A Swamp Cooler Primer
Energy saving cooling:
To say that Texas is hotter than Hell in the summertime is more than clich�©: two months of over-100-degree days with scant rainfall provokes the occasional theological debate, with one universal conclusion: if Hell is this hot, I better change my behavior. Global terrorism has only exacerbated my damnation beliefs, and drive me to read up on just how practical living on less fossil fuel could be in a state where air conditioning is as mandatory as adequate shelter. The solution may be a swamp cooler, depending on where you live.
While it sounds like a fluorescent orange Igloo chest of tallboys floating in scum water next to Bubba’s inner tube, a swamp cooler looks very much like a suburban air filtration device. It is designed to mimic the way the human body cools itself: we perspire a mixture of salts and moisture, and the air that contacts the perspiration cools the body with evaporation (there’s a more exacting explanation of this involving thermodynamics, but I’m certainly not the one to deliver it). A swamp cooler works through the same evaporation process, so often these are referred to as “evaporative coolers”.
The unit itself it a metal frame box with one central fan. The fan is surrounded by pads made of cedar shavings or cellulose. These pads are continually soaked with water by the unit’s water pump. The fan pulls warm air into the unit, and that warm air passes through the pads. The pads cool the air by evaporating its water molecules, dropping the temperature of the air by an average of 20 degrees.
Because swamp coolers don’t use any refrigeration process, they require an average of 25% of the electricity that customary air conditioning unit require, and that excites both environmentalists and cheapskates (I think to think of myself as the former, but I’m probably more the latter). However, swamp coolers only work for dry, desert-like climates such as Arizona and New Mexico. The eastern half of the United States is too humid to allow the evaporation process to work.
To say that Texas is hotter than Hell in the summertime is more than clich�©: two months of over-100-degree days with scant rainfall provokes the occasional theological debate, with one universal conclusion: if Hell is this hot, I better change my behavior. Global terrorism has only exacerbated my damnation beliefs, and drive me to read up on just how practical living on less fossil fuel could be in a state where air conditioning is as mandatory as adequate shelter. The solution may be a swamp cooler, depending on where you live.
While it sounds like a fluorescent orange Igloo chest of tallboys floating in scum water next to Bubba’s inner tube, a swamp cooler looks very much like a suburban air filtration device. It is designed to mimic the way the human body cools itself: we perspire a mixture of salts and moisture, and the air that contacts the perspiration cools the body with evaporation (there’s a more exacting explanation of this involving thermodynamics, but I’m certainly not the one to deliver it). A swamp cooler works through the same evaporation process, so often these are referred to as “evaporative coolers”.
The unit itself it a metal frame box with one central fan. The fan is surrounded by pads made of cedar shavings or cellulose. These pads are continually soaked with water by the unit’s water pump. The fan pulls warm air into the unit, and that warm air passes through the pads. The pads cool the air by evaporating its water molecules, dropping the temperature of the air by an average of 20 degrees.
Because swamp coolers don’t use any refrigeration process, they require an average of 25% of the electricity that customary air conditioning unit require, and that excites both environmentalists and cheapskates (I think to think of myself as the former, but I’m probably more the latter). However, swamp coolers only work for dry, desert-like climates such as Arizona and New Mexico. The eastern half of the United States is too humid to allow the evaporation process to work.
