Not quite A/C, and one big, hot mess

By Brendan Buhler

Friday, July 4, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Drip drip drip. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of laughter.

The swamp cooler is laughing at me again.

We bought our house knowing it was a fixer-upper, and both parts of that are true: I am always fixing the swamp cooler, up on the roof. The nice thing about a swamp cooler, I tell my increasingly unsympathetic friends and family, is that it’s easy to fix. That’s very convenient, considering how much fixing it needs.

I have receipts for a motor, a pump, a float, a water valve, another pump, four cooling pads and a float arm.

It’s not so much the repair and replacement as the tinkering, sometimes going up and down the ladder two or three times a day, bending a rod here, wrapping plumber’s tape there — all only to hear, half an hour, two hours later ...

Drip drip drip.

Often, it comes in the middle of the night, splattering onto the patio behind our bedroom.

I’ve woken up to tinkling water noises, grabbed pants and a flashlight and made it to the back door before realizing it was just the fish tank, working normally, full of happy fish. Do not ask what dark deeds I have weighed at 3 or 4 in the morning. The important thing is, the fish are fine and nothing happened with the hand blender. Nothing.

Drip drip drip.

I’d never seen a swamp cooler before I moved to the desert. It’s not very complicated. More than a toilet, less than a fish tank.

The swamp, or “evaporative,” cooler is a box with slatted walls that sucks air into the house. Here’s how it works: The bottom of the box is a pan of water with a pump in it. The pump pushes water up tubes, the water spills out and soaks pads inside the slatted walls. The water evaporates, cooling the air inside the box, and the cool air is blown into the house.

Simple.

It’s cheaper to run than an air conditioner and the extra humidity perks up plants. Also, and few people know this, my swamp cooler is the earthly form of Satan.

When we bought the house in the fall, we knew there was something wrong. The first clue was the roof — gray, cracked and drooping — over the back patio, downhill from the swamp cooler. The second clue was that it didn’t turn on.

So we called in a repairman.

He came, he climbed up and replaced the float, the motor, the water valve and the pump. Well, that’s what he said.

I’m not sure about any of it. I was on the ground and, as one of nature’s renters, I’d always figured heating, ventilation and air conditioning were someone else’s problem.

Besides, I had my own projects. I bought my first tool belt. I looked in the mirror and said, “Hello, Handyman.”

When spring rolled around and I turned on the swamp cooler and it did not cool, I almost laughed.

When I first climbed up on the roof to fix the swamp cooler this spring, the pump wasn’t working. I installed a new pump.

Simple.

Drip drip drip.

Oh, another thing about a swamp cooler: The water level in the pan is controlled by a float arm, kind of like what you have in your toilet tank. To adjust, bend the metal arm.

Drip drip drip.

This went on for a couple of weeks. Adjust, drip, twitch, adjust, drip, curse, adjust, drip, howl.

My wife, who is both too smart to climb on the roof and more observant than I am, figured it out first.

It was the pads. For the pads to work, they have to drain. Old pads, and ours were probably spoils from the sack of Rome, do not drain. They clogged, and water poured out of the sides. It had nothing to do with the float.

Drip drip drip.

So one Sunday, I climbed on the roof at 8 in the morning to pull the panels off and replace the pads before it got hot. It was going to be a quick job, and a good thing, too, because it was already 95 degrees out. This was the first day it broke 110. You might remember it.

We worked in half-hour stretches, running bucking wire-wheel drills over the panels, stripping rust and paint and sending sharp metal wires flying. We’d break for water and lie under fans inside.

By 4:30, we were down to the last panel. I told my wife to go inside and cool off. I’d be just a few minutes.

An hour and a half later, I opened the back door, stepped inside and felt the insides of my knees go numb.

Then my wife was standing over me and saying “purple” and pointing at my face. The word “hospital” came up. I shook my head.

Instead, I let her lead me — half-carry me — to the bathroom. I spent half an hour, maybe longer, in a cool bath, first mumbling, then chattering, while she looked nervous and asked me to focus my eyes.

Reading up on heatstroke now, I understand that I should have spent the rest of the day drinking water and lying down.

I went out to help paint the panels.

Three hours later, they were dry.

At 9:30 at night, I climbed off the roof, the panels installed and water running through the new pads but not out of their sides. Inside, for the first time all day, cool air blew out of the vents.

I felt good. I congratulated myself with a beer. What the heck, two beers.

At 10:30, I went out back to collect the trash.

Drip drip drip.

I didn’t fly up the ladder, but that’s because you can’t fly and stomp at the same time.

I pulled off the freshly painted panels, uttering oaths against the swamp cooler and its septic tank ancestors and their loose morals.

It did not take long to find the problem.

The float arm I’d so patiently bent, this way and that, over and over, had, finally, snapped.

And the swamp cooler laughed.

Drip drip drip.