Wondering how much pressure you were actually using before, because that detail matters a lot here. Like were you leaning into the DA with your body weight or just gripping it hard and muscling it around? I ask because I had a similar thing happen with a painter who told me my problem was speed, not pressure, and he was right for clear coats but dead wrong for blocking primer. Did Mike say anything about which grits this trick works best on? Curious if you tried it on something like 180 or 220 too, or just the rough 80 grit stuff.

Just work here because our air is dry" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because the monsoon weeks in July and August are exactly when swamp coolers fall on their face. When the dew point climbs past 55 or so, that $600 unit stops cooling and starts just moving damp air around your house, and now you are at 74 degrees only because it is raining outside. Your neighbor's $310 bill sounds less like a swamp cooler verdict and more like he has a leaky house, bad ducts, or a unit sized wrong, since plenty of folks with refrigerated air in ABQ run way under that. And that $94 is not the full story either, you are paying for water, pads, and pump swaps every season, plus you get to climb up there twice a year. I am not saying rip it out, but the money math only looks that lopsided when you compare your best case against his worst.