Maybe mold in the A/C. Try getting an inexpensive Air Quality Monitor like the Nikken:
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They work well and are very good for tracking down sources of contamination that can cause headaches and other health problems.
I just got mine and it immediately showed two old VME crates that had serious mold problems from lint stuck in the air channels. It will take a high pressure air compressor to blow them out. The Nikken will tell when all the lint is gone.
It will also help find mold spores from lint in old boatanchors like the HP 8566 or Tek 2467. These can cause severe headaches whenever you turn them on and the fans start blowing spores all over the lab.
It will also tell you when the condensor in the house fridge has started to accumulate lint that grows mold and can cause headaches when it is running. Another big source is the clothes dryer in the basement. This can be a real pain to keep clean.
For the price, you can't find a better deal anywhere. They are very inexpensive and can save a lot of grief and wasted time and effort.
The Nikken compares favorably with the Dylos, but it is portable and much easier to use. If you can keep the display down to the first two blue bars you should be fine. The VME crates were easy to find. They lit up all the bars.
Oddly enough, I am going to have to take my Nikken apart and clean it. The fan stinks when the unit is first turned on. It doesn't show in the display since the fan is on the exit and sucks the air past the sensor then blows it out the bottom. But it smells like burned pcb. Should be easy to clean.
If it's just a bushing and you like the rest of the unit, why not rebuild the motor? Local shops do that here for a song.
Sintered bronze bushings are actually very decent, quiet, handle large loads, and are sold in local hardware stores por nada. While you're at it you could over-size the replacements.
One caveat is you can't smear the pores closed during machining, which, sadly, almost everyone does. That wrecks the lubrication--betcha that's what happened to yours.
Yeah, it's a pain to have to do, but, well, you have to, and it's less of a pain than constantly looking for and vetting new ones with new problems.
It happens everywhere, including brand-new corporate offices. Sloshing partially used-up "air" around a building is simply not a very good idea yet that's what traditional A/C does. Same for central heat, which is why I feel much better since we installed wood and pellet stoves.
Never had any problems like that. The old HP3577 blows right in my face all day long sometimes and it won't bother me.
When you have large shedding dogs like we do that stuff is on a rigid maintenance schedule. Evey month or so the fridge comes out of its hole and gets cleaned. My wife has a checklist for this.
It is a good deal. But I like to keep the number of toys to a minimum and regarding the inhouse climate I have found out what works well for us (swamp cooler and wood heating). It was pretty extreme at my last employer before I became self-employed. By around 7pm I had typically worked up a good headache on some days. When I jumped into the car and rolled down the windows that always cleared up by the time I hit a grade into the hills where we live.
I think most of these ideas fall into the "80% effort for 20% return" category (instead of the more desirable "20% effort, 80% return"). Things like "self-cleaning" are already available OTS. Other worthwhile additions are trivial to implement (e.g., a sacrificial anode in the pan).
When I wrote the HVAC controller, here, I watched how the cooler and ACbrrr operated (simply by logging indoor/outdoor/operating conditions). My goal being *smart* control not just control for the sake of control.
E.g., two speeds is all you need for a cooler -- LOW when the house can easily be *maintained* at a desired "comfort setting" and HIGH when you need to move *to* a comfort setting (e.g., if house has been unoccupied all day; silly to keep it wet and sticky!). The same is probably true of the furnace (though ours only operates at a single speed as it quickly brings the house to temperature)
[Of course, in our case, the cooler is on the roof so we only really hear the air flow through the ducts, not the motor noise, etc.]
The biggest win comes from being able to decide *when* to use the cooler, when to STOP using it, and when to use the ACbrrrr.
At the very least, you need local environmental data to evaluate the effectivity of each at achieving your desired comfort setting. E.g., what's the local wet and dry bulb temperatures. Windspeed also plays a role as it can force air through the pads in "gusts" effectively allowing hotter, drier air into the system than intended. You also need to be able to monitor conditions *inside* to ensure the house itself isn't becoming saturated (e.g., by insufficient exhaust ventilation)
But, knowing current conditions isn't enough. You also have to have a reasonable idea as to how they are likely to DEVELOP in the next few hours. This requires longer term memory and prediction than a simple "current state" analysis.
