evaporative air coolers?

Dave · 2007-07-31T14:56:21+00:00

Hello;I realize this has nothing to do with repair, but the other alt.home.*groups seem to either be near-dead and/or also inappropriate ...Anyone have an experience with an evaporative air cooler, that theycan relate? An example would be the CoolAir 4000 air cooler:'m looking for an alternative to an air conditioning unit to lowerthe temperature of a 260 sq.ft. room by about 10 degrees.Thanks in advance.

Dave 19 years ago

Hmm ... makes sense. Also reminds me of some comedian's bit, maybe Steve Wright's, where he talks about putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and letting them battle it out. (Though in my case the dehumdifier isn't in the same room. ;-) thanks.

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Rich256 19 years ago

A small cooler such as that Coolair used along with a refrigeration unit is just going to make the refrigeration unit work harder. The refrigeration has to remove that excess moisture from the air.

The only way a evaporative cooler will work properly is to use lots of dry outside air. To be useful in very hot temperatures it should be capable of exchangine all the air in the house in three minutes. When the humidity is in the 10% and temperature about 90 much less air movement is needed. Most coolers have two or three speeds. And they require open windows. They work great for cooling kitchens in a dry climate. But when the outside humidty climbs comfort level drops in comparison to refrigeration..

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56neiv 19 years ago

Some of you guys posted about how much an evaporative cooler can drop air temperature. All answers mentioned incoming air humidity is a key factor, that's right! There is something called cooling efficiency, calculated by the equation: eff = (DBT1-DBT2)/(DBT1-WBT1) where DBT is dry bulb temperature and WBT is wet bulb temperature ; 1 is measured at entry of the device and 2 is at the outlet. The wet- bulb temperature is related with Relative Humidity, some equation sets or psychrometric charts are needed to find it from Humidity- temperature data. What I would like to say is that each type of evaporative cooler has a typical efficiency. efficiencies from 30% to 90% were found on my lab. The efficiency does not change much with incoming air humidity Another interesting point is about the ASHRAE comfort zone mentioned by Nick. For Evaporative coolers designes must consider the "Modified comfort zone", proposed by the Eveporative Cooling Institute/ASHRAE; that I found on this World Bank publication; see the link below

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EPA recommends very carefull maintenance in humidifiers to prevent health problems. People should know evaporative coolers are humidifiers. By the other hand, dry air irritates throat and increases incidence of some respiratory illnesses. I recommend aircooles without pads; beacuse these tend to grow microorganisms inside the porous wetted media.

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