Very cool. Evaporative cooling is neat in that it’s low-tech but it is often a bit climatologically awkward. It works great in dry climates, but then where do you get the water? And in humid climates you have the water supply but the cooling effect is greatly diminished. Still, there are certainly some places in the sweet spot where this may make sense
I imagine it would work great where I am in inland California but we couldn’t run it off or rainwater because we don’t get rain from ~ May - November. Still, in years with adequate water supply it’s a cool device.
where do you get the water?
From the rain. They have a built-in reservoir at the bottom, and use a little bit of electricity to pump the water up. And then water is collected back at the bottom etc
Yeah so if you’ve had two months of 35+ degree days and only a couple mm of rain it does nothing but soak up more heat. Like the above commenter said, there are probably places in a sweet spot for this, but it also wouldn’t work in many places. They even addressed your point about rain directly.
I might be wrong, but I remember seeing some numbers and your toilet would use more water than a similar system, so I still think it might be worth it (unless you use compost toilet with no water, then the comparison goes kaput). Let me try to find the source
Find it?
11 degrees cooler is pretty good for a non-enclosed space without any forced air. Big fan of this technology, my swamp cooler only starts to struggle in 100+ temperatures, the electricity use is next to nothing compared to AC, and it’s a really simple machine to maintain and repair, like this video shows the core mechanism is just a small water pump.
An aesthetically pleasing DIY passive swamp cooler is a nice project. There are ways it could be more efficient, but since they’re in Texas and definitely have an A/C, anything to offset their use of it is a positive.
If all our architecture did shit like this with consideration to place, it could even matter.
Do you know where the wild things go?
They go along to take your honey
Please don’t go please don’t go
I love you so I love you so
Looks more like a cool garden feature than something for cooling your house, or is this more to counter the urban heat island while in your garden?
Needs more greenery on it but hopefully that would grow with time.
they mentioned their patio in the video so I think it’s a way to keep things a bit cooler while they are sitting outside
Could be interesting to try something like that, don’t have anything like as much space though. Wonder what kind of water consumption rate to expect. If something useful could be grown in it then that would also be a large benefit.
Wonder what kind of water consumption rate to expect
This is rainwater recycled!
Sure, but you can only store so much rainwater and I haven’t seen rain in almost 2 months. In England! My plants would like some of the rainwater I have stored too and its very limited.
The water drips down into the containment area where it’s pumped back up so I believe it is quite cyclical and efficient.
Evaporative cooling means water is evaporating. With such a large area, potentially a fair bit of it.
Nice project, feels chill even in video
As a decorative water feature with a secondary cooling effect, I can see this working.
But the most efficient cooling method is still solar powered heat exchanger. You could use the water condensation from that to run our swamp cooler.
