Climate control experiment

This post won't go into the off-grid series.  Aw, shucks.

10 am:

This is to test the interaction of the dehumidifier and the evaporative cooler.  Now, one may be a bit puzzled by this, since they contradict each other.  A dehumidifier will add heat and take away humidity, whereas the evaporative cooler will do the opposite.

The trick is to get the heat to go where you want, and the water to go where you want it.

This experiment will be during the early morning hours, which is the most humid part of the day, if it's not a rainy day.  Running the evaporative cooler at that time of the day will conflict with the humidity of the outside air.  So, I moved the cooler to the center of the trailer, and turned on the dehumidifier.  Where does the hot air from the dehumidifier go?  It is pushed outside by the air flow of the box fan, which pushes air out the screen door.

So far, at about 10 am, it is about 80 degrees inside the trailer, with humidity at varying levels, depending on location in the trailer.  At the north end, it is 75 percent or more, and at the south end of the living area, it is around 40 percent.  Outside temperature is about 84 at this time.  It will rise to 90 degrees by noon.  Inside, I'd like to keep it as close to 80 as possible for as long as possible.

I've been running this configuration all morning.  I want the dehumiifier to supply the evaporative cooler with nearly as much water as it needs, without resorting to using any other water.  In order to do this, I keep the cooler on low power, and off about half the time.  This will mean about a quart of water every hour.   The dehumidier will not produce that much water, but it will be close.

noon:

Temperature outside 88, inside 82.  Stopped using dehumidifier.  Too energy intense, and results are inadequate in order to keep cooler supplied with water.  Been using half hour intervals for using evaporative cooler's water and shutting it off for fan only mode.  This keeps water consumption down, but cooling effect is less.

The dehumidifier might have produced close to a gallon of water.  The cooler has used all of it.  Energy use?  Might be close to 4 kwh.  That's a bit high.  Water use?  Zero from the faucet.  Rainwater and the dehumidifier may have supplied about a gallon or two.

How much longer to run this?  The hot part of the day is just beginning.  To run the cooler would require a buttload of water.

Maybe for another hour and a half.  That would take it until 1:30 pm.

Will check in later.


2 pm:

Inside temperature at end of experiment was 85 degrees.  Outside temperature may be close to 94.  Not much else to report since the dehumidifier was kept off.


Conclusion:

It is too energy intensive to use the dehumidifier for so long, but I already knew that.  Perhaps what I didn't know, and still don't know until later today, is if this will keep the high temperature in the trailer down.  We'll see.

I'll check in with some final words at that time.


8:45 pm:


Temperature looks the same as yesterday, even though I didn't do this yesterday.   In other words, what I did today had no effect on the temperature at 8 pm.

That sucks.

So, the thing I got out of this was that the dehumidifier can keep up for a little while, but only at low power setting, while being off 50% of the time.  Or,

I could run the cooler all day in low power setting, and use less than a kwh of power, plus 3 gallons or so of water.

Well, that tells me something.