My house stinks

It’s been freezing cold; winter temperatures all the way into May. I’ve been very grumpy about that, by the way. I’m very much a hot weather person. And there was snow in Santa Fe in May!

Finally the temperature got suddenly hot. So a couple of days ago we turned on the cooler and phew, something stunk. Foul air was blowing into our house.

Sometimes evaporative coolers get funky while in disuse, so John checked it out and it looked ok. Although it’s not easy to get into the depth of them.

So today we spent over $430 getting all our ductwork professionally cleaned (they do that with a big suction truck, like carpet cleaners). When they left, we installed a new filter, turned on our evaporative cooler and…STENCH! So we’ve been running it all afternoon, in the hopes that the smell will “clear out” with fresh water running through the cooler.

It’s been a few hours and I can smell it all the way out on the patio. I’m not sure what it smells like. I don’t think it’s mold or mildew. More likely it’s a dead rodent.

I was also doing a little bit of indoor painting today, and I couldn’t even smell the paint over the cooler stink. It was that bad.

We’re not sure how long this house sat empty before we bought it. It wasn’t on the market very long, but the previous owners had moved out, and then they hired someone to do a fair amount of updating. There’s no telling how long that took.

Here’s Kira eyeing the cooler warily through the gate. She thinks the smelly problem is with the evaporative cooler. My nose says so too.

For a long time I thought I liked evaporative cooling. It delivers a cool moist air, which in the desert is nice. And it takes a lot less energy than a condenser, because it’s just a fan blowing over water. But it works by evaporating water, which is scarce in the desert.

And evaporative cooling is just a big nuisance. It needs set up and taken down twice a year because it shares venting with the furnace, and apparently can’t be hooked up at the same time as the furnace. Once it’s set up, you can’t go back to your furnace. Once it’s taken down, you can’t go back to cooling. Our weather is extremely variable, and it’s inevitable that during the spring and fall there are days when you have cooling when you really need heat, and vice versa.

Probably my biggest issue with evaporative cooling is that it only works with the windows cracked open. In a cool, moist, welcoming climate like coastal California, it can be heaven to open the windows to the fresh outdoor air. But that’s not the case in the desert.

I run humidifiers and vaporizers 24/7, year round, trying to keep the indoor humidity up to around 20%. The minute I open a window, all that hard-earned humidity is gone. The evaporative cooler adds humidity, but only while it’s actually running. So most of the time the windows are all cracked open, letting out all my humidified air.

The conventional wisdom with evaporative coolers is that it’s not good enough to have one window cracked open. People (like my dear hubby) crack open at least one window in every single darn room. So that can be a dozen windows to run around opening and closing – or just leave open regardless of the current actual conditions.

Also in New Mexico, we get sand storms. It’s miserable on the hot days when you need your windows cracked open for the evaporative cooler, but the wind is howling and blowing dirt inside.

Also I like to be able to have my windows closed to block out the noise of the neighborhood. The neighborhood dogs set my own dogs off, and then I’ve got a riot of barking in my own house. It’s just quieter and more secure with the windows closed. I don’t want to have to have the windows open all the time. I only want to open them when it’s particularly nice out and I feel like opening them.

I just want central air conditioning. And it’s cheaper than moving to San Diego.