Oscar wrote:
wrote:
James \"Cubby\" Culbertson wrote

I live in Albuquerque and the swamp cooler is OK but not great.
The last few years has seen higher than normal humidities
so at night it struggles.

You might try a different configuration with better controls, eg turn
on the swamp to cool recirculated house air when the indoor temp rises
to 80 F and turn on a small exhaust fan when the indoor RH rises to 65%.

This works in Melbourne Australia...

Few use swamp coolers there.

I too had the impression that Melbourne (vs Perth) was too humid for swamp
cooling, but I was wrong (have you ever been wrong? :-)

Practically every new house built (and there are a lot of these at
the moment, most badly designed and over priced) has a large swamp cooler
mounted on the roof. Melbourne is rarely humid. I think the highest
dewpoint recorded is 23C.

We tried out your split-cycle swamp cooler idea a couple of nights
ago using a jerry-rigged humidistat using a SHT11 and a computer
to control the exhaust fan, and the brains of a commercial
refrigerative split-cycle system for the swamp cooler. We closed
all the windows (against standard practice with swamp coolers)

Its a ****ed approach with a swamp cooler, nowhere for the
higher humidity that comes out of the cooler to get out of the house.

Reading more carefully, you might wonder what the exhaust fan does.

and ran the swamp cooler to a fixed temp (22C) and the
humidistat to a fixed humidity (65% at your suggestion).
That night it was 28C and 35% outside.

Then again, 22C is cool, but comfy (PMV = 0.007), with vel = 0.1 m/s and
clo = 1 insulation. Raising vel to 0.5 and lowering clo to 0.5 makes 35 C at
65% comfy (slightly cool, with PMV = -0.54, on a scale from -3 = cold to +3
= hot), according to the BASIC program in the ASHRAE 55-2004 comfort standard,
so he might have just used a ceiling fan on that day... 28C at 35% with clo
= 0.5 and vel = 0.5 is "slightly warm" in the comfort zone, with PMV = 0.23.

Nick