Most are a waste of space.
Cheers,
Peter

Are of very limited use in my experience.

Type in Swamp Cooler in the internet & you get plenty but of charts on the very narrow band they they are able to work.

Years ago in Alice Springs in a hotel mid 30°C in the evening dry weather, the swamp cooler was going. It did cool the air but it you felt you were sitting in a cold sauna it was that humid, all sticky & clammy. It would have been far better to turn the swamp cooler off but that was out of our control.

A couple of years ago in Wellington we were walking up & down the street in our undies until about 3am due to heat & humidity, nothing one could do unless you had air conditioning. Not a good look!

Hi snook,
For a moment I thought you were a South Aussie with a nickname of "Snook" - a nice SA fish!

Evaporative coolers - yes they work best in drier climates BUT you can't just plonk them into a sealed room/caravan. Some businesses in the tropics use them but they use more than two & the pass a lot of air out the door. I installed one at our place in Ceduna many moons ago.
You have to back them up to an open door, window (ours went in through a wall) & have windows open on the opposite side, etc. The measurement I believe is for every 1000 cub ft of air flow (our house unit was rated at 8,000 cub ft/ hour (I think), you had to have 1 sq metre of OPEN WINDOW (I did manage to reduce this a bit). We could direct the air into the rooms required just by opening windows. And even on a hot night when it could still be over 35 degrees outside, it could be rather cold inside the house.

If you get one, I would suggest you read the instructions carefully, make a cover for your screened door with a cut out the same size of the air intake on the cooler - then experiment with the amount of window opening available. They are a FLOW THROUGH COOLER, not a room cooler.

It is another item to take up valuable room in your van but they use a fraction of the power of the normal airconditioners with the only maintenance being topping up the water, cleaning/checking the filter(s).

Yes, x2 for Landfall (the knockers).

Snook,
I got my measurements a bit up the creek - the rate of flow should have read 1000 cub metres per hour & 1 square metre of open window (our unit was as I said, 8,000 cub metres per hour so we should have opened 8 sq metres of ventilation.

In the dry environment, it got cold - we usually closed it down after 9pm.

Landfall wrote:

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We purchased a Companion brand one last year. The larger variety (the small one is useless) it has its own battery which last from memory about five hours. Can be recharged from a cig lighter socket or 240v. Cost about $190

Being from Tassie we don't like the heat much, do a lot of free camping so do not have 240v. Found that this was very good at giving some relief.

Friends who have seen it operation have also purchased one, so it can't be all that bad.

I think that a few knockers have never tried or owned one. Nothing like knowing someone who knows someone who had a friend who said.

 G'day mate,

Can you supply any link or info as to where to buy this unit?

Could be what we want.

Jay&Dee     Thanks 

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