Let the Mountains Do the Cooling
When the house starts to warm up, the instinct is to march over to the thermostat and push it way down. Then nudge it back up an hour later. Then down again by afternoon. That back-and-forth is the least efficient way to cool a home. Energy experts will tell you the same thing: the system runs best when it runs steadily, and most of the savings come from leaving it on a calm, consistent plan instead of reacting to every swing. So find the warmest setting that still feels comfortable, and let it settle in.
How much further you can push it depends on your day. If the house empties out for school, errands, or a commute, that’s your cue to let the temperature drift up seven to ten degrees while no one’s home. While you’ll barely notice on the way back in, your meter will reward you.
But a lot of us work from home now, tucked away in the home office on back-to-back calls, and a ten-degree climb at 2 p.m. is something you will most certainly notice. If that’s you, the lever is choosing that one comfortable number, staying put, and then leaning on everything else.
That’s good advice anywhere. But here, it’s only half the story, because Colorado hands us cooling tools most of the country never gets.
The big one is our air. It’s dry, and the days swing hard. We have afternoons that bake, mornings and evenings that cool right off. That swing is a gift if you time it. Open the house up at night and let the cool pour in. Then close down those windows, blinds, and especially anything facing west by mid-morning, before the high-altitude sun goes to work. Done consistently, you can coast through much of the day on cool you banked for free, and the AC becomes a backstop rather than the main event.
The dry air does more than make the nights useful, though. It’s the whole reason a certain Colorado fixture works at all: the evaporative cooler (or, less glamorously dubbed, the swamp cooler) one of those boxy units you’ll spot on rooftops across the state. In a place this dry, they’re among the cleverest and cheapest ways to cool a house, even if the name and the looks do them no favors. (More on that just below, if you’ve never met one.)
What in the world is a swamp cooler?
Don’t let the name fool you. A “swamp cooler” may be one of the worst pieces of branding in all of home appliances; nobody hears “swamp” and pictures yes, in my house, please. But the machine underneath is genuinely clever. An evaporative cooler, to use its real title, pulls warm, dry outside air across water-dampened pads; the water evaporates, the air cools, and a fan pushes that cooler air through the house. The catch is exactly why it thrives here: it only works where the air is dry, so the same unit that would flop in humid Houston is right at home on the Front Range. The payoff is real. It sips a fraction of the electricity a refrigerated AC system uses, and it puts a little moisture back into our famously parched air, which your skin and your houseplants will thank you for. Its one quirk fits our rhythm perfectly: it needs the house to breathe, so you run it with a window or two cracked. Ugly name, humble box, genuinely clever machine.
The other thing worth knowing is that, in a climate this dry, comfort often isn’t about the number on the dial at all. Plenty of times you’re not hot so much as parched. A glass of water, a cracked window, or a ceiling fan will settle you faster than dropping the thermostat two degrees. Fans don’t cool a room, but they cool you, which means you can sit comfortably a couple degrees warmer and let the system rest.
So a comfortable home here in summer isn’t really about overpowering the climate. It’s about cooperating with it, and spending a good deal less while you do. Open it up, close it down, let the fan carry some of the load, and give that restless thermostat hand a rest.
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