Reno is in the midst of the first real heat wave of the summer. According to my mother, that means it will be hitting Wisconsin in two or three days. My classification of a real heat wave is when the temperature gets to be over 100 degrees, about the same as my thoughts on the subject when I lived in Wisconsin. To me the psychological difference between 99 and 100 degrees is much bigger than the scientific difference, which is the same as the difference between, say, 95 and 96. My friends in Las Vegas have a different psychological threshold of a heat wave. They break the triple digit barrier daily, at about 9 or 10 am most days between May and September. To them a heat wave is when the daytime high gets to 120 or so, which is just too hot for me.
Every year during deer hunting season Bananas At Large remind Wisconsinites that “It’s not so much the heat as it is the gosh darn humidity,” in their song “Da Turdy Point Buck.” Let’s face it, 120 degrees is hot no matter if it’s humid or not, but the lack of humidity in the Reno area does have an advantage. My threshold for good sleeping is when the nighttime low gets below 70. Wisconsin’s humidity keeps the heat going over night so the days it gets into the 90’s it likely won’t get below 70 during the night. Out here, without humidity, there is a wider gap between daytime highs and nighttime lows and, given that when it does hit 100 there is almost no humidity in the air, the temperature can drop as much as 35 to 40 degrees at night, keeping the nighttime low below my threshold for good sleep. That science lesson brings to mind something I never heard of until I moved to Reno. When we were looking for a place to live, which happened to be in July, several places had something called a swamp cooler but not an air conditioner. My first thought was something like the way people in Alaska will cover things with snow when their freezer is full over winter months, but this was summer and I was confused. My husband, who spent a lot of time in desert climates, had to explain. A swamp cooler takes in dry air, fills it with humidity and pumps it into the house. The humidified air is cooler than the outside air, very much different from the humid air in Wisconsin homes over summer. Just like evaporating sweat cools our bodies, the evaporating humidity cools the air in the house in desert climates. The basic idea is the same as in the movies or TV where someone is sitting with a block of ice between themselves and a huge fan. The official term for them is evaporative coolers. Out here they are more cost effective than central air conditioning, as long as there is water to put into the air but that will be the focus of another of my ramblings. The thought of using humidity to cool a house took some time to sink into my Wisconsin trained brain.
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