Swamp Coolers -A More Economic Way to Cool Your Home
What is a swamp cooler? I’ll tell you this–it’s NOT Shrek’s choice of camping gear to keep his drinks cold. Swamp Coolers are, however, an economic way to cool your home if you live in a dry climate.
Also called ‘evaporative coolers’, swamp coolers work in a way similar to the first generation of air conditioners. If you remember those, they consisted of basically a block of ice, and a fan blowing across the top, therefore blowing cooled air into the rest of the room. Well, swamp coolers work in much the same way.
Basically, the swamp coolers use electricity to run a water pump and a fan to cool a home. The reason they have to be used in a dry area is because of the way the cooler works…it’s a box that’s attached to the roof of a house, with vents on each side of the box to bring air in, then a fan that pulls the air in and a duct to take the cooled air into the house. On the inside of each vented side of the box is a cooler pad, which is about 2 to 3 inches thick, and about 3 feet on each side. These pads are made of a fiber that is used to hold water.
To give you an idea of how the swamp cooler works, try to visualize this: there is a small reservoir of water at the bottom of the box. From the bottom, a tube comes up and ‘spiders’ out to the four cooling pads on each side of the box. Small hoses stem from these ends, and are used to pour water from the reservoir onto the cooling pads, keeping them wet. The water continues the cycle, draining off the pads and back into the reservoir. Heading toward the house side of the box, there is a large fan that draws hot air in from the outside, pulling it through the wet pads, which cools the air via evaporation, then the cooled air is pulled through the duct into the house.
Again, these types of coolers can only be used in dry, desert condidtions because they are dependant on dry air blowing through the cooling filters. While cheaper, swamp coolers have drawbacks, too. The main concern for people looking to use a swamp cooler is if it does rain in the area where you live. If the fan starts pulling wet air in, only hot, wet air will be blown into the house, rather than the desired cool air. If the air outside is humid, and stays that way for several days, the pads will start to stink, and with the fan still blowing, that smell will be blown into the house. Clogs in the water lines, clogged pads, and breaks in the water pump can also contribute to problems using a swamp cooler.
Swamp coolers cost between 200 and 400 dollars on average for a home cooling unit, and over 1 or 2 thousand dollars for a commercial cooling unit. However, if you’re only cooling a small area, you can get a portable swamp cooler for as low as 80 dollars.
There are an array of places to purchase swamp coolers, most of which can be found online. Overall, it’s a more economical way to cool your home IF you reside in a dry, desert climate.
