What cooler should I buy? - Community Laser Talk

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MichMich:

I don&#;t live in a hot climate (The Netherlands).

Most CO² lasers operate best between 16°C and 19°C.

If it gets warmer than that then you&#;ll need the ability to cool below ambient temperature. As noted the CW- can at best return the coolant temperature to near the ambient temperature.

When it gets colder than that then you need the ability to warm or heat the coolant. The difference between cooling and heating is cooling is only needed while the machine is operating. If the ambient temperature is near or below freezing then the heated coolant must circulate not only in the chiller/heater and the laser tube when the machine is operating but also during non-operational times to keep the chiller/heater, laser tube and water lines both inside and outside the machine from freezing and bursting.

SA makes a combination chiller/heater but the are pricey. Some users remove the fill cap from the top of the chiller and insert a thermostaticly controlled aquarium heater inside the tank. Others like myself have used thermostaticly controlled external inline heaters that are inserted into one of the water lines. In any case the chiller unit must be left running to circulate the coolant.

There is much debate about adding different kinds and brands of antifreeze to the water. I don&#;t for three reasons; glycol is the only one that doesn&#;t significantly alter the conductivity of the water which can cause arcing, adding even glycol will void the warranty on your laser tube and possibly your chiller, but mainly if you use any of the mentioned methods to heat the circulating water there is no need to add any type of antifreeze.

Traditional air conditioners&#;window units, central air, even those clunky portable units with the big unsightly hoses&#;are great tools for removing the heat from a room. Although using AC does effectively leave you feeling cooler than before, it&#;s also an energy-intensive process. Air conditioning costs money, and it also leads to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: All that energy use contributes to global warming, which means we need to use more air conditioning, which uses more energy, which costs more money, and so on forever. And that&#;s before we even get into the complicated contributions of chemical refrigerants.

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Evaporative cooling (PDF) is a refrigerant-free alternative that uses much less energy. There are a lot of different ways to take advantage of natural evaporative processes, but one common solution is to build or buy an evaporative cooler. Also known as a swamp cooler, this device uses a fan to recirculate the room&#;s air across a cool, wet pad (aka a wick) and then expel that freshly dampened air into the room. You know those little spray bottles with the fan mounted on top that people use to spritz water in their faces while they&#;re waiting in line for a roller coaster in the dead of the summer? It&#;s basically that, on a larger scale.

But do these swamp coolers actually work? And if so, why isn&#;t everyone using them?

Evaporative cooling is loosely based on an ancient, time-honored process known as sweating. You may have heard of it. Our bodies automatically cool themselves down by releasing moisture through the skin; the moisture gets picked up by a pleasant breeze and brings us back down to a more comfortable temperature. A quick run through a sprinkler has the same effect. That&#;s essentially what a swamp cooler does to the air in a room. But, as we found in testing, your starting ambient environmental conditions play a huge part in how well this works to make you feel cooler.

When we first tested portable commercial swamp coolers back in , we found that every degree of temperature cooling was accompanied by a roughly 2% to 3% increase in the relative humidity in the room. By contrast, portable and window air conditioners actually de-humidify a space as part of their cooling process, and we saw that in our tests as well (that&#;s also why that second-floor window AC is always dripping on you). Both methods can help keep you cool; they just use different approaches to achieve that.

But here&#;s the trick: those initial tests were conducted in the coastal Northeast, on a day when the humidity outside was already above 50%. With the air as saturated as it was, the machines couldn&#;t do much except over-humidify the room, making it danker without any significant cooling or comfort&#;so we were essentially setting them up to fail. It was the same unpleasant feeling you get when your sweat won&#;t evaporate on a muggy day. In a drier environment, however, humidifying the air as it passed through a fan could have made a serious difference. According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), an evaporative cooler can successfully reduce the ambient temperature by 5 to 15 degrees&#;but even the DOE is quick to clarify that this process works only in areas with low humidity.

In other words, a swamp cooler isn&#;t a great choice for a place like Boston (where we ran our initial tests). But if you live in a warm, arid climate, particularly in the western US, it can be a reliable and cost-effective way to bring some chill into your summer. One Wirecutter staffer based in New Mexico uses a whole house evaporative cooler as the primary HVAC system for his home, and has no complaints; it&#;s even easy to maintain, since it&#;s mostly just a water pump and a wick. An Amazon reviewer based in Arizona gave five stars to the Frigidaire EC300W-FA we tested in , saying that &#;an extra bonus for me is that I can take it into my workshop or put it next to me on my porch&#;places where an air conditioner wouldn&#;t work.&#; Another reviewer said that although the Frigidaire EC300W-FA dropped the temperature by a few degrees, &#;it also increased the relative humidity in the room from 13% to 40%.&#; There are plenty of other reviewers, in places like Las Vegas and Boise, Idaho, who also talked up the cooling sensation they got from their swamp coolers, while also acknowledging that a cool feeling is not always the same as actual air conditioning.

What to look forward to

We&#;re currently testing two new swamp coolers&#;&#;the Honeywell TC30PEU and Hessaire MC37V&#;at a home in the Mojave Desert. The Honeywell seemed like the closest comparison to the Frigidaire models we originally tested back in , which have since been discontinued. But we also saw mixed results with those models; they were smaller, and seemed like they were designed for casual residential use&#;a band-aid for the heat, rather than an actual cooling solution. So we thought it would be helpful to compare them to something more industrial-sized, which brought us to the Hessaire. The water tank capacities on these two models aren&#;t that different&#;the Hessaire can handle about 10 gallons, compared to 7.9 gallons on the Honeywell. But the Hessaire also claims to move more than four times as much air as the Honeywell, and we&#;re hoping to see if this makes any notable difference in cooling performance.

What about a DIY Swamp Cooler?

If you want to save even more money&#;and you&#;re feeling crafty&#;you can also fashion your own swamp cooler using a 5-gallon bucket (video), a Styrofoam cooler (video), or even an old computer fan in an empty milk carton (video). These DIY evaporative cooler projects all rely on the same basic parts: an electric fan, a container or pump to provide the water, and a wick or aquarium tube to carry the water to the fan. You may need some basic tools for cutting, and some of these MacGyvered swamp coolers recommend using additional piping to keep the airflow going strong. But in the right climate, an hour of work and a hundred bucks could get you a decent alternative to buying a whole new air conditioner. One DIYer even said his homemade swamp cooler &#;takes a while to cool a whole room, but it lowers my room average from 25 °C [77 °F] to 16 °C [60.8 °F] through the day.&#;

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