Date:         Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:59:39 -0500
Reply-To:     Jim Felder <jim.felder@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Jim Felder <jim.felder@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Re: coolers from swampy.net
In-Reply-To:  <003f01c8ec1d$8e617ee0$0c00a8c0@mike2d93581d7f>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I live in the south and such coolers would never work here as the humidity
has never been, to my knowledge, below 30 percent in my 58 years here.
But in a magazine article, I once saw an angle to evaporative cooling that
was used back in the seventies by builders using it to cool homes in
Australia, where humidity is also a problem. It got around the "swamp
cooler" problem in a novel way. It worked like this:

At the basement level would be built two large concrete block vents, it
seems each about 4 x 4 x 4 feet, passing from the outside of the house to
the air handling system in the basement or crawl space. They were adjacent
to each other, and each had a fan on the inside that would draw outside air
through them. A vane-type baffle, hinged at the point between the two, could
flop back and forth and divert the air from one or the other into a duct
that supplied either the house or a duct back to the outside, but not both.

The chambers between the fan and the outside were filled with rocks. A
sprinkler was timed to soak one pile of rocks or the other. What happened
was that, in turn, one pile of rocks was wet that chamber's fan drove the
moisture off that pile of rocks and cooling them down, with the moisture
vented to the outside. Once cool--and dry--the vane would switch over to the
house ventilation, and cooled dry air would be blown inside. During this
time the process of wetting and cooling would be done on the other pile of
rocks. So, there was always cooled dry air being blown into the house while
the other pile of rocks was being cooled, with the wet water vented to the
outside. The timing was such that by the time the dry stones had lost their
cooling capability, the other pile was ready to go.

This same approach could be done with a car cooler using more sophisticated
heat exchangers. Maybe it could fit into the "luggage rack" atop a westy, or
in the space of the spare tire carrier and a route into the ventilation
system being adopted from below.

Jim

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 12:08 PM, Mike <mbucchino@charter.net> wrote:

>  I lived in Phoenix, AZ for 12 years.  There's times of the year when the
> humidity is so high, that a swamp cooler won't work.  They operate on the
> priciple of adding cool moisture to the dry air (humidifying), giving you
> the feeling of evaporative cooling.
>  Imagine spraying a fine mist of water on your hot skin.  It works; up to a
> point.  If the outside humidity is higher than about 30%, it's practically
> useless against the heat.
>  My home had a swamp cooler 'piggybacked' onto the roof-mounted central AC
> duct.
>  When using the swamp cooler, you had to leave windows open to allow air to
> flow out.  I had ceiling 'up-ducts' installed to allow us to keep the
> windows closed (and locked!) to prevent break-ins.
>  AC, OTOH, needs the windows closed to recirculate the same interior air
> over and over again to be able to properly cool it down and de-humidify it.
>  These evaporative coolers would have little or no use here in New England,
> where hot dry days are few and far between.  Even Phoenix has more hot
> humid
> days now, due to all the expansion (lawns, pools, golf courses, etc.).
>  Bisbee, AZ is out the boonies; far from the big city and out of the
> valley, up in the higher desert terrain.  It's definitely drier there, than
> in the 'valley of the sun'.
>
> HTH,
>
> Mike B.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jake de Villiers" <crescentbeachguitar@GMAIL.COM>
> To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
> Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 12:44 PM
> Subject: Re: coolers from swampy.net
>
>
>  My father had a swamp cooler on the roof of his house in Bisbee, Arizona
>> and
>> it worked very well.
>>
>> When its 115 degrees out, it only needs a 10 - 15 percent reduction to
>> feel
>> more comfortable.  And you can still go outside without being flattened by
>> the heat.....
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Florian Speier <groups.florian@gmail.com
>> >
>> wrote:
>>
>>  Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> I am about to buy a cooler from swampy.net, specifically the mw1 or
>>> t154.
>>> While I know that this is not real ac, which I plan to add next winter or
>>> so, I wonder how good they are in the american west. Anyone have any
>>> experience?
>>>
>>> Florian
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jake
>> 1984 Vanagon GL
>> 1986 Westy Weekender "Dixie"
>> Crescent Beach, BC
>> www.crescentbeachguitar.com
>> http://subyjake.googlepages.com/mydixiedarlin%27
>>
>