E.g., if it is 95 degrees at 10AM in July, chances are it will get hotter *and* wetter as the day progresses. Running the cooler (or, continuing to run the cooler) will eventually bring you to a point where you are *heating* the interior of the house AND making it wetter. Best bet is to stop the cooler. It may or may not make sense to start the ACbrrr in its place.
OTOH, if it is 95 degrees at 2PM in June, it's likely not going to get much hotter *and* it will tend to stay "dry" so running the cooler is a great option!
It's also silly to aggressively cool if you know the exterior temperature WILL fall, predictably.
Effective use of the dual-cooling, here, required a fair bit of "expert knowledge" regarding local conditions. Our first few "summers" were uncomfortable experiments! :(
Also, there are seasons where the cooler makes allergies absolutely unbearable! (this is the argument SWMBO initially used in favor of year round ACbrrr). Those vary based on the individual and the local flora.
The practical problem is that of closing the outside vents when the cooler is replaced by the ACbrrr. You don't want to be pushing conditioned air out the "windows"!
[If SWMBO ever consents to returning to the cooler, I'll motorize several of the skylights and use them as vents instead of the regular "windows". I've got some really neat linear actuators set aside for just that purpose!]
It would also be nice to be able to run the cooler motor *backwards*; as a giant exhaust fan. I've lived in other locations where running such a "whole house" exhaust fan for 15 minutes on returning home after work would quickly bring the house to a comfortable temperature. Likewise, running it at night to draw in cooler night air would take a load off the rest of the cooling system.
Depends on who used it before you got it. Some labs are very dirty. I could not stand to turn on the 8566 without getting a terrible headache. It took a lot of cleaning with a high pressure air hose to blow out the lint.
It's a threshold thing. When you are young and have a vigorous immune system, it can handle some pretty severe contamination without you noticing.
As you grow older, your immune system becomes less effective and has a more difficult time keeping up with contamination. As soon as the concentration becomes greater than your system can handle, you start noticing problems like headaches, muscle and joint aches, or a sick feeling in the stomach. It comes and goes as the concentration changes.
This can lead to vague complaints of not feeling up to par, and numerous doctor visits that largely lead nowhere. Most doctors have no clue about mold and will try to give all kinds of unhelpful suggestions.
Obviously you are in good health and I hope it stays that way. But for others who have developed a sensitivity to air quality, this can be a very effective tool to help track down and solve problems.
Unfortunately, they use a lot of water -- about 50 gallons a day. (If you have a self-cleaning model -- or, worse, the sort with a constant "bleed" -- that number climbs to 150-ish!). For places with long cooling seasons (like here! :> ), that can be a significant portion of your water consumption (25%).
Depending on the cost of your water (and sewer charges which are related to water consumption, even if the consumed water NEVER goes down the sewer!), that can add up quickly. (Recall the cooler also uses a fair bit of electricity to spin that large squirrel cage... which it tends to do at a high duty cycle!)
+42 (though any headaches *I* get are from allergens brought *into* the house by the cooler). The other unfortunate aspect of coolers is they can easily lead to an EXTREMELY humid house if insufficient exhaust ventilation. Doors swell, towels never feel dry, etc. (and don't even think of eating popcorn or potato chips! :> )
No really. Very expensive large units have a dump pump, that's it. No stirring or anything. I have seen an impressive collection of gunk in some coolers where people never paid attention.
That's why there's Updux :-)
VF drive has big advantages. Aside from no sudden air inrush it is also better for the material. A motor that runs slow and cool most of the time will live longer than one that runs on-off full bore. Efficiency can also improve because many coolers suck the pads too dry on hot or windy days. When it runs 70% all day instead of 100% intermittently that problem can be avoided.
Why? It is very easy to sense intake and output temperatures. We are sensing only output which I find enough. If the air coming out is less than 74F it's fine, if it's much higher we turn it off.
That's pretty easy. We make sure the ventilation matches the cooler setting (high/low). One can also measure the pressure differential.
All you need to measure for that is output temperature. 74F is our limit, works well.
