmest year on record in 2024, with 55 triple-digit days. And Tucson saw a record-breaking 112 days of triple-digit heat that year.

Aside from heat and humidity, swamp coolers have another weakness in the face of climate change: the outdoor air they pull into homes carries pollutants like wildfire smoke, which is becoming increasingly common in a drought-stricken and easily ignitable Southwest.

“Going the Way of the Dinosaurs”?

According to local plumbing companies, more people in Albuquerque are now turning to refrigerated cooling, a pricier and less environmentally-friendly form of air conditioning.

But it wasn’t always this way.

“We had a swamp cooler my whole childhood all through high school, and it always seemed to work well enough,” said Wood, who grew up in Albuquerque in the ‘90s and early 2000s. “Even on really hot days in the summer, my bedroom felt cool even though it was on the second floor, and I had no complaints with it.”

McAfee noted that swamp coolers used to be much more prevalent in Phoenix until it got too hot, and thinks Albuquerque is moving in that direction as well.

“The way we’re going, [swamp coolers] are going the way of the dinosaurs,” McAfee said, adding that interest in refrigerated cooling is increasing among the clients he talks to.

This shift away from swamp coolers isn’t confined to Albuquerque. In El Paso, for instance, the advocacy group Amanecer People’s Project is campaigning for 24 schools in the district to install air conditioning systems to replace what they call “outdated swamp coolers.” While these devices used to work, the group told KFOX14 that increasing heat sometimes pushes classroom temperatures above 85 degrees.

Heat in the classroom can affect concentration, memory and learning, and working in a hot environment can lead to decreased productivity and stress, according to experts at the University of Buffalo . And while an 85-degree indoor home temperature is generally considered safe, some populations, such as the elderly, are advised to take precautions to avoid heat-related illnesses.

“The Energy Use Is So Low”

Despite heat challenges, many environmental advocates hope people will stick with their swamp coolers due to their low energy usage.

According to Neil Kolwey, building electrification specialist for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project in Boulder, Colorado, swamp coolers are anywhere from 25-50 percent more efficient than traditional air conditioning units or heat pumps running in cooling mode.

“I don’t think we should discourage swamp coolers,” he said. “The energy use is so low, and the cost is really good.”

Ann Simon, City of Albuquerque sustainability officer, agreed.

“I think overall, it’s a good way to cool homes, generally speaking,” she said. “Of course, when temperatures get up over a hundred degrees, it is difficult, and it isn’t as effective.”

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As an alternative to abandoning swamp coolers completely, Kolwey suggested keeping them as the primary cooling systems for homes—at least on the second floor—and supplementing them with refrigerated air or heat pump systems on hotter days.

He also recommended that people with swamp coolers ensure their homes are properly sealed and insulated, which should help with efficiency. It’s also important to properly size and regularly maintain swamp coolers in order to get the most out of them, he added.

Some people also supplement their swamp cooler with a portable air conditioner that can cool a bedroom or office. Before Wood invested in her central refrigerated air conditioning system, she depended on such a device, which cost her about $400.

“It works really well for a single room,” she said.

Nature’s Swamp Coolers

As Southwestern cities become hotter, local governments are also seeking ways to cool neighborhoods, which could help take the load off of struggling swamp coolers. Adding tree canopy can help not only by providing shade, but with its own evaporative cooling of the outside air. Through evapotranspiration, a process in which trees release water vapor into the air, the leafy canopy cools the surrounding environment.

Albuquerque collaborated with NASA in 2021 to map its tree canopy, and then compared temperatures across the city on the hottest days of the year. According to Simon, they discovered up to a 17-degree difference from one neighborhood to the next based on how much tree canopy they had.

Let’s Plant Albuquerque is a city-led initiative that aims to plant 100,000 new trees in the city by 2030—so far, they’ve reached a little over 25 percent of this goal, according to the website. Using the data collected for the 2021 NASA project, the city is prioritizing plantings in areas with diminished tree canopy. It’s also encouraging citizens to take a tree-planting pledge where they would commit to planting a tree in their yard or in the community, and now requires all new development to meet tree-planting quotas. A similar initiative in Tucson aims to plant a million trees by 2030, and the nonprofit Eco El Paso also hopes to plant that many.

Albuquerque’s effort to incorporate more green stormwater infrastructure, a practice that uses natural systems and practices that mimic natural water cycles to reduce flooding, can also lower temperatures with evaporative cooling. For instance, permeable pavements, which allow rainwater to seep through a porous surface, can help cool the pavement when the moisture evaporates. The city also aims to use such infrastructure to naturally irrigate trees, according to Simon, helping them fulfill their cooling mission.

But anything that can reduce the outdoor heat in the city can help indoor temperatures remain in the range in which swamp coolers are more effective.

Albuquerque is investigating solutions like cool roofs and pavements, which use materials that help reflect sunlight and absorb less heat, Simon added. In Phoenix, the Cool Pavement Program, which uses a water-based treatment painted on top of regular asphalt pavement, lowered temperatures in treated areas by 10.5 to 12 degrees during the afternoon compared to untreated asphalt.

“We’re still testing [cool roofs and cool pavements], but we passed a sustainability resolution last year with nine to zero council support,” Simon said. “It urges the city to pilot these kinds of programs, so we will be rolling those out for sure.”

Anyone in need of respite from a hot house can visit one of the city’s air-conditioned libraries, take refuge under the shade of a park tree or cool off at a city-managed pool or splash pad, she added.

Simon encouraged people to think about heat in the long term and help manage rising temperatures by cutting their carbon output, whether it be by reducing their food waste, taking the bus or making their next car electric.

“No matter what’s happening in Washington, D.C., we can still take climate action,” she said. “These ways that we can help our own communities will really matter, if not immediately, then for the next generation.”

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