Evaporative cooling is an ancient method. Homeowners past used to spend summer nights sleeping on screened-in porches or enclosures. Wet sheets or blankets would be hung around the enclosure, fans were used to draw warm, outside air into and through those blankets, cooling the room.
That same concept has been refined to cool many of today's homes in dry areas like Arizona and southern California to great effect. An evaporative or "swamp" cooler uses electric fans to draw warm air into the system where it meets moist pads and is cooled by evaporation as it passes through. That cooled air is then distributed by fan throughout the home.
Evaporative coolers utilize a much simpler technology than refrigerant air conditioners and therefore cost much less: benefit number one. They also require less maintenance (those moist pads require replacement every season or two) and do not house any toxic refrigerant fluids. They do only work in areas of low or zero humidity (areas with humidity levels of 30% or less are ideal) but that includes large portions of the United States, and with energy efficiency at the forefront of homeowner and environmental concerns, they are growing in popularity quite fast.
Evaporative coolers use much less energy to run than air conditioners. That has opened the door to utilizing solar electric panels to run the small motors. This is especially plausible because solar panels work best at the hottest times of the day -- exactly when cooling requirements are at their highest. There are two distinct types of evaporative cooling: direct and indirect, both of which you can learn more about in the following Library articles. Some new evaporative coolers, called two-stage coolers, combine both indirect and direct systems into one that makes evaporative coolers more useful in climates with higher humidity levels.
Two-stage evaporative cooling is the process of combining both the direct and indirect systems to increase comfort in the home solar power system. Get ideas, articles, and free estimates from home solar power contractors.… Read more »
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