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And thus began the perpetual cooling machine. -Frankie Fix-It
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Keeping the Air Conditioner Cool
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This company is simply outsourcing all sweating jobs to sprinklers.
Hey, I did that. It works (a little), also leaves a lot of water on the ground.
MacGyver, if you don’t mention sprinklers I didn’t catch… Thankyou!
btw, I have your swiss army knife here, just use your teeths meanwhile
not the prettiest solution, but this is actually a good idea…they should have an water softener on that water source to prevent scaling..
the cooler water lowers the head pressure, therefore the compressor doesnt need to work as hard. Thus leading to a more effecient use of energy.
They actually sell kits for this… tho i have heard, it can lead to premature breakdown of the rad fins.. if the water is not filtered properly…
i done something similar in phoenix, only with swap cooler pads. eliminates scaling the fins, and swamp cooler pads are cheap to replace every 3 to 6 months. dropped the house temps a bit with that old kludge of an ac we had (shoulda took pics) we insulated the outside with windshield sun visors (the foil buble wrap kind) put a bigger blower in (hell of a hacksaw job) plus the swamp cooler pre-cooler. and that think barely managed to keep the house 80…. compaired to 90 before we “fixed” it
So, I live in the AZ Desert and I did something similar a few years ago to allow an aging A/C unit to make it one more summer. Every 45 days I cleaned the fins with a 50/50 mix of food grade phosphoric acid and distilled water. Worked great with no noticeable build-up.
Ah yes, I’ve seen this done before when I worked HVAC for a while. This usually happens from 1 of 2 reasons.. either the unit is junk and the owner won’t pay for a new one or there is indeed something wrong but the techs are/were incompetent.
Or they needed to keep the unit running for a few weeks till the weather cools off. With a Hospital or Police Station or certain other places you can’t just “do it on Sunday when they’re closed.”
Once the weather cools, you can afford to take the system down for a half or full day to repair it, without baking everyone in the building. Or the huge expense of bringing in a trailer-mounted chiller.
From the look of the chiller, it looks to be pretty well maintained, so I don’t see it being a tightwad owner or an incompetent tech. The most likely reason is that a part is on back order & this is the only solution until it comes in. You can tell by the haphazard rigging that this is not intended to be a permanent solution but instead a temporary & very effective solution. I’ve done this many times to keep a customer cool until the proper repair could be made, a cool customer is a happy customer.
No that is quite common. We have a setup like that at our hospital. It is mounted a bit better than that. That is a pretty recent condenser and since the compressors are on the roof the pressure can get very high in the system. Even more so if it gets in the 90′s and up. Incompetency has nothing to do with it. That is about the only way you can make the pressure lower and cool better on a 95 degree and hotter day.
Or the spray pump inside the cooling tower went down. This is pretty common fix to keep the unit in freecool mode until your parts arrive.
I’ve done this…. with a water mister… and it works well.
But still no one can figure out why drinkable water supplies are dwindling!
I’ve seen this done in emergencies when a heat pump just wasn’t cutting it to keep a (badly thought out) equipment room cool. I’m not sure what the permanent solution was.
And yes, for commercial cooling towers you buy water treatment chemicals so it won’t scale.
Ah yes, the high-ambient kit add-on. I’m very familiar with this technology. I specify it often.
OK, I’m not the only person here who’s been involved in this kludge. Tells you what kind of people are attracted to the site in the first place!
That’s what I’m hoping Frankie will get eventually.
I did a much BETTER job with mine.
At first I tried that “solution” until somebody pointed out the hard-water and scale problems. So, I ditched THAT method.
Instead, I bought a “condensate pump” from Menards, and *captured* the otherwise wasted water from the cooling coils that normally get wasted down the drain. Good, CLEAN, distilled water, and COLD too!
No worries about water adding to the rust-factor on the outside unit; because it’s designed to handle rain-water … Which is pretty much the same thing.
Instead of a sprinkler, I took a drip-irrigation hose and punched about 100 tiny holes in it with a needle; then fastened the holey hose around the outside edge of the condenser coils.
Unlike the method shown, there’s no downside from scale or rust.
However, the spray is intermittent, not constant; as it only runs when enough water gets to the pump by being condensed out of the air.
Still, it DOES seem to make quite a difference even so.
the energy to run the cond pump over comes any savings from the lower head pressure every few mins, UNLESS you require the pump because you dont have a gravity drain.
