Projected Benefits of New Residential Evaporative Cooling Systems: Progress Report #2

The use of conventional evaporative cooling has rapidly declined in the United States despite the fact that it has high potential for energy savings in dry climates. Evaporative systems are very competitive in terms of first cost and provide significant reductions in operating energy use, as well as peak-load reduction benefits. Significant market barriers still remain and can be addressed through improved systems integration. This report investigates the first of these approaches, exploring innovative components. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building America research teams are investigating the use of two promising new pieces of residential cooling equipment that employ evaporative cooling as a part of their system design. The OASys unit, which is a combination of direct and indirect evaporative cooling stages developed by Davis Energy Group (DEG) and manufactured by Speakman CRS, is used to ultimately provide outside air to the living space. The outdoor air provided is indirectly and directly evaporatively cooled in two stages to a condition that can be below the wet-bulb (wb) temperature of the outside air, thus outperforming a conventional single-stage direct evaporative cooler.