[AT] Vehicle cooling before AC

[Mark Johnson]

Fixed swamp coolers are still used for home/small business A/C in some 
parts of Arizona (they don't work as well in Phoenix; all the irrigation 
and lawn watering have raised the humidity from historic levels). The 
energy cost is somewhat less than Freon-based cooling, but it does 
require a good supply of water, which can be problematic in the desert. 
At $15-20 per foot of well depth, in 'good' drilling, and twice that 
through limestone, a 400 foot hole is an expensive way to get 
water...and using large quantities of rural/municipal water for cooling 
is going to get expensive rather quickly.

I have also heard tales of folks who turned them too high, and the 
resulting humidity resulted in a mold storm in their house.

Arizona story: The Titan Missile Museum, south of Tucson, is today kept 
cool with a rather large swamp cooler. The site was originally cooled 
with somewhere between 50 and 100 tons of conventional A/C, necessary 
because the liquid fuels in the missiles had to be kept at 62 F or lower 
- somewhere just above 70, hydrazine can explosively decompose. Of 
course, today there's no fuel in the display bird, so it suffices to 
keep the complex in the low 70's for tours.

On 2/12/2019 7:22 PM, Ralph Goff wrote:
> On 2/12/2019 4:46 PM, bloomis at charter.net wrote:
>>
>> A California thing for sure. If you check out low rider cars, i.e. 
>> early 50 models, particularly Chevys, a lot of them have them on the 
>> restored products. Same so with 'eyebrows'. Well a bit huge but you 
>> get the point.
>>
>> Bradford
>>
> Those big tubular things hanging on the side of the car were known as 
> "swamp coolers" I believe. We never saw them on vehicles but there was 
> something similar on the
>
> early tractor cabs. Known as a cab cooler. It had a big foam sponge 
> filter that was kept soaked in water by a pump. The cab fan drew air 
> through it and blew the somewhat
>
> cooled air into the cab. It was better than nothing but nowhere close 
> to a good air conditioner.
>
> Ralph in Sask.
>
>
>
> <http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient> 
> 	Virus-free. www.avg.com 
> <http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient> 
>
>
> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>
> _______________________________________________
> AT mailing list
> AT at lists.antique-tractor.com
> http://lists.antique-tractor.com/listinfo.cgi/at-antique-tractor.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.antique-tractor.com/pipermail/at-antique-tractor.com/attachments/20190213/db24d0f4/attachment.htm>