old school chiller idea?

[fluffhead]

I am a sheet metal worker who spends alot of time on roofs.On some very old buildings and some newer(1960's)I see a very simple yet effecient air cooling system and wonder if anyone has tried it for tanks.Heres oh it works:water is trickled over a series of wooden slats while large fans sit on either side of the slats with an intake fan in the center efectively cooling large buildings.
MY question is has anybody ever tried something like this or think it would work?Build a box with drip trays or slats.water would trikle over the trays while a fan blew across it,cooling the water,it could be pump or gravity fed.
Anybody ever here of this?I don't have a great need for a chiller but I've seen this system work on a large scale very well.Just wondering what the DIY crowd thought of it.

 

[itstheantitang]

The deltec eco cooler is a very similar design, you should check it out. It would be an easy diy, just a wet/dry with a fan.

 

[Satori]

Most houses here in Arizona have one on the roof. We call them Swamp Coolers. They don't work so well with high humidity, so during monsoon the house gets a little warmer.

If you plan to try it to cool your tank water, just remember that it's called evaporative cooling; you'll need to top off a lot. However, maybe you could use this method to cool tap water running through a tubing coil in a box with tank water running around the coils and take advantage of heat transfer.

 

[Karl K]

That unit refered to in the first post is a cooling tower. It is used to cool water that has been heated by the high temperature side of an A/C chiller for a large building. The low temperature side keeps the cooling water for the buildign at 45 degrees. The high temperature side of the chiller keeps the water at or over 100 degrees. Plenty warm enough to dump heat into the outside air.

There is not just one type of cooling tower, either. There are open circuit towers and closed circuit towers.

There has been much talk about these evaporative coolers on RC. One thing that concerns me about them is that the dirty (relatively) air from the room housing the aquarium is given a very large suface area of water into which it can unload all the airborn contaminants (dust, pollen, pollution)

Just something to think about