Even Cooler

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Submitted by Steven Ribeiro on June 8, 2009 - 10:43am

Energy Efficiency

I love technological advances that are simple. You know, the kind that are like “Why wasn’t this done years ago?” Let’s talk Coolerado. These guys are standing the air conditioning industry on their ear. We all know how energy efficient an evaporative cooler is, but we don’t always want the additional humidity or associated maintenance caused by mineral deposit buildups. They have just rendered the high horsepower, compressor and discarded waste heat paradigm air conditioning obsolete. This old style, energy hog, Rube Goldberg technology is nothing more than “thermodynamic nonsense” they say. In most all cases, I agree.

Here’s the basics on how it works. Air is drawn into their unit, through a filter and divided into two air streams. One air stream is passed by proprietary saturated cooling “pads” and then exhausted outside. (actually this cool, saturated air can be used to cool solar panels to increase their performance up to 15% and/or ventilate a hot attic space and then be exhausted if you want to really take advantage of the full potential here). The other half of the air stream is passed by the dry side of the now cold saturated pads that are actually acting as a heat exchanger. This air stream is very effectively cooled, but no moisture is added beyond what was in the airstream when it entered the unit. The result is cool, dry air at one tenth the energy requirement of what we all use today. Six tons of cooling for just 600 watts, rather than six tons of cooling for 6,000 watts with conventional A/C. Sorry Mr. Trane and Mr. Carrier.

Mineral buildup? Not anymore. A carefully controlled water flow drips a few excess gallons per day of high mineral content water which is drained from the system and discarded or drained to a planter bed if you like. The result is avoiding the mineral scale buildup that plagues conventional evaporative coolers.
Independence Station is planning on using 4 of these innovative Coolerado units. The Coolerado tag line is “The Greenest way to stay cool”. I couldn’t agree more!