Can I use a Swamp Cooler in my 3-car garage shop here in SLC Utah?

[Jason White]

Don't do it! Your cast-iron machines will rust like crazy.

I grew up in California with a swamp cooler on the roof. That thing destroyed several electronic devices (including a computer) in our house because of all the humidity it produced. It was also a pain to keep the pads clean.

Jason

My wood working "shop" is found in the 3rd car bay of my homes garage. I am primarily a wood turner but over the last few years I have picked up a Powermatic 6" jointer, a Ridgid granite top table saw, a Rikon 14" deluxe band saw, a Craftsman radial-arm saw and a few other tools to try and complement my Mustard Monster lathe.

So for the specific question. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. So for those not immediately familiar with it we are very very dry here in terms of climate especially through-out the summer months. We are also quite warm here.

Last summer, my first in this house, my shop was blisteringly hot and entirely unusable. I would like to try and do something about that this year. Last year I had no insulation in the ceiling of the garage and none in the walls and tried a window air-conditioner unit. It was amazing how little effect it seemed to have. I honestly don't believe that it made any temp difference at all in the shop. So this last winter I had the ceiling insulated. The walls are finished and so I stopped short of ripping down the sheet rock to try and insulate the walls though I will do so if I have to. The end of last summer when doing the new wiring in the shop I got to be up near the ceiling and you could feel the heat just radiate down out of the attic through the ceiling.

So now that I have some insulation up there I am hoping this will be greatly reduced. But I want to add some direct cooling. With the window air-conditioner having been such a failure last year I am looking at alternatives. The much much larger ductless mini-split A/C units are of interest to me but I was walking thru HD the other day and saw some nice large Swamp Coolers. (Evaporative cooler for those that haven't hear this term before.)

And I got to thinking that might work... But then I wondered about putting that much moisture into the air. I don't particularly want to turn my tools in puddles of rust.

So I thought I would ask here. Is it safe in very dry areas like Utah, New Mexico, Nevada etc... to use an evaporative cooler? Or will it just rust the tools into oblivion?

Anyone ever tried it? They were just 1/5th the price of the mini-split unit I was looking at.

Thanks,
Joshua

[Eric Gustafson]

Not true - heat in the room is removed when the water evaporates. It's just like how sweat cools you down - as the sweat evaporates off your body, the energy used to convert liquid to gas is removed from your body, cooling you down.

The heat is not removed. It is just converted. In the case of sweat, moisture and heat leaves the body through evaporation. The swamp coolers convert the hot dry air into cooler wet air, the heat is in the water vapor. Those coolers just do not work unless there is a constant flow of air through and out the room. Portable units will not work in a closed room.

[Rollie Meyers]

Didn't that Legionnaire's disease problem about 25 years ago come from some poorly maintained evap coolers?
.

No, it happened because of improperly maintained cooling towers on a hotel chiller. (Cooling towers are sort of a evap cooler but not in the same way as the cooler in this thread).

BTW, I live in the Sacramento Valley, where temps do get into triple digits & do cool the house w/ a evap cooler.

[Talbert McMullin]

Problem here in the Phoenix area is, you cannot get enough humidity! Soon as the swamper pumps moist air in, it's bone dry in a matter of seconds. I do keep my tools coated, however, just to be safe. When I lived in Tennessee, you could hear the tools rusting!

[Steve Orbine]

Steve - the heat is used to convert liquid water to water vapor. I think the number is around 970 btu per pound of water, it's called the latent heat of vaporization. You get cooler, wetter air. The 'heat' is removed when inside air circulates to the outside, either passively or not, carrying water vapor out. If the inside air gets too humid, the evaporative cooler fails as evaporation does not occur into saturated air.

[Howard Acheson]

>>>> But then I wondered about putting that much moisture into the air.

That's the problem with evaporative coolers.

[Dave Cav]

Hi Joshua,
How did your swamp cooler experiment work out? I'm moving from north of Seattle to the Cache Valley next spring, and I'm building out my shop right now. We'll be in Richmond, and I'm thinking about a swamp cooler. Did you ever install one in your garage?

