Now that is a crappy air conditioner. Can not recommend. 
Whoops… cold in one direction, hot in the other! Not a heater!
With the laws of thermodynamics, it would actually make the room hotter.
Yeah but no way the exact looking thing I saw on eBay for £2.49 was in any way different than the one on msn or amazon (for £40). I need not say that anything sold in or around the UK (maybe Spain) is a swamp cooler. You stand in front of a fan and you’ll usually feel cooler as sweat evaporates. So this is a total rip-off at least via fairly high profile companies you might trust.
Just anecdotally, I went to Waitrose (upper-scale market) the other day to buy some Coke (and ended up with American Style Scottish Buttermilk pancakes) and it was frigid in there. This was a one-day heat wave where it hit 28C (I dunno - like 82F?) . The cashier had on a coat and finger gloves. This is the kind of coolness I expect for £40 or £2.50.
Indeed.
Isn’t that like $60 US bucks? Hell yeah, I want that.
(Alas a humidifier ain’t gonna make it cold as in frigid. Sorry)
The item in my OP that MSN and then as it turned out Amazon was pushing was about $55 yet only about $3 on eBay. Of course it is merely a fan. If they had any left I’d have bought the eBay one as it looked cool and throw a few ice cubes in front of it and poor-man’s AC.
In-room air conditioners are rather expensive perhaps because of how the necessary hose (with hot air) has to be isolated from the cold fan part. At least in the UK that’s about the only kind you can get for most homes as the windows are not really made to hold such things securely and differ so much. So that (demand) itself might be a reason they’re pricier.
Many vehicles have AC (mine does not) and on Wednesday you could tell my who had by who had the windows up or down.
In the 7+ summers I’ve been in the UK (from Yorkshire down to Dorset) there’s typically only about 6 days where the temps get up to 27C+ (yeah only low 80’s F but these houses somehow hold in heat only in the summer). Above 30C is a definite threat to life especially for older people.
ETA: AC in cars in IE/UK was practically unheard of 20+ years ago yet even when I was in Ireland about half the cars had it.
I recently saw this design for the first time. Should solve the “hold securely” issue.
A totally-indoor swamp cooler can cool a room, at the cost of using up water and filling the air with humidity. There’s something called “latent heat of vaporization” that keeps the thermodynamic books balanced. In a sufficiently hot and dry environment, this can be a good tradeoff. But even there, the ones you see spammed all over the Internet are too small to have very much effect.
The other point to remember beyond @Chronos excellent point is that the purpose of air conditioning and fans and swamp coolers and everything else is NOT specifically to alter the ambient temperature in a room.
It’s to alter the human occupants’ perception of ambient temperature. Which perception is a complicated mix of actual gross temperature, actual gross humidity, local temp and humidity at the boundary layer adjacent to an occupant’s skin at various spots around their body, air velocity, the presence or absence of radiant energy sources like sunny windows or fireplaces, etc. Plus of course personal variation and personal preference.
To be sure, now that we have efficient and generally affordable machinery to manufacture genuinely cold air on demand in quantity, the rest of those “fool the senses” (“take advantage of the senses” more like) techniques are less necessary than they once were.
But in almost any context involving human bodies and human engineering, saying “It’s simple physics; the Law of [Whatever] applies, hur hur hur” is simply wrong. Or at least so far short of a complete answer as to be more misleading than informative.
I wouldn’t say that these other things “fool the senses”. Ultimately, what matters is that the rate at which heat leaves the body must be the same as the rate at which the body produces heat, and so our senses, being well-evolved, actually measure that rate. A breeze blowing past you will, in all circumstances short of completely catastrophic, actually increase the rate at which heat leaves the body. High humidity will actually decrease that rate, and so on. When you turn on a fan on a hot day and feel better, that’s not your senses being fooled; that’s your senses accurately and correctly telling you that the conditions are, in fact, better.
Good point. I wasn’t real happy with my choice of words, but flubbed the dub on fixing them. The parenthetical was a weak attempt that probably made things worse, not better
You’re absolutely positively 100% correct of course.
Thank you.
Seems like you might want several hundred pounds of ice to keep cool an entire room, though!
There are various mechanisms and devices that are powered by electricity, compressed air, whatever, that blow cold air out one end and hot air out the other. Presumably you would rather port the hot air outside, for obvious reasons, but wouldn’t you still call one a stand-alone unit? (Here is a cute standalone cooler for industrial applications, not for home use though.)
In Europe and the UK, double-hung windows are much less common, they mostly use casement and awning windows. Those are much harder to fit air conditioners into, generally requiring a special narrow/tall A/C unit and a cut-to-fit filler panel. Also that Joy Pebble (really?) A/C can only accommodate up to an 11" wall thickness, which is fine for wood-framed buildings, but it won’t work on a lot of brick buildings, especially those with projecting widow sills and stools.
And in practice, an indoor swamp cooler would typically be in a room with windows cracked open. This will allow moist air to replaced with dry air so that the indoor swamp cooler can continue cool efficiently. Otherwise, the swamp cooler would work for just a short time before the humidity in the room got too high. This would typically be used for spot cooling. For instance, if you didn’t have a whole-house cooling system, you might put a standalone swamp cooler in your bedroom that you’d turn on at night to help you sleep more comfortably. But you’d need one properly sized for the space. The little one in the ad wouldn’t provide enough cooling to make a difference.
I could see that being used in commercial kitchens. One end blast-cooks the food, the other end cools off the sweaty dishwashing staff.
I suppose that may be technically correct, but in the context of a home or small office, the amount of heat dumped into the space is going to completely overwhelm the localized effect of blowing slightly cooler air directly at the person. A small evaporative cooler will soon make the room too humid to feel comfortable, and it will reduce the effectiveness of the evaporative cooling as well. Cracking a window probably won’t be enough to overcome that if it’s too warm to just have the windows open otherwise.
The window A/C sitting in the middle of the room will also heat up the room due to the waste heat of the compressor motor and fan motor, and as the room heats up, the temperature of the cold air goes up with it. Typically the cold air from a window A/C is about 20 degrees (F) colder than the room, so if the room heats up to 90 or higher, then you’re fighting a losing battle. Any moisture that’s condensed will be re-evaporated into the room unless you can drain it to a bucket. Dehumidifiers warm the spaces they’re used in for many of the same reasons, but they’re usually used in basements where it’s already cooler to begin with, so they can take on that extra heat.
If you have access to a window and can open it a crack, it seems to me the hot air can be exhausted outside; at least that will be better than dumping it in the middle of the room.
But the whole situation assumes it’s warmer outside than inside (or at least that’s what you’re trying to achieve), so attempting to dump hot air out means that it’ll have to be sucked in somewhere else. This is why portable/single-hose air conditioners are so bad. They suck room air across the condenser and then blow it outside via the hose. But that air has to be replaced, so an equal amount of outside air has to be sucked into the building through cracks, under doors, etc. In the spot cooling scenario where you have the A/C in the middle of the room or you’re using an evaporative cooler, cracking open a window isn’t going to provide nearly enough circulation to dissipate that heat.
Once when I was a kid and it was brutally hot and humid in a Connecticut summer, I put a box fan in one of the two double-hung windows of my small room with the adjacent other window open. When I was ready for bed, the room was pleasantly cool.