How to Keep Cool Cheaply When Its Hot

There is nothing quite like being able to sit indoors on a blisteringly hot day and enjoy a cool blast of air from a portable air cooling unit while relaxing with a book or in front of the TV. This small pleasure can become an absolute necessity if you work from home and spend several hours each day at a desk working on a computer or laptop.

Having a means to keep cool indoors when it's getting crazy hot outside is something that many people take for granted. But not everyone has the means or the budget to be able to afford the cost of buying and running a big portable air conditioning unit in their home office or in their sitting room or bedroom.

Let's face it, the power hungry aircon units will eat up your electricity supply in order to blast out that beautifully cold air and you will end up paying dearly for the privilege at the end of the month. However, there is a much cheaper air cooling solution that can be every bit as effective, as long as you live in the right kind of place.

Swamp Coolers

Instead of the power hogging portable air conditioner, why not look into buying a swamp cooler, or evaporative air cooler to give it the right name? As long as you live in a hot dry climate, then these units can cool the air as effectively as their electricity hogging cousins while using only a fraction of the power to do it.

The only caveat is that you have low humidity for these things to work at their best. If you have high humidity, then you're out of luck. That's because a swamp cooler cools by evaporation and it needs dry air to create a cooling effect.

Real Life

I have a friend who lives in Denver, Colorado and his home office is kept beautifully cool by a single swamp cooler that he paid less than a hundred bucks for, brand new. It uses only slightly more power than a regular fan, which is almost nothing and there is no need to vent it to the outside because swamp coolers don't produce any hot exhaust air.

That means you can take one of these units and move it from room to room in your as you need it without the hassle of feeding a flexible exhaust pipe out a nearby window, as you would have to with a regular but not vent free portable air conditioner. How incredibly convenient is that!

So if you live in an area with low average humidity when it gets hot, you really should consider one of these amazing swamp coolers for your home. You'd be throwing a lot of money away otherwise!