OT: Swamp cooler question

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:-)

BTW the little swamp cooler works nicely. 100F goes in from the outside right now, 73F comes out of the blower, inside it is 79F. Feels nice and cool, not moist at all.

According to the chart 100F -> 73F must mean 10% outside humidity. And sure enough, tada, it is:

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It would be useless, around here. The humitity is always high. :(

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Yep, they aren't much good in Florida. But out here the humidity drops to 10-20% when it gets very hot.

My wife just discovered another use: She steam-cleaned the carpets and it helps drying them really well because of all the air the cooler pushes.

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Then it doesn't get "very hot". ;-)

If you turned off the water the carpets would dry a lot faster. ;-)

Folks,

Quick follow-up question: Anyone know about those "Fresh Aire" cakes you can place in a swamp cooler? Says nothing on the packages other than that it avoids odors.

Our cooler does not smell but after a while there is algae in the bottom of the pan. Not much, and doesn't float up, but looks yucky when opening it. Do these cake bricks avoid that?

They look like this:

Baking soda?

A Google search on "dial cooler fresh air cakes MSDS" turns up the information that it's a "plaster encapsulated quaternary amine". They don't say which quaternary amine(s).

These chemicals are effective against bacteria, fungi, amoeba, and some viruses. They do seem to have some algaedical properties... "polyquats" being more effective at this than "simple quats".

Aha! Thanks, Dave. I am not enough of a chemist to have figured this out. I'll give it a try then.

I see you already have an answer on the cakes. However it begs the question why you have algae so soon on a new cooler. The pads have an algaecide in/on them from the manufacturer and it should have lasted longer than this. IIRC your cooler has a plastic pan and sides? All of my coolers have been galvanized steel, originally painted but that lasted for all of 1 year, and I never had algae in the pan. Perhaps the zinc kept it at bay? It may be worth a try to throw some metallic zinc in your pan. Art

Yep, and I picked on up before church. The last one they had.

I don't know. Algae was only at the bottom of the pan, not floating about. No smells but when cleaning the cooler it looked sort of yucky down at the bottom. It's a Champion cooler, all metal but it is painted on the inside as well.

Luckily I made a nice waste water connection for the cooler instead of letting it all drip into the yard and making a lake like others around here do. Plus a nice 1/4-turn shut-off valve right behind it, and so on. That makes maintenance a breeze.