DIY swamp cooler

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funkywizard

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Jan 15, 2017
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Arizona gets pretty hot. The garage has no cooling (or insulation, sadly), so it's been getting up to 110+ degrees, with sub 10% humidity.

Have built a home made swamp cooler to address this, so that the garage will be cool enough to run servers.

Have put 6x noctua fans blowing out of the garage's upper ventilation vent (the pressure causes an equal amount of air comes in the lower vent). This will exhaust the wet air and bring in more dry air, so that the swamp cooler doesn't bring the humidity ridiculously high and stop working altogether.

Wanted to have a float valve for automatic refilling, but was having trouble with that, and don't have a faucet in the garage anyway, so decided to go with a 38 gallon ice chest instead. Can go through as much as a gallon an hour so a 5 gallon bucket wasn't cutting it.

Pictures coming shortly....
 
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funkywizard

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Jan 15, 2017
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Planning to run a couple gpu miners on the table that has the thermometer on it. Not a ton of power in the garage unfortunately though.

From what I can tell, should be able to keep the air in front of the swamp cooler at 80 - 90 degrees (and 40-60% humidity) when it's 110 outside.
 

BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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love it! i built something like that before too, also using PVC pipes and a HFT water pump. but I couldn't keep the humidity under control... i need to be in AZ for something like that...
 

funkywizard

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Jan 15, 2017
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Thanks!

You need a constant source of fresh air to keep humidity down. That does mean, a constant source of hot air, unfortunately.

It's most effective during the hottest times of day, when humidity is very low and temperatures are very high. You can get a substantial temperature drop in those conditions. At night when temperatures are lower, the cooler doesn't do a whole lot, but, the temperature is already a lot lower so that's not so bad.

The cooler doesn't keep it cool enough for me to want to hang out in the garage, but, gives a good amount of thermal headroom for the servers.
 

funkywizard

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Jan 15, 2017
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These use less power. They're popular for being cheap to operate in hot and dry locations.
Yup : )

Something in the ballpark of 150w and 30 gallons water / day.

Shouldnt be more than 20 cents worth of water / day, which, running a small ac for a bit over an hour would cost the same.

Could probably get the water and power use down by running the system on a thermostat as well. Not really necessary to run the system when its below 90 degrees already.