Painted a Customers Wagon Today

It looks like an evaporative cooler to me, commonly called a 'swamp cooler'. Basically you have these straw mats inside the box, and you run a small water line up to the cooler. Water drips down on the mat, the fan blows air across the mat, and you get a bunch of moist 'cool-feeling' air ducted in to the house. Had it in out first house, but it didn't work very good.

 

2 cars per week for the next year, like that one, and you can sail away.

 

Right, KK. They were the poor man's AC!
Lots of people used them that had to travel across the desert with no AC.

 

Yes that is one of my A/C units on the roof. I have two of them up there. We don't use much heat in the winter but we do use the A/C in the summer!

 

Nope it's A/C. I do have a swamp coller on my shop though.

 

Found this yesterday! A fan, a cooler full of ice and a PVC elbow - $20 AC!

http://www.thestar.com/videozone/1004907--beating-the-heat-for-20

 

You'd need a really, really long cord for your car, though!

 

I've got AC in the car. Just not hooked up until I get time to finish it.

I was thinking for the upstairs, or the pantry on the main floor. Basement is always around 60F in summer, and 45F to 50F, in the winter. Great place for a TV room or a refuge from the heat outside. The ground stays frozen until mid-June up here. I had to wait to move my clothesline posts and pour concrete 4' down. Frost line is at 3.5 feet.

 

Sorry for the thread derailment. What is the purpose of mounting the A/C on the roof? I am assuming you would need a larger unit than we would use up north, but it also seems like it would get hotter up on the roof.

 

I'm not really sure. In newer houses they have split units that have the condensor and compressor on the ground and an evaporator unit in a closet inside the house. Maybe roof mounted units came about since cool air falls? Latley the biggest drawback to ground units is theft by the copper thieves. The other night on the local news there was a story about a church that put a new unit on the roof after two ground units were stolen.

 

When I had my clock factory, I got two Air Makeup units over the finishing and spraying rooms. Back in 1982, these puppies were expensive (like $25,000 each), but we needed them because Alberta (where I lived then) was hot and dry, cowboy country. We used catalytic finishes too, which is a killer on lungs.

Anyway, they went on the roof. The argument, since we used waterfall spray booths, was that the inside heat accumulated at the top of the 20 foot ceiling (the building used to be a repair shop for semi-tractors) had less to travel to get out, and any spray vapours in the air, inside, would get sucked out ASAP.

These guys were right. The other side of the building was warehousing for our finished clocks. No dust! And no looped up spray painters! Coolest place (low 70s, all year long!).

Our offices and wooden case manufacturing were on the other side of the street. Dust extractors and sawdust towers. Much tougher to cool down, since you're moving chips and sawdust, so we ran radiant cooler tubes in the shop floor.

Kept it at mid-70s unless it got to 100F outside. Nobody walked in sandals in there in the mornings, the floor would get down to 60-ish in the AM. Really hard to control, since it used early Geothermal technology. The earth below stayed at 55F summer and winter. The geothermal tubes ran straight down for 50 feet, filled with Anti-freeze. One tube at every 12 feet in all directions, over a 10,000 sq ft. floor space, looping horizontally in the concrete at 6" spacing in 1" in ID tubing.

Talk about cheap AC, without AC! In winter, it did the same in reverse, same temps all year long. The spray/warehouse building, cost me 8 times as much for half the space! But we had to get the fumes out. Catalytic finishes were fairly new, for wood, back then, and really caustic.