I finally have the swamp cooler working again! For those of you who aren’t familiar, a swamp cooler, or evaporative cooler, is a device to cool the air that is common in low humidity climates. So you wouldn’t use one in Cincinnati or Kansas City, and therefore I had never heard of such a thing until moving into our house in Denver. Instead of central air, we have this monster machine up on the roof that magically cools the air.

Well it was cooling the air fine at the beginning of the summer, but over the last couple of weeks it suddenly stopped being effective. It was blowing air, but the air was not cool. So instead of hiring someone to come in and take a look at it, I do what I often do and consulted the web for any information I could find. After some research I was convinced that the filter pads needed to be replaced. The pads are continuously sprayed with water and the evaporation there is what cools the air as it comes into the cooler.

First, I had to get a bigger ladder so we could get up there and see what the problem was. So I am now the proud owner of a twenty foot extension ladder. The fourteen or sixteen footer that I bought first wasn’t tall enough to reach the roof. Once we were finally able to get up on the roof, we removed the huge pads from all three sides of the cooler and immediately went over to the local hardware store to get some new ones. We put the new pads in on two sides, but before putting the last one in, I wanted to test the system.

So I turned the water pump on, which should soak the pads, but instead nothing happened. Crap! I didn’t even think to check the water pump before replacing the pads. Anyway the motor in the pump must have died because all it was doing was producing a light hum and no water was flowing. I later took the pump into the store and asked if they had anything to replace it. Fortunately swamp coolers are very popular in this area, so they had just what I needed. And finally, $30 later, the swamp cooler is working again and probably better than ever with some brand new pads too!