Evaporative coolers are appearing more and more in homes, apartments and office spaces to cool the air instead of traditional air conditioners. Evaporative coolers look much like a free standing air conditioner and use evaporative cooling to lower air temperature in a home or office. What is evaporating cooling? Evaporative coolers use one of nature’s most effective means of lowering temperature and that is through the evaporation of water, known as evaporative cooling.
The best way to try explaining what is evaporative cooling is to give an example. A simple example would be to consider how hot you feel after a long jog, your body produces perspiration to cool you down. How this process works is essential the same process of evaporative cooling. The perspiration absorbs the heat from your skin and when it evaporates it takes the heat with it. Evaporative coolers work much the same way, hot air is drawn through moist wet pads by using a fan and then heat is drawn from the pads as soon as the water begins to evaporate, and this effectively cools the air in a room.
Are evaporative coolers effective at lowering the temperature in a room? Yes, amazingly so, evaporative cooling is a low cost way to effectively lower a room’s temperature. In fact, evaporative coolers are so efficient at evaporating water from the wet internal pads, and as a result heat is taken with it, which produces discharged air that is on average 30 degrees cooler than the air being drawn into the unit.
An interesting study revealed that constant air circulating in a room will lower the perceived temperature of people in the same room by as much as 6 degrees! This is called the “effective temperature” in a room, which is considered 4 to 6 degrees lower than what the actual temperature is. The best time of the day to operate an evaporative cooler is during the hottest time of the day. Why is that?
It is at the hottest time of the day when relative humidity falls quickly while the temperature increases. This helps water to evaporate at a faster rate. The way evaporative cooling works, the faster the evaporation of water from the pads the more heat that can be taken out of the air, which means cooler air.
What is evaporative cooling? It is an ingenious low cost way to lower the temperature in a room or building. In fact, more people are using evaporative coolers because they use only one-forth as much electricity as their air conditioned cousins. This means homeowners can save a whopping 75% off their monthly cooling costs, which explains why evaporative coolers in Australia are popping up everywhere.