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Old 07-02-2010, 05:02 AM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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Love to see the pictures when you get it done, I'm also interested in how well it works for you. Ya I am familiar with evaporative coolers, although I commonly call them swamp coolers. That's an interesting chart, and I have not done extensive testing on them, I'm just going by my real life experiences. This is the portable cooler that I mentioned I had (before I sold it) although I only paid $299 USD at the time.

Master cool

Although technically it's a closed loop system, they still lose water. It evaporates and becomes humidity in the room. As I mentioned it held 5 gallons, but the water level would get to low for the pump if you ran it full blast for 3-4 hours. I didn't want the pump to run dry while I was sleeping so I hooked up the water line to the float valve (it came with) to a faucet (for the toilet tank fill line) in the bathroom and ran it along the baseboards into the bedroom. Now I know it is not suppose to work well in closed spaces, but I was not about to open the windows and allow the 120+ degree heat (fresh air) into a room that was 80 degrees without the cooler even being on.

Of coarse it felt cool if you were right in front of it, but the humidity in the room kept rising (because the water evaporates) to over 60% (from less than 10%). That's why I sold it. At my place of work we had two roof mounted swamp coolers in the shop, and from my experience they still weren't any good unless you were standing directly under the air duct. If you were 10 feet away it did no good for me. I don't know what the water temp was in those systems, but being mounted on the roof and the water lined needing to run up there, it was not any 72 degrees. But all that being said, I can easily build a swamp cooler myself. I have no idea what the books say the temps should be, but I do have real world experience with how they function, work, and cooling ability's (in my area).

I also planed to build something similar, but an actual closed loop design that's more like an AC, than swamp cooler. Because the water does not flow down a filter that the air passes through providing humidity. Instead the water is pumped through a radiator (refurbished, and clean), and the air passes through the radiator. The water would be pumped from an ice chest full of ice water to cool the radiator.

No humidity and cool air. But I have never tested it, and don't know how long the ice water would stay ice cold. As you mentioned it takes energy to cool with a swamp cooler, as it would in this system. That energy is heat transfer (same principal as geothermal energy). But the key is "transfer" not "elimination", so the heat does not disappear, it's just transferred to the water. I know that's slightly different than how a swamp cooler cools, as anyone who has walked under a mister on a hot day knows. But that's because technically it's not a completely closed loop, and the air passes through the water on the filter.

If the air temp and water temp are the same or close then there is not much transfer, but in my area when the outside temp is 120+ degrees there is plenty of transfer. We even leave the hot water heater off all summer because the heat in the garage is hot enough to heat the water in the hot water heater, and that's insulated. We even need to let the shower run (cold water) for about 10 minutes before getting in it because the water is to hot. After about 10 minutes the water that was in the underground pipes (and cooled by geothermal energy) begins to flow out, then you don't get burned when getting in it.

P.S. Sorry English is my only language, but I believe I am able to understand you fine, for what it's worth.
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