Swamp cooler question

I spent 29 years in Tucson. So I guess I'm qualified as a desert rat.

I used a bleeder kit (~$5). There's a "T" fitting which you put in the tube between the pump and the spider. Most of the water flows straight thru. Out the side of the T is a small connection for a 1/8"(?) tube. This small tube runs out the overflow and the end just gets stuffed into any stack pipe for the plumbing. A cheap sheet metal pinch clamp adjusts the flow rate in the small discharge tube. This worked great and kept the build up of calcium to a minimum. Ace HW had them. Home Despot too.

A friend of mine tried feeding his swamp box with soft water. Instead of the hard calcium build up he got sodium crystals which were quite soft and long and thin. Much easier to clean off the sides than calcium. They also shed from the inside of the pads and got blown into the house. His wife went ballistic.

Art

My swamp cooler was making odd noises, so I checked it. The pump was wearing out and making wierd noises.

Went to Homer's and got another. While there, I encountered a water dumper that exchanges the water after eight hours of running time.

I believe that this cooler uses softened water, because at the beginning of each season, it looks like Carlsbad Caverns inside. This exchanger touts that it will make everything run better, and keep the deposits down. It also claims that it will save water, which I find hard to believe, since it dumps all the water after eight hours of use.

Long story short, I got one, and am going to try it on one of my swampers. I have two. Anyone have any experience with these?

They are spendy, coming in at $48 per.

Advice and anecdotes appreciated. Puhleeeeeze, only desert rats that know what a swamp cooler is need reply.

Steve

I wondered what that T was for. So, it just kicks out some of the mineralized water, and keeps the tank full with relatively fresh water that keeps getting diluted with more fresh water?

BTW, yes, the Carlsbad Caverns formations are easy to remove. Lots easier than the regular scale.

Steve

That sounds quite unlike softened water to me. Lots of mineral in it.

Well ... I am not currently a desert rat, but I remember them from when I was growing up in South Texas. They would really freeze you out of a house there. Back then, IIRC, they were operated as total-loss devices -- no pumps to recirculate the water, just a continuous feed from the fresh water supply through pipes with small holes lined up over the filter mattes.

Here (near Washington DC), the humidity is so high that I don't see a chance for them to do any good. I strongly suspect that the refrigeration A/C units in this area probably *extract* more water from the air over a season than a total-loss swamp cooler would consume over the same period. :-)

I'm not giving either advice or anecdotes, but some guesswork.

1) Without that exchanger, as the season goes on, the concentration of minerals will build up and up, as the water evaporates (which is what does the cooling), leaving the minerals behind. 2) The higher concentration of minerals will probably accumulate on the filter mattes, closing the pores and reducing the airflow, so reducing the cooling capability, and costing you more to run it. 3) The increased mineral accumulation on the mattes *might* increase the amount of water sprinkled to the outside (instead of properly soaking into the mattes), and thus actually increase the water used compared to dumping the water once every eight hours.

Note -- these are not from experience with the product, just guesses as to what the benefits might be.

So -- please let us know what differences you experience over a cooling season between the two. Is there any way to measure the water consumed by each?

Enjoy, DoN.

You got it.

With no bleed the mineral saturation level will reach equilibrium when the rate the minerals are deposited on the sides and pads equals the rate they are added by the incoming makeup water.

With a bleed you lower the equilibrium level in the pan. The higher the bleed rate, the lower the level as you are removing more minerals. You will still get some mineral deposition on the sides & pads but far less than with no bleed.

BTW. It only bleeds when the pump is running so there is no waste of water when it's off.

Disclaimer: My experience is with unsoftened well water(high calcium content) and aspen pads. Your experience may differ.

Art

As an Albuquerque resident for 15+ yrs I guess I almost qualify as a "desert rat" . I think the 8 hrs is too frequent to dump the water. It realy depends on how hard the water is but I would think about once a week would be enough to help a lot. The "bleeder" technique will work to some extent but it just takes a fraction of all the water so some of it is the just introduced fresh water. I guess the REAL solution would be a hardness monitor and when a certain point is reached then dump it all. :-) (a retired electronics engineer speaking) :-) ...lew...

As a reference point ... Back in the sixties in Phoenix the pump on our well broke and we had to carry buckets of water up to the cooler.

5 gallons per hour with the temperature in the hundred & something-teens and single digit humidity.

Art

So -- please let us know what differences you experience over a cooling season between the two. Is there any way to measure the water consumed by each?

Steve, be SURE to route the dump water to either a vent pipe on the roof or a cleanout in the sewer system. These things work well, but make one hell of a mess if just vented into the the yard.

Bill in Phx.

SteveB wrote:

On Fri, 20 May 2005 16:19:37 -0700, SteveB wrote (in message ):

Las Vegas 28 years now and former steam boiler operator. LOTS of Calcium in our water. IMHO the bleed method is much better than the dump method. Also, I quit using the Aspen pads eight years ago and now use the plastic foam ones (Buy a roll and cut to size). They last two seasons (for me). Also went to a fiberglass/resin cooler. Won't ever rust out and the scale doesn't stick as much as metal. Idea I haven't tried yet would put water sump, pump, and float valve somewhere where you didn't have to climb onto roof to service; hose from pump to cooler and return drain hose to sump. Would really help with rust-out as that occurs at waterline. besides then only motor, belt, fan, and pads would require going up on roof. Hope this helps.

