Looking for a more efficient way to cool your home? Evaporative air conditioners, or "swamp coolers," as they're sometimes called, might be the perfect solution. This guide will tell you a little bit about how they work and how to go about installing them in your home.
How They Work
An evaporative cooler, as the name suggests, cools down your home through the power of evaporating water. Evaporating water produces cool air. The evaporative cooler then circulates that air into your home. The unit is made up of a large, window-mounted box that houses a fan that is surrounded by a wet pad. The fan blows air over the pad, carrying the cooler air into your home, driving the hotter air outside via vents or windows. Water is continuously pumped into the unit to keep the pad wet.
Evaporative coolers differ from traditional air conditioners in a few ways:
- Evaporative coolers are fairly low tech, avoiding the use of Freon or other refrigerants. This makes them significantly more eco-friendly.
- While traditional air conditioners remove humidity from the air, evaporative coolers add it.
- Evaporative coolers are significantly cheaper to install than central air conditioning units and use less electricity than wall-mounted or central air conditioning units.
The Drawbacks
Despite the many positives that evaporative coolers can offer, there are a couple drawbacks as well:
- Evaporative coolers work best when the outside air is dry. So, they might not be the best option for humid areas.
- They tend to use a great deal of water (up to 15 gallons a day). This could render them useless should any restrictions be put on water usage (say, during a drought).
Installation
Installation of these devices is pretty simple. In fact, it's exactly like installing a standard, window-mounted air conditioner. Open the window and clean it. Place the unit in the window and prop it up to keep it steady; you can either have someone hold it up or else place something, like cinderblocks, under it to hold it up. Level it using a level.
Swamp coolers usually use a set of chains, attached to the cooler and the side of your home, to hold them in place. Attach these once the unit is level. Then, extend the sliders (on the side of the unit) out to the edges of the window (as you would with a window-mounted air conditioner), effectively sealing the opening. Finish by placing weatherproof stripping around the unit.
Once installed, all you need to do is connect the unit to the water supply (or fill it manually, depending on the type of unit), plug it in, and let the cool air fill your home.