
The Principles Behind Evaporative Coolers
Living in Southern Arizona means living with air conditioners. You don’t have any choice when regular summer temperatures around Tucson can reach 120°F during the day.
Or do you? Standard air conditioning systems that circulate refrigerant and cool your indoor air through a process of evaporation and condensation are not your only options for lowering the temperature inside your home. The power of evaporative cooling—using water to cool your air—can provide you summer relief.
Goettl Good Guys Air Conditioning offers installation of modern evaporative coolers that will provide you with comfort as well as significant energy savings. Call us today to find out more about this alternative for your old air conditioner.
How evaporative coolers work
The basic principle behind an evaporative cooler (also known as a swamp cooler) is one you’ll experience any time you dunk your hands into water on a cool day and then draw them out. Your hands will immediately feel cooler. That’s the power of water evaporation at work: when liquid evaporates, it draws heat with it. An evaporative cooler applies this principle to the air, drawing heat from the air to bring the water to equilibrium.
Here’s how an evaporative cooler carries out this task: The cooler, which is usually mounted on the roof of a home, draws hot air inside using a blower fan. That fan pushes the outdoor air into the house and through the ventilation system to the rooms. But first, it passes through a set of damp pads. The water in these pads cools down the air. A water pump keeps the pads moist, otherwise they would quickly dry out. The air that enters the house is now cooled down to a comfortable level.
Evaporative coolers are inexpensive and use much less energy than standard ACs (about a third less) because they do not need to run a compressor to move refrigerant around the system. However, evaporative coolers do have some drawbacks. They are not very effective in humid climates, where the difference in moisture levels in the air and the pads is too small for there to be much cooling affect. Evaporative coolers also raise the humidity level inside a home, which can be uncomfortable. You must also maintain the system regularly to avoid mildew developing in the pads.
We are now in our 75th year of serving people with cooling solutions in Green Valley, AZ, from evaporative coolers to central air conditioners to the innovative AquaChill system. Call us today to find out more about your options this summer.
Our evaporative cooler experts at Goettl Good Guys Air Conditioning can help you discover if one of these systems is a good fit for your home and budget.