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Location: Stuck on the East Coast, hoping to head West
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My upstairs bedroom is ridiculously hot. I cannot have a window unit, per hoa rules. I'm debating between a swamp cooler vs a portable ac unit. Does anyone have any ideas as to which would be better. Mid-Atlantic region if that matters. The house does have central A/C, but the bedroom is still too hot.
I'd also say in the Mid-Atlantic region is far too humid for an evaporative cooler to work well. There are maps of effective zones; look up your region to see if a swamp cooler would be even marginally effective.
Doesn't a portable AC unit still need to get the water out somehow? Through a hose that goes out your window? Make sure HOA is okay with that.
I live in a low humidity area and I have tried a swamp cooler and it doesn't work that well, and you have to be real close in front of it to feel enough cool air.
Location: Stuck on the East Coast, hoping to head West
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Thanks. I'm renting right now, but the system seems to be working well.
The townhouse is 3 levels: basement is awesomely cool, middle level stays cool, my 3rd level bedroom is hot, the other 2 bedrooms, third level, on the other side of the house are fine.
The other 2 bedrooms are shaded. I'm pretty sure it's just the fact that my bedroom has no shade and gets alot of sun. I have thermal curtains and I suppose they help a little.
My neighbors have said their upstairs room is also hot, but they are just cranking up the entire central air unit. I was thinking the portable unit, just in my room, would save more energy.
Yes, I will be putting a hose out the window for the portable unit and see what happens.
I did check the maps, and it looks the swamp cooler wouldn't work in this region. I was thinking that the central air would've removed enough humidity from the house so that the swamp cooler would work. Has anyone ran the swamp cooler + central air?
I live in a low humidity area and I have tried a swamp cooler and it doesn't work that well, and you have to be real close in front of it to feel enough cool air.
Based on this and nothing else, I have to wonder whether you were using it correctly. I've had both evap and AC; both worked fine in North California although some humid days were borderline with a cooler. It wasn't even a sad joke to think about in the northeast (with AC that pulled more water out of the air than our well did out of the ground).
But here in Denver, with ~20% RH a good part of the time, I added a moderate-sized through-wall to my two-story, 1700sf house and have no complaints. (About three days a summer, the humidity goes up just high enough that cooling is noticeably affected.)
If you really have low RH, a cooler should work well. The big difference between a cooler and AC is that AC more or less requires a sealed box for proper operation, while a cooler requires some slightly fussy blow-through allowance, with selected windows open a predetermined amount, to get even cooling.
If you run a cooler into a closed box or without sufficient flow-through, they won't do squat and "the only place you'll feel cool air is right in front of them."
Doesn't a portable AC unit still need to get the water out somehow? Through a hose that goes out your window? Make sure HOA is okay with that.
I live in a low humidity area and I have tried a swamp cooler and it doesn't work that well, and you have to be real close in front of it to feel enough cool air.
Yes we have a portable a/c but the hose has to go out the window. I also have a small "arctic air" cooler, which I use at night, when we turn off the main unit. It is about the size of a radio & does a good job at cooling down a small space, ( ie , just one side of the bed.) They need no hoses, & only cost around $40.
you have an attic fan? i remember in my last house when the attic fan stopped working it was impossible to cool the bedrooms upstairs.
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