It adds 43 BTU/hr to the room (about 1/17th of a resting human BTUs).
Amazing deal at only 30% more than a 5,000 BTU window A/C unit!
You could buy 18 of these BB approved fans.
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It cools the room by evaporating your hot cash into the ether.
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Every July and August in the South I keep thinking of that line from The Abyss, “We all breathed liquid for 9 months, Bud. Your body will remember.”
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The best part of these BB Store shitposts on Sunday is they stay at the top long enough to really get ripped into.
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It’s an evaporative (“swamp”) cooler. Yes they work, but there’s nothing at all “new” about the concept. If you have a cheap, reliable water supply, they’re significantly less expensive to operate than an A/C, and even most heat pumps, but they aren’t as strong, overall, and can’t cool down as many degrees.
To be fair, the Boing Boing Store sells disappointment.
But at 87% off!!!
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I build this design last year, and I must say I really liked it…
First, no water pump needed - just a fan.
Second, filter before air intake, so your evap mesh isn’t also your dust filter.
Third, it’s inside your yurt so easy to check on when you’re being lazy after that all nighter.
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Even if water stays in the same room, it lowers the temperature of air a bit, at the cost of introducing moisture.
The heat is absorbed during phase change:
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Swamp coolers work. I’ve been in a house that was cooled with one, and it’s not some kind of urban legend. And they don’t have any mechanism to send heat outside through a separate hot-air vent, like a traditional air conditioner. The physics is hot dry air + liquid water → cool damp air.
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I feel like the name is wrong - I always understood swamp coolers to be actual ice in back of a fan. It’s evaporative - kind of - but not like that - and adds humidity to the air - what you are showing is a real cooling system that can actually be used for refrigeration if you have enough water in a dry climate (although usually in dry climates water is an issue).
It’s a dumb name. It wouldn’t work in an actual swamp. Swamp air is already humid.
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That should be on a t-shirt.
proprietary tech to humidify the air as it cools
Proprietary eh? You mean a swamp cooler?
But yeah, the environment these can work in needs to be very specific otherwise it will just be blowing muggy air into the room. As others have pointed out, you can only effectively use these if you’re in a very dry region. I used to live in Nevada and that’s a great place for something like this but then again there are larger and cheaper swamp coolers you can get elsewhere.
I don’t know if there is an award for the most generally applicable BB Shop comment of all time, but you have set the bar very high. Kudos.
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And drape a damp cloth around the back of your neck.
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Perhaps the name refers to the swamp-like humidity created by evaporative coolers rather to where they are used?
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At 87% off it’s more like a vague feeling of slight dissatisfaction with the world in general, which buying stuff promises to fix by making you feel better, but often actually makes it worse.
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By calling this an “air conditioner”, the bbs has run afoul of federal law. The Appliance Labeling Rule is enforced by the FTC. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0044-heating-and-cooling-your-home-less
Swamp coolers don’t have ice in them. They pull dry air in from the outside through wet filters, so the evaporation of the water cools the air. That’s why they only work in a dry climate - if the air is too humid already, there’s little evaporation and very little cooling.
There are modern versions of evaporative coolers that use two stages: the first is an evaporative cooler around tubes fitted with heat sinks which bring in outside air and cool it a bit without adding humidity. In the second stage, the still-dry somewhat-cooled air from the tubes goes through the wet filters of a second evaporative cooler, which cools it even further. I’ve heard they’re very efficient and effective.
The desk “air conditioner” here, however, as everyone agrees, is a relatively ineffective, expensive rip-off of a very old idea, pretending to be high tech and hip. There are lots of cheaper options if you want to try it:
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