Frank — modern window air conditioners do pretty much the same thing internally. The condenser fan picks up moisture from the pan and blows it through the condenser. It thus recovers some of the energy used to condense the water, improving efficiency. When the channels leading from the evaporator (cooling) coil to the pan clog up the air conditioner pees on the floor, like mine is doing right now.
The trick is also useful when the air conditioner is inadequate, either because it’s not working right (as noted above) or because the original buyer tried to cheapskate out of getting a big enough unit. In some cases it isn’t really cheapskating — it’s expen$ive to buy a unit big enough to work through a 1-2 day heat wave and run it at lower capacity the rest of the time, and commercial units often include evaporator kits for just that reason.
Ah … Glad to hear that commercial units sometimes include evaporator kits. Me thinks they always should. I wish mine had.
When I think of the HUGE commercial units like that one with all that beautiful cold distilled water being poured down the drain, wasted ….
I never heard of the idea until I implemented it myself.
Thanks for letting me know that the idea isn’t original with me.
I was thinking I might have to fight to get the idea out.
(I’m getting too old for that.)
What’s coming off your air conditioner is definitely NOT distilled water, it’s condensed. Condensed water can still be full of chemicals and particulates, and is almost always teeming with microscopic organisms.
… Just like rain-water.
However, spraying it on the *outside* condenser coil has none of the drawbacks you imply. If it was added to the inside air (which it is not) then you might have a point. As it is, the condensate *removes* such stuff from the air. Only, instead of being poured down the drain, it’s used to cool the outside (HOT) condenser coils.
Probably even pasteurizes the water when it does.
A filter for particulates makes sense though.
(If the air-conditioner filter isn’t working.)
I have a high-voltage electronic air-filter in mine.
Works a lot better (though far more expensive) than the kind you have to replace every month of two.
A nylon-stocking and a rubber-band ought to do it for the water.
Keeps any small particulates off the coils and out of the pump.
I’m going to add one to mine.
Thanks for pointing that out.
You guys are making WAYYYYYYY too much of this. It’s a common temporary solution in the trade…. No filters are needed, just like no filters are needed for the 20 years of rain hitting the condenser in it’s lifetime. Besides, it’s only temporary. Carrier is quite notorious for requiring OEM parts & the wait for them can be anywhere from days to weeks & a commercial building is not going to go without a/c for that long especially if there is a simple, cheap & effective temporary solution.
You engineering guys are ruining the fun here! Where are the puns, the zombie stories, the HVAC romance tales, and the laughs?
Don’t rain on their parade!
That A/C is as big as my house!
o_0 One of my clients told me he was doing this on the roof of his company yesterday. Here I thought he was the only one.
We did this when i was a manager at McDonalds, all the units on the roof had a sprinkler next to them. It worked quite well.
TURRRRBO officebuilding! Now with intercooler sprinkler!
Our building’s AC gets wet on too; but the liquid isn’t very cold and I think it’s gonna leave scale..
I’ve seen this going on all over Melbourne (Australia) whenever the temp gets over 35 Celsius. That’s actually a bunch of aircooled condensers, and there’s no way known there’s a cooling tower involved… It’s a nasty kludge and a damned selfish one at that, given the current drought conditions in Oz. If the fridgies responsible for this abortion took a five minute smoko and thought about the problem a tad longer, a much more elegant (and water-saving) solution could be worked out. I’m handing out my props to the idea involving swamp pads, drip trays and recirculated condensate water.
whoops – I know which university this is – its mine…. yes, we had a warm summer here in germany
OH i can comment on this,…being a veraran of the ACR/HVAC industry for some 25 years,….about the only reasons to do this is if you have a bad compressor or IF THERES AIR IN THE DAMN THING!
Dump the charge, fix the leaks and pull a good vacuume,..and replace driers,..almost forgot that one.
sheeesh,….some people will never learn
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or a couple of bad cond fan motors, the most likely reason.
Yeah, I love the whole “hurrdurr this is fail” attitude. I would have loved to have sprinklers set up like that a couple of months ago when it was nearly 100F with almost 70% relative humidity. Suffice to say with the compressors pushing nearly 180psi I was doing a rain dance in the control room but eventually gave up and had to raise some temps.
The cooling water reservoir was almost hot to the touch.
I think there’s just a lot of kiddies out there that think “refrigeration makes cold, durr.” and have absolutely no grasp of how heat exchange works.