I tried to send you a PM but your mail box is full....

[Randall J Cox]

I have been using a swamp cooler in my 16x18 shop for 12 years now every summer. Not a speck of rust that I can detect on anything. I live in central Calif valley where its hot and dry, 99 degrees yesterday. I have a whole host of tools with lots of cast iron that wax annually and no problems whatsoever. My guess it should work fine. You just have to let the air blow through, can't close everything up and run it. Randy

[Peter Kelly]

My exhibit vendor in St. George uses a large swamp cooler in their wood and metal shops. No rust on the machines. Should be fine in SLC.

[Mike Bigfoot]

For 15 years I have ran a huge swamp cooler in my 1,200sq ft garage shop in Southern California, It runs continuous 24/7 from April - mid October. It comes in from the back south wall & the air exits through the 3 large vents on the roof. I don't have any insulation at all & it can be 105 outside & the shop stays in the high 70's, maybe low 80's if it gets hotter but it makes all the difference. I keep the doors shut & the air cools the place off nicely. I don't have any rust on any cast-iron, this is a new one for me. In my office I have a new $3,500 mac 12" from that cooler, the other 5 year old mac has been there since new, no problems but its dry here. HOWEVER we do get 2 weeks during July that the humidity takes over & we cant run the air coolers, It becomes miserable & thats when we turn on the AC, HA. I know its an old thread but hey, I like my air cooler.......

Not sure about the OP in Utah though

[Greg Parrish]

I'm in Florida so plenty of natural humidity but I'm running an 18k btu Mitsubishi mini split full time in my 2 car garage and it works great. That said, I also run a separate dehumidifier full time too due to the large garage door. Since I can't seal off that door I get small air leaks that let in humidity. The dehumidifier only comes on now and then though. One big thing that helped here was insulate garage door panels, insulate garage ceiling in attic, put foil radiant barrier under rafters and had expanded foam pumped into walls between studs all the way around.

In in your case a large mini split and pumped in foam wall insulation might do the trick without the dehumidifier.



DOH! Fell for the old thread too.

[Stew Hagerty]

I have no windows in my shop and I don't want to cut a big hole in the wall (not to mention it looks ugly from the outside), so I can't use a window air conditioner. A mini-split would be fantastic, but they are a bit pricey for me (disabled and rely on just my SSDI for income). My neurological disorder screwed up my internal thermostat so I cannot tolerate temps in excess of 70 degrees while working (I can do upper 70's for a while if I'm in the shade and not exerting myself), so I MUST have something. Oh, I live in NE Indiana. My furnace w/evaporator is in my garage, so I added a vent. It helps, but not enough. So last year I got a "portable air conditioner". It is a 14,000BTU, dual hose unit. I have an 12" jog between my 2-car & 1-car doors, so I popped off a couple pieces of siding and modified the port that comes with it to fasten to the wall. I cut two 5" holes for the hoses, attached them to the port, and bingo - I have A/C. My garage is fully insulated, and has really good 2" thick "sandwich" overhead doors that I have sealed about as good as possible. Between the vent & the portable unit, the garage will stay under 70 for me until the outside temp hits the upper 90's or more. And even then, it stays comfortable until usually around mid-afternoon.

Here is a link for the portable A/C unit that I have. I love it! It has a remote, it self-eliminates condensation, it's relatively quiet, at $500 it is comparatively inexpensive, and it works great.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[Joshua Dinerstein]

Hi Joshua,
How did your swamp cooler experiment work out? I'm moving from north of Seattle to the Cache Valley next spring, and I'm building out my shop right now. We'll be in Richmond, and I'm thinking about a swamp cooler. Did you ever install one in your garage?

Awesome. I lived in Cache Valley for a long long time. I love it up there!

To answer your question: I never did it. To be honest I never did anything about the temperature in my shop. My wife and I had an unexpected set of twins. And between that change in life and several major job changes I have had very very little time out in my shop. I have sadly gone a year at a stretch without being able to get out there. This most recent job change has me no longer working 80+ hours a week and so finally I have gotten back into the shop. For my first project I just installed an Onieda SDD cyclone and got that working great. Saved some much needed space in my poor shop of the HF 2hp DC and a 40gallon trashcan with a Thien baffle lid.

