Choosing evaporative Cooling - choose with care

Choosing Evaporative Cooling

We had an enquiry the other day. "We need evaporative coolers", they said,  "about 3 of them". Our enquirer, it seemed, had made his choice. Now choosing evaporative cooling was mearly a matter of picking a size and colour, or so it seemed.

From a promising start it soon became apparent that this was not a suitable application for evaporative coolers. The building was a reasonable size and was in fact a venue, used for weddings and the like. With a relatively low ceiling and stuffed with people in fancy hats eating wedding cake, there is going to be a requirement for considerable cooling on a warm day. The trouble is that for this application the volume of air that would be required to cool the room and its occupants would be very high relative to its ceiling height. The air movement that would result from introducing the cool airflow would be more than a nuisance - the serviettes would be flying all over the place, and... there goes the best mans speech!

In a different environment and with higher ceilings the story would be quite different. For industrial applications with lower occupation levels and where staff are working and would welcome any breeze but particularly a cool one, the cool air movement introduced by evaporative coolers is a bonus not a nuisance.

Going back to this application, we could put in fewer evaporative coolers and duct the air to more diffusers to avoid drafts. The problem here is that the quantity of cooling delivered on this draft free air would not be sufficient for fulfil the main objective - cooling. Moreover, such an installation would only serve  to give evaporative coolers a bad name. Wedding guests would be perhaps more inclined to spread bad news about the venue and its cooling rather than good news.

A better solution - how about chiller modules and some fan coils? Heating and cooling capability from one system and no ruffled hat feathers.