Most people think of keeping cool indoors during hot weather, but with a high power evaporative cooler you can stay cool in your home's outdoor space too!
Here are some suggestions on using a swamp cooler outdoors and make a hot and sweaty sun-trap suddenly much more inviting and comfortable with its own supply of cooling breeze literally on tap!
There are always some questions that arise from the idea of using any kind of cooling device outside the home. So I've taken some of the more commonly asked of those and complied a helpful collection of knowledge that you can take away with you and put to use in your own circumstance.
This is one of the most commonly asked questions from level headed folks that are genuinely concerned about the cost of electricity and that it should be used wisely and not wasted. For sure, if you put a portable aircon unit on your patio and ran it for several hours, you could expect your household electricity consumption to spike upward very quickly and cost you a whole lot of money.
While AC is never a good choice to use outdoors, for the simple reason it uses way too much energy, the less well known alternative, evaporative cooling portables, can certainly be used outdoors. This solution is cheap to run and therefore perfect for as long as you want and need a cool, albeit artificially created breeze on a hot day.
Bear in mind that a typical portable AC will consume 2,000 Watts or more electricity while a comparable swamp cooler typically uses under 200 Watts to produce the same amount of cool breeze. I'm sure you can see the glaring difference in power usage!
Is a Cool Breeze All You Get?
There's another aspect of using certain types of coolers outdoors that a lot of people don't consider. What temperature of air is your cooler producing in total?
All fixed or portable air conditioners, ductless or ducted/vented, produce as much (if not more) hot air as cold. And that hot air has to go someplace.
When used indoors, it's simply a case of venting the hot air out of the building through a wall vent or a window kit. The indoor occupants can be comfortably cool without even having to think about what's being pumped outside.
But outdoors on a patio or porch, that hot air can't be discarded quite so easily. It often happens that the group of people standing in front of the unit enjoy the cool blast of air while the group standing back of it get the blast of horrible hot air out the vent!
However, with a portable evaporative cooler, there is no hot air produced, only cold. So for the one part, you get only the cooling effect that you desire, plus your not wasting money on energy that is being wasted to produce hot and cold air from the same unit!
No Contest
Ultimately, if you're sensible enough to realize that you should not be wasting energy foolishly by placing an AC outside, while you can enjoy cool comfort from a low energy evaporative cooler, you're going to opt for the right choice. Every time!
It's not just the energy aspect that makes swamp coolers so attractive as an outdoor cooling solution, but also the low maintenance and low mechanical wear aspect that makes these devices so perfect. They have few moving parts to wear out aside from the fan, no gases to compress, no compressor to run and no heat exchange to create hot air as well as cold.
All in all, putting a swamp cooler on the patio for your next barbecue is going to make your guests very happy as well as a lot more comfortable and not cost you an arm and a leg to be the host with the most!