There’s no point as a swamp cooler does not have heat to reject. A heat pump in a traditional AC works by making one side hot (outside) and one side cool (inside). A swamp cooler decreases temps by evaporating water, which absorbs energy.
Also, swamp coolers are only effective in very dry environments. Unless you’re in the desert it’s going to make it feel warmer by raising humidity significantly. A large part of why AC makes it feel nicer is reducing humidity, which allows sweat to work better.
At first I thought it’d be a wash. The heat absorbed by vaporizing the water in the swamp cooler will be released onto the evaporator coils of the AC, so that’s a net zero energy transfer.
However, air is not good at conducting heat. This water evaporation/condensation cycle might transfer heat from the air to the evaporator coils of the AC better.
You are going to have additional water and electricity costs from running the swamp cooler though, so I really don’t know. I suppose you could run the condensation from the AC back to the swamp cooler to greatly reduce water usage.
Could mitigate the water costs by draining the AC condensation into the swamp cooler 😅 and maybe could use the airflow from the AC to drive the swamp cooler instead of it having its own fan
In my use case I often don’t really need to change the humidity at all, I just want to cool down.
Usually when thats the case though there’s enough of a breeze that I can just open the windows and that’s definitely more efficient than running active cooling 😅
There’s no point as a swamp cooler does not have heat to reject. A heat pump in a traditional AC works by making one side hot (outside) and one side cool (inside). A swamp cooler decreases temps by evaporating water, which absorbs energy.
Also, swamp coolers are only effective in very dry environments. Unless you’re in the desert it’s going to make it feel warmer by raising humidity significantly. A large part of why AC makes it feel nicer is reducing humidity, which allows sweat to work better.
I wonder if using a swamp cooler at the same time as AC would increase the efficiency 🤔
That’s a great question.
At first I thought it’d be a wash. The heat absorbed by vaporizing the water in the swamp cooler will be released onto the evaporator coils of the AC, so that’s a net zero energy transfer.
However, air is not good at conducting heat. This water evaporation/condensation cycle might transfer heat from the air to the evaporator coils of the AC better.
You are going to have additional water and electricity costs from running the swamp cooler though, so I really don’t know. I suppose you could run the condensation from the AC back to the swamp cooler to greatly reduce water usage.
Could mitigate the water costs by draining the AC condensation into the swamp cooler 😅 and maybe could use the airflow from the AC to drive the swamp cooler instead of it having its own fan
I guess youd need some water purifier involved though, which would probably get rid of any efficiency benefits
No, AC reduces humidity while swamp coolers increase humidity. They would directly conflict and just waste electricity
See other comment: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/17914169
In my use case I often don’t really need to change the humidity at all, I just want to cool down.
Usually when thats the case though there’s enough of a breeze that I can just open the windows and that’s definitely more efficient than running active cooling 😅