{"id":2732,"date":"2019-10-11T12:19:05","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T17:19:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/?p=2732"},"modified":"2019-10-11T12:37:22","modified_gmt":"2019-10-11T17:37:22","slug":"swamp-cooler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/?p=2732","title":{"rendered":"Swamp Cooler"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Burnhardt Road Rye AZ<\/p><\/div>\n

Payson weather was getting too cold overnight, so after a week at our campsite, we decided to move to a lower altitude. The ladies went over to Cottonwood and I drove south to a spot just outside Rye, Arizona. <\/p>\n

Rye is only 15 miles from Payson but 2000\u2019 lower in altitude. I figured that some daytime temperatures would be quite warm but nothing very uncomfortable. It turns out that a few days have been up into the 80s, a perfect temperature as long as you can sit in the shade and enjoy a beverage. The inside of Minnie, however, becomes too warm as the sun beats down and cooks the walls. With that thought in mind, I wanted to document here the homemade air conditioner I built. <\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t want to hear about mechanical contraptions you can skip this part. <\/p>\n

I can\u2019t fully take credit for the design of my evaporative cooler but I have long had the idea way before I found out others had similar designs. I have a large box fan purchased this summer that I would place in the window and use a mister bottle to spray the air in front of me. This worked ok but was tedious and inefficient. I tried soaking towels and hanging them in front of the fan. I tried blowing the fan across a tray of water. Nothing worked very well. Then I got the idea of placing a cooler pad in front of the fan and dripping water through the pad and catching it in a tray below. When I looked on YouTube, it turned out a few others had the same idea and explained in detail how they built one. <\/p>\n

My first design had the cooler pad in front of the fan. Placing the pad behind the fan draws more air than trying to push air through the fan but I was worried about moisture getting into the fan motor. I finally rationalized that box fans are so cheap that even if they only lasted a couple years it was worth the increased efficiency to pull air through the pad. <\/p>\n

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Cooler unit<\/p><\/div>\n

My final design (so far, I\u2019m always tweaking it) uses a frame of pvc pipe with holes drilled along the top and a cooler pad held inside the frame. A small fountain pump circulates water up the pipe where it trickles down through the pad into a plastic tote. The whole frame and pad are attached to the fan and placed in the window. I cut the tote lid for shrouds to seal the unit to the window. <\/p>\n

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Circulation pump<\/p><\/div>\n

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Cooler pad and frame<\/p><\/div>\n

Evaporative cooling works well when the humidity is low. On very dry days I have seen the air temperature as much as 15 degrees lower than the outside temperatures. When the humidity gets above 25% or 30%, the cooler will only take a few degrees from the outside air. <\/p>\n

My swamp cooler would not be possible without the new lithium ion battery I put in. I have to give credit to the extra power it produces to run a box fan and fountain pump for hours on end. <\/p>\n

Once everything is set up and running, all I have to do is add water every couple hours. It\u2019s amazing how much water will evaporate into the air. And I guess there is a benefit to health too. Studies show that a slight increase in humidity is better for us than very dry air. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Payson weather was getting too cold overnight, so after a week at our campsite, we decided to move to a lower altitude. The ladies went over to Cottonwood and I drove south to a spot just outside Rye, Arizona. Rye is only 15 miles from Payson but 2000\u2019 lower in altitude. I figured that some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-junk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2732"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2740,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions\/2740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelafferty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}