Pablo,

All a dehumidifier consists of is a small air conditioner that happens to exhaust all the heat right back into the room. Okay, and a water tank to hold the condensate, which would ordinarily flow outside with a window or central unit.

If the choice is between an A/C and a dehumidifier, choose the A/C every time.

My bedroom windows face west, and in Southern California, that means the room turns into an oven during hot summer afternoons. But I counteract the effect by simply covering my windows with aluminum foil. Once I started doing that, the temperature in that room dropped by at least 15 degrees! Sure, it can darken the room, but I leave a space of a few inches at the bottom for light, and I'm not usually in there during the day anyway. With the help of the foil, it only takes about 20 minutes to cool the room once the sun goes down, by opening the windows. It used to take at least an hour and a and a half to clear out the heat.

Sometimes low-tech can do wonders.

Serai1, your plan sounds cool -- except for those surprise midnight visits from the DEA.

If your attic is not well ventilated (I have never actually seen one that has enough ventilation) consider installing a thermostat -controlled attic fan. It is amazing what a difference it can make when the attic is 105 F instead of 150 F.

My condo is so warm that I have yet to run the furnace at all, even in January in Canada. But in the summer its insanely hot and my AC runs hard 24/7.

Serai1, I'm going to try that tin foil thing, although all my windows face east. No doubt the condo board will go absolutely berserk. Bonus!

...you can always put a bowl of ice cubes in front of a fan...

Ice made in a freezer, which is running on what, exactly?! And it's not like the ice would last even ten minutes in the type of temperatures where you'd be tempted to try this trick... so let's make lots of ice! Or maybe not.

Too often Pablo's assessments are weakened by poor mathematics, overly simplistic comparisons, or, as in this case, asides which are just puzzling from an environmental perspective.

And then there's the premise of this week's apples and oranges "comparison": fans are obviously more energy efficient per full-power unit than a/c units, but offer a completely different kind of heat relief, and need to run constantly.

I can't sleep in a hurricane -- and my ceiling fan would have to be kicking one up to provide the same cooling that my a/c unit provides on its most energy efficient "night" setting, which I can generally switch on for 30 minutes every 4 hours or so to keep the temperature below "sweating".

So why not run the maths on actual usage?

Too hard, Pablo?

Do your research, Pablo. See:

http://blog.worldvillage.com/home/swamp_cooler_vs_air_conditioner.html

and

http://www.doityourself.com/stry/swampcoolerinstall

And much, much more. Swamp coolers are FAR more efficient than AC - as well as cheaper to run, easier to maintain, better for the environment (no freon), healthier (they constantly bring in fresh air) and more pleasant (you don't feel like you're living inside a dank, stale refrigerator) since you must leave a window open.

We're on our 14th day of temperatures in the high nineties. In my home office, beside an open window three rooms away from the swamp cooler, it's 71 degrees all day.

Swamp coolers rule, AC drools.

(Yes, I know the only work where humidity is low. One more reason to love dry heat.)

Foil does work. But there's a solution that's just as good that won't drive the homeowner's association wild enough to ostrasize you at the next community meeting.

Blackout drapes. You buy this stuff by the yard and then, if you're sewing challenged, you pin or velcro the stuff to your curtains.

Nice and NO light.

Works exceedingly well on West-facing windows.

At least where I live. The fans and the air conditioning run at all times. The thermostat is set at a reasonable 75 degrees.

I do miss being able to cope in the summers with just fans and open windows. I miss people thinking a hot spell that lasted 14 days was unbearable.

I'm stuck in a place where the heat lasts from May to September. Where the worst, swampiest, wet-cotton, blast-to-the face heat comes in August.

Count your blessings if you don't live in a place where air conditioning is not (rightfully) worshipped.

I forgot two other options, b/c I don't use them, but they're still nice.

Shading screen material that blocks out the sun and works just like window screen material is available by the roll.

Tinting material, which comes in rolls, which you tack up like contact paper, usually looks nice for a few years at any rate.

I just like blackout material because I can take it down in winter, and to be honest, it looks the nicest. (At least to me.)

The answer starts out by talking about "50 watts of 120 volt electricity", as if 50 watts of 240 volt electricity would somehow be different. A watt is a unit of electricity regardless of the voltage used to generate it.

If the advice given is for the particular LW, then reducing the humidity or using a swamp cooler are mutually contradictory. One or the other works for a particular situation but cannot be considered as alternatives for a particular locale at a similar time.

The idea of using a freezer to make ice cubes which are then placed before a fan for cooling is too silly for words. Ignoring the minimal cooling affect on a house of a bowl of ice cubes, that advice makes as much sense as leaving the fridge door open to cool the house.

And going to an already air conditined building is not better for the environment. Just walking into the building will let out some of that cool air, and the building's air conditioner will have to work just a little bit harder to cool down that warm body that is now within the building. Or that one might drive to this air conditioned building.