Out here it's easy. You turn on the cooler and occasionally peek out the office window. If clouds roll in it may make sense to turn it off. Otherwise we just keep it running and when it gets to cold in the evening we turn it off earlier than usual.
Right on! That's the real spirit of home automation, it's useful. Also, you might want to consider Updux:
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They push themselves open when the cooler begins to pressurize the house and fall back to the closed position if off. You also need to heed fire codes that may require automatic shutting in a fire.
I do not like wholehouse fans. Friends had one installed and I told them that this will increase their allergies and suck a tremendous amount of dust and pollen into the house. They didn't believe me. A few years, thousands of sneezes and lots of vacuum bags later ... it's gone.
This is one of the key advantages of a swamp cooler: Cleaner air. When we had some close wildfires last year I was surprised how bad the small was outside the house and inside it was crispy clean. A few days later the smell became noticeable inside. Opened the cooler and saw that it had deposited an impressive pile of soot and ash in the middle of the pan and it began to reach the pump intake. Dumped it -> Crispy clean air again. So I did that every 2-3 days until the fires were largely contained. All the while the other neighbors were coughing inside their homes.
It can be really bad if the guys using it were heavy smokers. Yech. Nothing against a good cigar or something but not in the lab.
True. But even more important is to harden yourself. With the advent of network simulation, CAD and all that I found myself becoming too sedentary in the office/lab. So, I invested in a good mountain bike. Best investment I made in years, makes one feel many years younger. Except after a crash but so far I only had two and all that got bruised was my ego.
Our current cooler uses a lot less but it is also a bit too small. Anyhow, it didn't make a dent in the water bill versus the years before installation. We tend to watch such trends in order to be environmentally conscious and detect when there may be a slow leak somewhere.
That's why I'd really love a VF drive. That allows you to fine tune it to the air volume pushed in per minute that the house really needs.
Tried double-padding?
We never eat that anyhow. One must be diligent about ventilation and avoid creating a "head" with the cooler. That would be easy to automate though. Humidity does go up, of course, and when the cooler runs we must use coasters for beer or chilled drinks because of condensation on the outside of the glass.
I know it is dependent on the climate you are in, but I like it when it is hot enough outside to make my air conditioner run enough to bring the humidity into the mid 40s percentile and the inside temp is about
78*. If the humidity is 50% it needs to be 76* to be comfortable. But I'm in Northern Florida aka the Redneck Riviera.
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Naaah, that's for wimps. I am sitting here right now in around 50% humidity and 86F office temps. Feels alright. Yesterday I ran a lot of SPICE sims and that drove it up to over 90F. Still ok with me. But I may be unusual, when it's 100F or more I am the only one out there on the local mountain bike trails.
Hi Jeorg, I would go with Jim on this one. Take a look at your local hardware store, and see if they have replacement motors (NOT directly from the manufacturer!) I know evaporative cooler makers have recently started disappearing. When I wanted another portable unit a month ago, I ended up spending a lot more for a tricked out unit with a microcontroller on it, much more than I needed...
Forget it. The concept of the good old hardware store has gone out the window a long time ago. You can buy a bottle of Drano there or deck stain. But when I asked for this very motor at two local Home Depots they could not even find it, let alone order it. And I bought the cooler there at Home Depot!
I just left a negative review about this manufacturer and this product on their site under the tab of the cooler we bought. They rejected it. Time to write to their CEO again I guess. Last time I did that it triggered a mid-size earthquake and shortly thereafter the manufacturer disappeared from their offerings.
With such shoddy quality that is no wonder. People like you and I know how to fix that but for a regular customer the unit is shot. It is quite tough to get the blower assembly out of there and a new one wired in. And then get it all balanced.
I prefer not to have any electronics in there unless I built them myself. My experience with electronics designed by appliance manufacturers has been as bad as with automotive. Which is why I purposely bought a car that had the least amount of electronics in mission-critical areas.
obvious, but try to have a fan blow directly onto you. In Haiti, we had tent hospitals with guards toting shotguns facing out. I measured the temperature in the "OR," and it was
112 F - maybe higher when you count the thermal radiation from the tent surface. The docs would occasionally faint, and we'd drag them out and do a saline drip feed. They have to put up with outrageous temperatures, as do the Indians in Kerala, etc. I've met people from Belize who say they 'like' to be at 90 F. You can play that game with yourself. In the winter, I work in my shop at 55-60. I much prefer the cold.
