There are four general main types of air conditioning that you can consider, depending on the age and location of your house and the amount of money you're looking to spend. If you live in a hot dry region, like the American Southwest, you might want to consider an evaporative cooler, a technology that's been around for more than 3,000 years. Evaporative coolers, or eevaps, take advantage of the heat lost through the evaporation of water to provide low cost cooling to the home. In their modern incarnation, an electric blower pulls air through sponge-like pads kept wet by a circulating pump. The pads chill and filter the air and the blower passes the resulting cool breeze through your home.
Evaporative coolers cost quite a bit less than air conditioning.
However, cost isn't the only advantage of eevaps. Unlike most air conditioning systems that recirculate air, they bring lots of fresh clean air into the home, upping indoor air quality. Central Air Good as they are, evaporative coolers can't match the carefully controlled cooling power and dehumidification offered by a compressor-drive air conditioner. Air conditioning cools two ways. First, it removes heat from the air, thereby lowering its temperature.