Now that that is done I have actually just looped back around to this question for myself. I had decided not to do a swamp cooler. The consequences can be just a little high for my personal tastes. I had chosen to do a Friedrich Breeze mini split. Thanks to a pretty cool design on the lineset it was something that I could install myself. I admit that with how little I was able to get out there buying a rather huge mini split for $2k and then paying someone $2k, those were the bids I was getting, to install it was just not in the budget or honestly justifiable. It would literally have been $1000/hour over the last 4 years. So I spent the last few years saving and sadly when I went to purchase it this last week I found that Friedrich no longer makes or sells this model. And the prices have sky rocketed on what little stock remains. And then I could find only the 12 BTU model and none of the 24k BTU ones.

A bit more research turned up the MrCool line and they also now have a DIY sealed lineset model that goes way up to I think 36k BTU. Different arrangement than the breeze but an identical concept. No Vacuuming of lines or Nitrogen bottle needed etc... But I have been able to find very little in the way of reviews. I think that personally I am going to stop trying to track down perfection and just buy one and use it. If I had done that 5 years ago before the twins were born I might have actually used my shop. But when it is either freezing or roasting and you have at most 30 minutes it just never seemed worth it.

I admit to still wondering what BTU to get. I have a standard 3 car garage that now has a ton of blown in insulation above the ceiling but an unknown amount behind the finished walls. Standard living space calculators indicate using as 12-14k BTU unit but when I tried a window unit at that range, I borrowed it from a kind friend, it was insufficient to really solve the problem. So either a 24k or a 36k is in my future. I think that for my usage pattern something that can come on and really cool it down quick in the summer and perhaps heat it up a bit quicker in the winter is better. It will sit off much more often than not.

I tried to send you a PM but your mail box is full....

Yeah. My membership just expired. Happens about this time every year. When that happens you can have far less messages in your inbox. So suddenly I go from having room to having none. I will sign up again today. Thanks for the reminder.

For my part as you may very well beat me to the punch I would love to hear what your choice is and how it works out for you.

Joshua

[Joshua Dinerstein]

I have been using a swamp cooler in my 16x18 shop for 12 years now every summer. Not a speck of rust that I can detect on anything. I live in central Calif valley where its hot and dry, 99 degrees yesterday. I have a whole host of tools with lots of cast iron that wax annually and no problems whatsoever. My guess it should work fine. You just have to let the air blow through, can't close everything up and run it. Randy

Interesting. Very interesting. The local Home Depot is beginning to start clearancing these things out. It amazes me that they start to do that so early in what seems to be the summer. Given that my first choice is no longer available perhaps I should try it again. Thanks for the feedback.

If there were no problems with rust where there any other problems? All your wood spalted on you or tool handle issues?

Joshua

[Joshua Dinerstein]

I'm in Florida so plenty of natural humidity but I'm running an 18k btu Mitsubishi mini split full time in my 2 car garage and it works great. That said, I also run a separate dehumidifier full time too due to the large garage door. Since I can't seal off that door I get small air leaks that let in humidity. The dehumidifier only comes on now and then though. One big thing that helped here was insulate garage door panels, insulate garage ceiling in attic, put foil radiant barrier under rafters and had expanded foam pumped into walls between studs all the way around.

In in your case a large mini split and pumped in foam wall insulation might do the trick without the dehumidifier.

DOH! Fell for the old thread too.

Greg,

Hey! Who you callin' old?!!? It might be old but for me at least, as just described in another message, it is as relevant today as it was years ago.

Your reply really caught my attention. I have, as mentioned, a 3 car. With no dividers in it I have to heat or cool it all. I want a wall in there... my wife does not. So no wall.

For a 2 car with and 18k how do it work with the temp? I know that there are lots of factors, insulation/sun exposure/etc.., but are you happy at 18k? Would you have gone bigger or smaller given the chance to do it over? Would you recommend a 24 or even a 32 for a 3 car garage?

Thanks,
Joshua