March 2nd, 2009
By John DeFore
Green Right Now
Visitors to this past week’s RETECH convention in Las Vegas had the chance to judge firsthand the fairly astonishing claims of a company that says it can air condition a small office for less energy than is consumed by the average hair dryer.
Coolerado, a (naturally) Colorado-based company, is pushing its namesake air conditioning unit, a novel device that cools air by using water instead of chemical refrigerants and a compressor. As this video demonstrates, its developers believe it’s the greatest thing for warm climates since the automatic ice maker.
The company’s claims are impressive on multiple fronts. Most important is the power consumption of the unit on display in the video: 600 watts, or “one third the amount of power of a standard hair dryer” and a tenth of what a similarly sized traditional A/C unit would use. Spokesman Rick Gillan says the unit is large enough to cool 3,000 square feet occupied by about 20 people — the size of a small business — and can be powered completely by a small array of four photovoltaic panels.
Also appealing is the idea that the air conditioner itself can help boost the output of the solar panels powering it: In the heat of summer, when solar panels operate at lower efficiency, ducts from the A/C route exhaust air their way. The exhaust air is warmer than that being delivered to the rooms below, but cooler than the untreated outside air, so it helps the solar cells operate closer to their maximum efficiency.
A fan and solenoid are the invention’s only moving parts, and it uses a common air filter stocked at most hardware stores. While no chemical refrigerant is used — making these devices, in Gillan’s opinion, “the greenest air conditioners made by man” — the Coolerado does use four gallons of water per hour.
Those water requirements would appear to make the Coolerado less than drought friendly; but as Gillan points out on the Coolerado products page the unit uses less water than a traditional AC unit when water used at the power plant for electricity generation is taken into account. (For more on that comparison, see Gillan’s math in the Q & A.)
When we called Gillan seeking a cost for the device, he said that the company (like many other A/C manufacturers) doesn’t advertise prices because costs vary so much depending on the specifics of an installation.
“It’s about the same as a high-quality air-conditioner — the higher-efficiency ones,” he says.
A list of vendors can be found here, and Gillan explains that they’re focused on Western states because “our system cools but it does not dehumidify” — making it unsuitable for use in damper regions. Coolerado is doing R&D on another air conditioner that would both cool and dehumidify air.
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