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Old Posted Jul 25, 2019, 8:40 PM
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Pedestrian Pedestrian is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sopas ej View Post


Funny you should bring those up; I recently talked to someone about swamp coolers... I guess I could look up how they work online, but basically what they told me was that swamp coolers only work in dry climates, and it basically blows cold moist air (vs. an air conditioner which blows cold dry air).

So do they act as humidifiers too, then? They'd be good for people who have issues with dry air?
Yes, they only work in dry climates. The simple principle is that evaporation uses ambient heat which is why you feel cold when you get out of a swimming pool (and in AZ in summer, I've literally begun shivvering when it was 105 degrees in that situation). So evaporative coolers blow the air across/through water-soaked material causing evaporation which cools and, yes, humidifies the air before it is blown into the living space. But making the air more humid when the ambient humidity is 5% is not a problem--in fact, for most people it's desirable (I get nose bleeds from the dryness whenever I first go back to Tucson in the fall). It never gets "Gulf Coast humid".

If the ambient air is already anything like saturated with moisture, very little evaporation occurs and so very little cooling. These things are useful mainly in the desert but there they can be very useful and some form of them have been around a long time.
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