Designing a RV Garage

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taoshum said:
Interesting perspective on the dynamics of the air flow.  There's no free lunch tho... cool, wet air is much heavier than warm, dry air so the fan on your swamp cooler has to work harder to move the cool, wet air from low to high.  OTOH, the warm, dry air wants to vent anyway since it is lighter... in fact some of the ancient middle east home designs used this effect to vent hot air and pull in cool air from below.

It's called chimney effect.  Hot air rises, if you place an opening at the top of the stack you'll draw in replacement air at the bottom.

Jerry's doing the same thing in his garage - if anything, the convection flow will help airflow through the swamp cooler, not hinder it.  I'll bet there's a slight airflow from convection through the cooler any time the windows are open, even if the cooler's fan is off.  So there is a free lunch, after all.
 
Lou Schneider said:
It's called chimney effect.  Hot air rises, if you place an opening at the top of the stack you'll draw in replacement air at the bottom.

Jerry's doing the same thing in his garage - if anything, the convection flow will help airflow through the swamp cooler, not hinder it.  I'll bet there's a slight airflow from convection through the cooler any time the windows are open, even if the cooler's fan is off.  So there is a free lunch, after all.

I understand the "chimney" effect...  I doubt that we have any data... either way.

refs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler

https://energy.gov/energysaver/evaporative-coolers

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/articles/dept/musings/saving-energy-evaporative-cooler

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=187974

If it's "better" to install swamp coolers low and vent high then hundreds of thousands buildings in the SW have been doing it wrong for many decades.  The main drawback to installing high and venting low seems to be the maintenance problem of roof access and roof stains.  Most of the roof systems have a large central discharge vent and the flow is controlled by the open windows in the locations where cooling is needed most.  In technical terms if the blower moves 6,000 CFM, it completely dominates the flow and convection flow is miniscule in comparison plus pumping cool, heavy air from low to high would, in most cases, use much more energy to drive the blower/fan.  On top of that, gravity would dominate the convection flow in most situations.

If Jerry likes to push cool heavy air up, great.

 
Here's an update on our garage evaporative cooler.  We were very thankful to have it last summer when we had a flood in our stick and brick which forced us to live in the motorhome garage for three months.  That cooler was superb!  We only had several days when we had to use the motorhome air conditioning because of monsoonal moisture which lessened the cooler's ability to operate efficiently.

Also, after 17 years we just replaced the cooler with a new one - not because it wasn't working but because our extremely hard water had corroded it so badly the metal pieces were about ready to break apart.  The 1 horsepower motor did its job the entire 17 years.  And forget all the technical aspects of what you all have been talking about.  The fact is, our old evaporative cooler worked perfectly for 17 years by blowing/pushing the hot air through the length of the RV garage and across the width of three car garages to go out the ceiling height exit windows and it replaced that hot air with cooled air.  When it was 110-115 degrees outside, the garage was a comfortable 75-80 degrees.  We can't complain about that!

ArdraF
 
ArdraF said:
Here's an update on our garage evaporative cooler.  We were very thankful to have it last summer when we had a flood in our stick and brick which forced us to live in the motorhome garage for three months.  That cooler was superb!  We only had several days when we had to use the motorhome air conditioning because of monsoonal moisture which lessened the cooler's ability to operate efficiently.

Also, after 17 years we just replaced the cooler with a new one - not because it wasn't working but because our extremely hard water had corroded it so badly the metal pieces were about ready to break apart.  The 1 horsepower motor did its job the entire 17 years.  And forget all the technical aspects of what you all have been talking about.  The fact is, our old evaporative cooler worked perfectly for 17 years by blowing/pushing the hot air through the length of the RV garage and across the width of three car garages to go out the ceiling height exit windows and it replaced that hot air with cooled air.  When it was 110-115 degrees outside, the garage was a comfortable 75-80 degrees.  We can't complain about that!

ArdraF

No doubt about it, they work great in a dry climate.  Not only the cooling effect but they filter the air and add humidity. We had them in ABQ, NM for 35 years and never needed a regular A/C unit.  We switched to an AeroCool unit after twenty years on the original unit.  One on the house and one on the garage.  Both discharged high and vented low though.  ABQ has "high mineral" or "hard" water too.  We found the best way to compensate for that was to run a bleed off the water pump that diverted a small amount of water to the trees... recycling at its best?.  Anyway, this caused the water in the swamp cooler to stay fresh and did not accumulate the mineral deposits as quickly as re-using the water many times.  Many locations now use the swamp cooler to pre-cool the heat exchanger for the regular A/C unit which vastly reduces the load on that unit as well.
 

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