Swamp Thing (Epilogue, For Now)

[kevin_standlee]

The heat has arrived. Today's projected high is 34°C and it will stay in the high 30s (close to 100°F in old money) throughout the week, with humidity between 10 and 50%, mostly on the lower side of that range. Therefore, it was time to put the refurbished swamp cooler to the test.



There isn't an easy way to plumb water to the place where we need the cooling (the living room, which is also my home office), so in order to actually use the evaporative cooler, we have to fill it with water manually. Here's what it looked like dry after having sat for a week with the multiple coats of paint having had plenty of time to cure.



And here it is full of water, although it's sort of hard to see in the picture. The bucket holds between 9-11 liters of water, and it takes three bucket-loads to fill the cooler pan to within 1-2 cm of the rim.

With pan full and the cover replaced, I turned the pump on. The way this kind of cooler works is that you should run the pump for a while to pump water up to the top where it percolates through the blue pads. The pump made funny noises initially, but once it stopped sucking air, everything was fine. Once the pads were well saturated, I turned on the fan. Success! Lots of cool air, evaporating in the low humidity and providing immediate relief from the heat.

We have to keep a couple of windows open in order for this to work properly. Otherwise, you get too much humidity and not enough evaporation. Also, once the outside air temperatures get above body temperature (37°C), I find that the cooling effect tends to trail off. It's not perfect, but it's also a lot less expensive than a big home AC system would be, as in one fewer zero in the cost.

Comments

[delosharriman]

If you use filtered, or ideally distilled, water, you should be able to substantially reduce the mineral buildup. In fact, it might work to use distilled water, say, one fill in five.

[kevin_standlee]

You're not the first person to suggest that, but distilled water is $0.80/gallon, or roughly $7.50 per complete fill of the cooler, and I've already put another three buckets into the cooler just today. Besides the cost, that's makes for an entire case of distilled water in just one day. While we use distilled water for cooling (because the tap water runs Lisa's pans), running through a case or more of water per day is too much for us. Although this cleaning/painting/refurbishing is a hassle, it still costs less.

Lisa says that she'd considered trying to figure out a solar-powered distillation system, but in essence the house runs on the wrong axis as the roof is the easiest place to put it. I think we're pretty much stuck with this system, annoying as it is to have to do this every year or three. We can help ourselves out by draining the cooler more often and also running a cooler-cleaning solution through it every now and the to fight hard-water buildup.

Our water is certainly safe to drink (for the amount of money spend for the water plant, which amounts to nearly half our annual property tax bill, it had better be!), it's very hard, and we're not likely to put in a water softening unit, which as its own problems. Ah, the joys of home ownership and the tradeoffs therein. Still, I find that I do like owning a home rather than renting, and furthermore owning in a non-HOA situation where people can't tell us what color to paint the wood box or stuff like that.

[delosharriman]

I certainly wouldn't suggest buying cases of gallon bottles for such a purpose. Sometimes you can get it in five-gallon jugs, or larger units, at a considerably lower price. Also, here where I am, possibly because of the Hispanic population (I really don't know, but many of them seem to be labelled primarily in Spanish, & it may be that immigrants are less likely to trust the city water system) there are these little kiosks everywhere which dispense RO-treated water for 25¢ a gallon. This is substantially less mineralized than the city water, & is probably what I would use in an evaporative cooler, if they weren't totally worthless in this climate.

[katster]

So, there was the time that my folks went camping and left me home with the cats, the air conditioner broke, and it was 116 out. In Redding, we had both AC and swamp, so I was still running the cooler to get some airflow, even if it was stupidly hot air. That was unpleasant.

[kevin_standlee]

As someone who spent a large part of their childhood growing up in the farmland between Sacramento and Yuba City, I Feel Your Pain. And Tudor was a cool oasis compared to places like Red Bluff and Redding.