It’s already 25DegC in my home office.
The best cooling automation I have so far is to turn the fan on when it’s 25 for >5mins.
Is there a nice zigbee / ESP32 evaporation cooler that I can enjoying setting up with HA?
I heard about an evaporative cooler that might work if you can get lots of cheap water. Basically you spray salt water at the top of a pipe or brick chimney. The water partially evaporates and land on a cold water recirculating loop. That loop goes into the house and you blow air past it to cool the air.
Before you bother with a swamp cooler: have you measured the relative humidity % in the room on a hot day? They only help in very specific climates.
Here! Have a website with some helpful charts!
https://learnmetrics.com/evaporative-cooler-chart-swamp-cooler/
For a website called Learn Metrics to give temperatures in Fahrenheit is wild.
Only as wild as a website called learnfrench to have text in english
Thanks
Hmmm… my office is 50~60%:
At 55% relative humidity, the swamp cooler will be able to drop the temperature from 90°F to 81°F. That’s a -9°F drop.
So, it’ll be able to drop 32°C to 27°C…
Looks like I might have to look for a different solution… or have a higher electricity bill by running a dehumidifier too.
Dehumidifiers are air-conditioners… Like literally. So, you would be running a swamp cooler to cool the room by adding humidity, but because dehumidifiers produce excess heat, you would then be adding heat to dehumidify…
Yeah, when you put it like that… yeah it’s madness.
It sounds like you are not in the US, so the best I can do is give you some suggestions that are available to me and hopefully they are not too far off for you…
A small 5000btu window AC are really cheap here, and are typically less than 40lbs (18kg). So you probably won’t want to pull it out of the window daily, but you could probably lug it into position at the beginning of the season, and then take it out at the end of the season.
Portable ACs typically cost a bit more but are much more mobile. They are typically heavier than comparable window ACs, but they are on wheels and the exhaust tube is light and can be put in taken out of the window on demand. Ones with both an intake and exhaust tube are much more efficient, but they are a lot harder to find (at least around here) and more expensive. The ones with just an exhaust tube do work though, however you should judge it’s cooling by half of whatever it says. So if it says it is a 10,000 BTU then it will perform more like a 5000 BTU. If you wrap the hot exhaust tube in a blanket or some other form of insulation you will see a significant improvement in cooling. Also the exhaust tubes are only about 5 to 6 inches (130-150mm) in diameter, so they can be routed through holes holes smaller than windows. On the side of my garage there’s a hole in the brick where they routed wires and other stuff to the exterior. I was able to cut a hole in the sheetrock on the inside of my garage directly opposite of that hole through the brick. I was then able to route the exhaust from my portable AC through that hole and it blows out through theme opening in the brick. Or maybe you could have the portable AC tube routed to an exhaust in another room but have the AC positioned to blow into your office Despite what others have said swamp coolers do work, even somewhere like where I live where the typical humidity outside is 75 to 95%. But the higher humidity the less positive effect they have. So they definitely fall into the “better than nothing” category. And of course the big downside is it is going to increase the humidity. If your windows are closed, that could cause problems. But my guess is that you have your windows open, so a lot of the humidity is going to make its way out with normal breezes anyways.
If all else fails Matthias has a great video on how to best position a fan to get the most airflow out a window.
At that point just get an AC unit
Most dumb appliances work great on a smart outlet. That’s how I set up my smart whole house fan.
Oh, my other advice is definitely buy the bacteriostatic water additive, because otherwise you will have to clean all the wet parts of the machine with hot soapy water every single week to keep yourself healthy.
And my other other advice is to get the absolute dumbest unit possible that can be turned on and off with a knob/switch. Just set it to on and plug it into a smart plug.
Good points.
That’s what I’m doing for the winter: dumb dehumidifier on smart socket. HA measures the humidity and turns it on / off.
I was hoping for something that could cool and report back what it was doing to HA, but I think I’ll have to go with the same approach as the dehumidifier.
Hate to say it, but unless you go for air-con, just a standard pedestal fan works way better than the evaporative coolers.
*AC
That’s what I appear to be learning from this post’s comments 🙂
As a colleague used to say: Every day’s a school day.
If you can find something with an infrared remote you can control IR blasters via hass. I control an AC unit and a fan using an RM Mini3 (and my TV and soundbar) via Home Assistant.
Hmmm. Hadn’t thought of that. Interesting point… I’ve even got an unused IR blaster… somewhere.
Remember that a fan does not cool the environment. It cools you due to pushing the hot air away from you, but it does not actually cool the air itself. I have a dumb window air conditioning unit in my room that I’ve connected to a smart plug and I’m using the forecast temperature from the weather provider to automate it turning on. Eventually, I think I’ll actually get a temperature sensor and switch the automation from the online forecast to the sensor instead. But the online forecast is cheaper, so that’s how I’ve at least started out.
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Remember that a fan does not cool the environment. It cools you due to pushing the hot air away from you, but it does not actually cool the air itself.
One step further actually, you’re directly dumping heat into the room by running the fan.
Depends on how much room you have and what your budget is. In my server room, with no cooling it gets up to 90F pretty quickly. A standing AC unit with a dehumidifier rectifies the situation and keeps the room at 70F without issue. It’s an inverter unit on a separate electrical line, so it’s pretty energy efficient (especially because I’m shooting for 70F and not 60F), and there’s no chance of failed power because the AC tripped a breaker.
Low tech solutions sometimes are the best. Cut open your wall and install a box fan. 🤷♂️ Cheap and effective. lol
Obviously, the first question: Why so hot in your home office?
Guessing you don’t have a central hvac unit…??
No way to install window unit or through-wall unit…??
Me working from home in the UK today in a house designed for winter with no air conditioning (as is all typical in this country, since the industrial revolution had barely happened when most were built, let alone global warming):
25 degrees sounds blissfully Baltic compared to the day I had today
There are not enough fans in my house
The roof above my head is probably close to 40DegC, but I put 150mm insulation in, so it’s not toooo bad at the mo
That’s where the external heat’s coming from.
The internal heat is me, a laptop under heavy load (corp security = noticable% CPU), some monitors and the NAS (which is now on automated power on / off cycles to reduce heat)
But yeah, we have no AC. We only have a few weeks in the year like this - at scattered random times - so it’s not worth installing. Next week we might be back down to 15DegC
And if I put a unit in my window then I’ll basically be living in a dungeon.
Just to mention it again, through-wall is an option…
But, if overheat conditions are not that often, still might not be worth cost of installation.
Might consider a low-tech solution such as putting a bowl of ice cubes in front of the fan so the air passes over the bowl before hitting either you or equipment. 🤷♂️
