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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.
What do you mean use city water? As in how they do it with geo thermal sytems?
Never work with piped water from the street because you wouldn't have enough of heat sink. Those systems are closed loop and use the ground as a heat sink. When using it for cooling it is just a giant heat sponge with an unquenchable appetite.
I sometimes freeze it into ice cubes, toss some into a glass of lemonade using freshly picked from the trees lemons and it sure does work better than most things.
A long time ago, when I lived in a third floor walk up with a flat tar roof, I tried this. It didn't work worth a flip and was a complete waste of time and water. Bought a $100 window AC and got some relief.
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.
You mean like how they do it in pcs or supercomputer complexes? No it wouldn't work like that since the water cost would be extremely high and it wouldn't cool down the place.
Supercomputer complexes use the water to actually heat up the rest of the building not cool it down.
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.
I'm not sure what sort of a cooling system you're talking about but here on the High Plains where we typically have low atmospheric humidity in the summertime, we can sometimes use "swamp coolers" or technically known as evaporative coolers. These units cool by drawing outside air through wetted pads and blowing it into the living space. They add moisture to the air. My 1800 square foot west Texas farmhouse is cooled entirely by swamp coolers.
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.
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. Now the ground on the way up may warm/heat up the water. That is definitely an issue down here. As an example, If the pipes providing water to your house are not deep enough in the ground you can get a hot flash of water when you turn on the faucet. This is really pronounced if the pipe are under a blacktop driveway.
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