Evaporative Air Cooler safe to run when its raining and lightening outside? Is it too humid for this?

Question

I have an evaporative air cooler on top of my house along with a regular air conditioner and it drips water, outside, when it's cooling the house down. But right now it is raining hard and lightening near my city so I turned the regular air conditioner off. Does anyone know if it is okay to run the evaporative air cooler, or will this make the house more humid (I have never used the evaporative air cooler before)?

Answer 1

Which drips?  Evap (Swamp coolers)  are maybe 3 times more efficient in dry climates than refrigerated AC.  In the driest climate sole use of a swamp cooler will not bring inside humidity much above 50%.....It will decrease in efficiency as the outside humidity increases but will never exceed more than about 25% over outside humidity inside if proper airflow is maintained.  If your evap cooler drips then yer float level is not set correctly.  A properly sized and maintained evap cooler will reduce the temperature inside your house by 30 degrees when outside humidity is below 35% and your airflow is correctly managed.  Depending on size and speed of the fan yer evap cooler pushes X ammount of cubic feet of air per min thru yer house.  To enjoy maximum cooling benefit from this you need to control the outflow of air from your house to about 80% of the inflow the cooler produces.  This gives the cool air the cooler produces time to cool the house before going out.  In other words the evap cooler should pressurise yer house slightly.  In a rainstorm humidity increases outside, so evap cooler efficiency decreases but danger does not increase.  As long as outside humidity is less than 100% an evap cooler will provide some cooling.  The water pump and the fan in the evap cooler use 30% of the energy of refrigerated AC.  Now I live in a dry climate.......Todays maximum humidity was about 20% outside.  Outside temp like 98  inside temp with evap cooler on lo fan speed? can U say 68?  Inside humidity about 42%.  ya, and my power bill runs less than $40/ mo.  Way to go! Swamp cooler!.

Answer 2

To answer the question is it safe then the answer is yes. However an evaporative cooler works by water evaporating off the pads. So if it is humid, & or raining it will not work very well. Also yes it does make the air in the house more humid when it is operating.