[AT] Vehicle cooling before AC

[James Peck]

I lived in a house in El Paso Texas with a swamp cooler for a couple of years. I performed service on it. I replaced the media and cleaned out all the dribble holes on the water distribution.

Since the Rio Grande is sucked nearly dry by the time it exits the area and the Ogallala aquifer is being sucked down, it will probably continue to be dry there.

[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, .
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