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For some odd reason, I though that if you get the water deep enough, water is always around 50F, no matter where or what time of the year it is located.
AFAIK that's the case, somewhere around 50 feet and then after a certain depth it begins to rise. The well water I have is constantly that cold, not sure how deep the well is because we moved here recently but likely a few a hundred feet.
The downside to evaporative coolers is that, although they are very inexpensive to operate, they cease to cool when the atmospheric humidity rises above 50% to 60% which limits their use to the drier areas of the country.
I saw a bunch of them for sale at a discount store here in Central Maryland, where summer humidity levels are typically 70%-90%.
I had to wonder how many people bought them and how upset they were when they found out that swamp coolers are useless here.
I was thinking about running water through an evaporator coil that you put on a furnace, however I just remembered that due to the subzero winter we had in wisconsin, I had to often run the water to prevent the line from freezing, and the water and sewer charges were a bit up there.
Such systems are already used for some commercial buildings. It's not common, but they exist. I'm not referring to chilled water systems with the big towers, but actual source cooling operations like seawater cooling. If those work, and cour city water is cold enough, you could make it work.
The problem would be the water/sewer bill, which would probably be much more than just installing refrigeration cooling and flipping it on whenever you wanted to.
Now, if you had beachfront property and could trench an intake line out into deeper water of Lake Michigan, you would get some seriously cold water, and it should work very well. There may be some legal issues with that. In some areas, you can't return energy depleted water back to its source (whether that is injecting into a well or back into a body of water). Power plants are obviously exempt from this, apparently.
Has anyone ever tried to use city water to cool their apartment, or house? I was wondering if it saved money, or if it ended up costing more then using window air conditioning or whole house cooling by central air.
Wouldn't this require copious use of a limited resource?
Toronto, the largest city in Canada, has had a system that cools over 80 downtown commercial buildings, using cold water from the 700 foot level of Lake Ontario, for ten years now. The system is operated by the city energy utility. The lake is about 125 miles long and 55 miles across, at it's widest point. It is a cold deep lake, and even in the midst of our hottest summers, with 90F air temperatures, the water at the intake point of the pipe is only 38 F. The system is a closed loop, that returns the warmer water to the lake, after it has been used to cool dozens of public and private office towers.
The fish love it, and we have a thriving sport fishing industry on Lake Ontario, with dozens of charter boats, and people can fish with in sight of the downtown towers of Toronto.
We maintain our indoor environments at 72 F, year round.
Could this be used by a home owner? Probably not, but the concept is certainly in use here in Toronto, on a very large scale, and has been for more than ten years.
I saw a bunch of them for sale at a discount store here in Central Maryland, where summer humidity levels are typically 70%-90%.
I had to wonder how many people bought them and how upset they were when they found out that swamp coolers are useless here.
Yes they would definitely be useless in Maryland. I lived at Severn (AA County) for several years. The best thing there was our whole house fan in the springtime to draw air into the windows and into the attic. That big fan in the center of the house was great. I wish I had one here.
Swamp coolers in arid and semi-arid areas of the country depend less on the temperature of the water entering the unit than they on their ability to convert water into a vapor state by rapid evaporation. If the air being drawn into the unit is loaded with humidity, rapid evaporation is not possible so cooling does not result.
If you are talking about Municipal delivered water (potable) then you are wasting the most valuable resource on the earth Clean drinkable Water and flushing it down the drain to cool yourself.
Some comercial cooling units use water or gylcol to cool the compressor rather then send the hot air into the room. This is more eficient since they do not need to have larger air conditioners.
In the 50's there were amonia air conditioners that used tap water to help with the cooling but they just sent the water to the drain or lawn.
Since well water (deep supplies) are used for drinking water for most of the country there are regulations about pumping water back into the well. Most new geothermal units use a non toxic antifreeze solution in a closed loop buried below the frost line to recover heat or cooling from the soil. for air conditioning they use the soil as a heat sink for heating they preheat the return air to reduce the heating load. They try to bury the coils near the normal ground (surface) water level to maximize heat transfer.
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