Where do you get your water? My understanding is that water is a limiting resource in most of the areas you mention. Locations where water is plentiful tend to have a lot of it in the air so swamp coolers won't work.
Sometimes your poor thinking shines brightly. "Sloshing around" the air by an AC is no different from a ceiling fan blowing. If you have systems that bring in fresh air which help to alleviate your symptoms then the problem is likely a house issue, not an AC issue.
More poor logic... if your one piece of old equipment has no problem, then clearly no piece of old equipment can have a problem.
Did you ever determine what you are sensitive to? Offices have regulations on how much fresh air is brought in but systems can (and do) malfunction. You can find the real cause of your problems or you can just blame it on central heat/AC and never figure it out.
If you aren't servicing your cooler twice a year (before and after cooler season), chances are, you've got bigger problems!
Prior to starting cooler season, we would:
- uncover the cooler
- reinstall the belt on the fan motor
- oil the bushings
- verify the quality of the pad (in case we were going to replace it at the end of last cooling season and "forgot")
- reinstall overflow tube
- turn on water supply
- verify water level control valve (float) operating
- verify pan never OVERfills
- turn on circuit breaker
- verify fan, water, and purge pumps operating
- verify "dry side" of cooler free of any water infiltration
- verify no leaks from bottom of pan
- verify cooler pan remains level (no water leaking out side of pan)
- remove the manual "gate" and reinstall barometric damper
End of cooling season:
- inspect exterior/underside for signs of leaks (calcifications)
- remove overflow tube (ensures ALL water drains from pan)
- remove pad to expose shelf beneath
- wash down pad and shelf (calcification and other salts)
- inspect pad, replace if necessary (so ready for next season)
- flush dirt and debris from pan (mainly *sand*!)
- ensure drained pan is free of debris
- drain water line
- turn off water supply
- turn off circuit breaker
- remove belt from motor (so it isn't under tension all winter)
- cover cooler
[I may have forgotten a few details as we are not using the cooler anymore]
By contrast, the ACbrrr just sees "turn circuit breaker on" and "turn circuit off" as it's regular maintenance activities.
[Cooler and ACbrrr are each more than a decade old. Repairs to date have included replacing cap on condenser fan motor ($8); replacing cooler pad twice (2x$100).]
And, if you don't have an attic, that's why you have a linear actuator on skylights! :>
We found that our cooler ran on low most of the day. If it shifted to HIGH, we took that as a sign that outdoor conditions were too much for the cooler to keep up. You *want* the fan to run as it keeps positive pressure inside the house without which, the hot/dry air from outside will blow in through all the open windows!
[A room with a closed window doesn't see the effect of the cooler]
When it's 115 outside, your cooler won't be able to achieve a reasonable "comfort setting"! Even if it can drive the temperature down 30 degrees, the resulting air is *soup* -- 85 and humid sucks!
If you turn off the cooler when it is no longer comfortable, then you are left sitting in a house with windows closed (else the interior temperature will quickly rise to the outdoor temperature) hoping it doesn't get *much* hotter (and, it is already "humid", inside).
Instead, we (in the past) would button up the house, turn off the cooler and turn on the ACbrrr. But, now it has to work to remove all that moisture from the house. AND, *someone* had to:
- notice this was necessary
- close all the windows/vents
- actually switch the cooler off and ACbrrr on [The first and third are easy to do with automation. The second is a problem in most homes, here.]
A better solution is to *know* this is likely to happen and avoid the need to change cooling mechanisms mid-day. E.g., we wouldn't even bother to turn the cooler on once Monsoon started. It was a
*known* that it would not be able to keep the house comfortable in the high temps and outdoor humidity that we *expected* each day.
So, switch to all AC cooling until Monsoon has passed and drier days return. Then, switch back to the cooler for the balance of the cooling season (which is over 200 days/year, here).
