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?
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.
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.
Most dumb appliances work great on a smart outlet. That’s how I set up my smart whole house fan.
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…??
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.
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
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.
Metrics and the metric system are two different things.
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.
At that point just get an AC unit
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.
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.
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
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.