Roger in Vegas Worlds Greatest Impulse Buyer

At that low a humidity, I'll bet that you got *lots* of cooling for your work carrying the buckets.

So -- now all we need to do is to compare that one with one which dumps intentionally once every eight hours. (But under those conditions, you would have turned off that feature, I'll bet. :-)

Thanks, DoN.

That shows another difference between what I remember from South Texas in the mid 1950s and what you have there. These were window units, so everything was easy to access. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

In Perth, West Oz, we are getting more and more humid, but were a dry place until a few years back. So there are many houses with roof-mounted whole-house evap a/c units.

I was checking out these units, and asked how much water they used. "Oh. Only about 10 litres per day".

This is what I was told by everybody I asked in the stores. When I expostulated, they said "Well, there's a little tube that lets the water out the bottom just to drain them"

No idea.

I think it's bad, because they are chewing up water in a city that has real water problems, and nobody realises.

That's a good idea , I'll have to do that. I was in the shop yesterday thinking that its about time to re-do the swamp again soon! That should cut down on the fishy smell and chlorine usage. I run mine on and off and spray the outside down before turning it on and a pinch of chlorine , yeah I know it doesn't like metal. I just refurbish it once a year. The wife is always pissed that the shop is freezing while the house isn't near so with AC. Only thing is that the machines don't like it much.

Slap some magnets around the water line. :o)

I've always wondered what the best way to get the electric motor out of the rain forest would be.

It's about time to set the alarm at 3 am again. Which brings up a question I've wondered about for a long time. Is it possible to see the sine waves in the street lights from say 15 miles away and them being perpendicular and 15 miles long? They seem awfully rhythmic for just heat convection. They go back and forth while watching way out over the city before sunrise.

Hi all:

Since I just put new lines on my cooler dump system today I will tell you what I do. My cooler(s) are on the roof, I run a 1/8" black plastic line into the cooler (weight on the end in the cooler so it sinks) run it across the roof and down. It goes into a manifold with 3 adjustable taps with a ball valve shutoff on it. I widened the rubber grommet that the supply line uses and that is where this dump line go into. This siphons when I open the ball valve and I use the water to feed a stand of bamboo in back of the house. This works pretty well, costs almost nothing and the mineralized water seems fine with the bamboo, plus no holes in the cooler to leak. It also helps mineralization in the cooler, once or twice a month I run it full out to get rid of high concentrations due to evaporation. Another trick I use on the coolers in the shop is to route the pad supply water into copper line with fins on it that is in front of the output side (side drafts) then to the spider. This makes the output cooler (supply water gets COLD when humidity is low) and in addition I think it condenses out some of the humidity they blow out. Less rust on your tooling, of course this only works in places like Tucson, where I am.

Dave G.

You should see building swimming pools endlessly and I put up sprayers around the shade over the pool and just dump the water as fast as possible. They say pools evaporate a quarter of an inch a day out here and their everywhere! Fly over the city and look at the backyards and it's like pool, pool, pool, no pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, no pool. I'd have one , but the wife pitched a fit and I built a machine shop instead, now there isn't room for a pool. I was going to do it all tile in some kind of design, but NOOOO.

Wouldn't some sort of conductivity probe give an approximation of a hardness monitor? As the dissolved solids content in the water increased , you could , at a certain point, open a solenoid valve and dump the lot.

I doubt that your vision is quick enough to detect 1/120th of a second half-cycles. TV works with 1/30th second changes of scene, and movies are even slower, though I forget what the actual frame rate is. I do remember that it is different between home movie cameras and the professional ones.

Remember -- the heat convection has a lot of air to work with between you and those lights. I'll bet that if you spotted a bright star just above the horizon in about the same direction, you would get the same sort of variation.

Now -- one possibility (but *very* unlikely) would be that you are seeing the sum of light powered by two different power grids which are not precisely at the same frequency, so the brightness of the sum will vary, if the lights actually vary in intensity fast enough to track the power line. Incandescent lights will not, but mercury vapor ones probably will, and the Sodium lights probably will as well, since it is ionized clouds of the metal vapor which is generating the light, not overly hot metal filaments.

I say that it is *very* unlikely simply because any two grids that physically close together would be kept in sync to allow for an emergency transfer of load from one to the other.

Enjoy, DoN.

Was that a 3 or 4 pad cooler or a single pad window type cooler?

I have a single pad window type cooler that I welded up a small dolly for and hook up the garden hose and an extension cord when I want to use it. I was thinking about welding up a 5 gallon tank to put on top of the cooler, but if I have to refill it every hour, I'll live with the garden hose.

thanks, Bob in Phoenix

Roof mounted 6500CFM 4 pad.

Art

Was that a 3 or 4 pad cooler or a single pad window type cooler?

Foresaw that already. Not sure if I will go bleeder or dump, but I know it will sure make a white mess in the yard.

Steve