Unfortunately, Monsoon isn't a homogenous experience. It is not uncommon for things to "dry out" for extended periods of time
*in* Monsoon. Just looking at temperatures isn't enough to tell you how you should control *now* or even *today*. That's why there is a fair bit of "art" to using a dual-cooling system. Watching weather forecasts, actual conditions developing, etc. and using "wetware" to decide which appliance to use on any given day.
[you end up playing it safe and using the ACbrrr more often than not as the cooler->ACbrrr transition is usually an admission that you screwed up and are now uncomfortable as a result]
It's not static! Are you going to keep tweaking your VFD every time a gust of wind comes along blowing hot air *in* through your open windows?
Rule of thumb (nominal ceiling heights) requires ~4CFM/sq ft of floor space. I.e., you want to change the air in the house every two minutes. So, 6000-8000 CFM for a "nominal house".
The cooler's effect relies on open windows in each room -- because the cooler isn't recirculating air but, rather, EXHAUSTING the "hot"/stale air *through* those opened windows. I.e., no matter which direction the wind originates, chances are, you have open windows/vents facing that direction. Stand by a window and feel a blast of 100+ air blowing *in* and you really notice it (windows tend to be located in places where people sit, sleep, work, eat, etc.)
This was one of the advantages of using the skylights/roof windows for vents as they tend to *only* face one direction (due to roof pitch) instead of every* direction (like the rest of the windows)
And, at that point, you just resign yourself to being uncomfortable? Or, do you resort to some *other* cooling mechanism (gee, maybe AC)?
Folks here *know* that a cooler simply won't cut it when humidity rises. If all they have to use is a cooler, then they plan on being pretty uncomfortable until Monsoon is over.
[Forget using one *during* a rain storm! Even if temps drop to the 80's from the cooling effect of the rain, there's no way to get the stickiness out of the house!]
If your "control system" is smart, it knows when these conditions are likely to exist. E.g., I *plan* on 4 July being the Start of Sticky (OK, this year our first rain came on the 3rd). When we ran dual-cooling, I had "service the cooler" as a standing chore with a 4 July deadline each year. (along with "service the roof")
Currently, I have a small weather station on the roof so I can watch conditions *here* (which ALWAYS differ from those reported on the "news" due to microclimates around town). I use this for instantaneous climate data for the controller (as well as the irrigation controller -- don't bother to irrigate if it's likely to rain/has rained!) so it knows whether the cooler "makes sense" as a cooling option "now".
[I am unhappy with the humidity sensor, though. The constant sun/heat exposure seems to render them inoperable, quickly. And, I'm not keen on the expense and maintenance of a chilled mirror technology!]
Ideally, I would like to track this information year-to-year (instead of doing so informally in my head) and make those control decisions "automatically".
In Summer, it is *usually* 90+ at 11PM. It *may* drop to 80 in the early morning hours. (surprisingly, this feels "cool")
OTOH, in Monsoon, 80 is icky -- midwestern/new england summer icky!
I.e., temperature alone tells a controller nothing. This is why so many cooler controllers are jokes.
That only works if you have an attic to vent into. As I said, the solution, here, is an operable skylight/vent/roof window that you can deliberately "open" when needed.
I never had a problem with house fan. OTOH, the air from the cooler (certain parts of the "allergy season") has been a problem for both of us. I suspect the problem lies more in the environment than the mechanism that brings air into the house.
(e.g., our cooler pad is 12 inches thick; the house fan had *no* filter of any kind -- yet I fared much better with it!)
Exactly. There have been grumblings about "prohibiting" swamp coolers on new construction, here, for exactly that reason. Ditto with "misters" used for outdoor cooling.
However, this raises the bar for homeownership in ways that politicians shy away from -- even a "cheap" ACbrrr is going to cost considerably more than a "cheap" (or, *good*!) cooler (in terms of home selling price).
You can bring electricity into an area a lot easier than you can bring *water* into that area!
[We're not keen on drinking effluent just to allow folks to keep "developing", watering lawns/golf courses, spray mist on their outdoor patios, etc.]
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