What the work is
An evaporative cooler cools by evaporating water, which means everything dissolved in that water stays behind on the pads and in the tray. On hard water they scale, stiffen and stop absorbing, and the cooler quietly stops cooling long before it stops running.
Service is the pads, the pump, the float valve and the bleed-off. The bleed-off is the part people disable to save water, and it is the part that decides whether the pads last a season or a month.
It is worth being straight about what these do and do not do. An evaporative cooler adds moisture to the air as it cools it, so it works well when the air is dry and much less well during the monsoon, when the humidity climbs. That is not a fault in the machine; it is the physics, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
They also need a window or a vent open to work, because they push air through the house rather than recirculating it. A cooler in a closed house does very little, which is the single most common complaint we hear about one.
What is included
- Pads replaced, tray drained and cleaned
- Pump, float valve and distribution checked
- Bleed-off set and explained, rather than removed
- Winter shutdown and drain-down if that is what you are calling about
What is not
- Converting to refrigerated air, which is a system replacement and quoted as one
- Roof structural work
The water is the reason these fail early
The City of St. George's Water Distribution Division instructs residents to set a water softener to 18 grains per gallon, with a maximum of 22. That is about 308 to 376 milligrams per litre as calcium carbonate, which the USGS classes as very hard.
An evaporative cooler concentrates that. The water leaves and the minerals do not, so the pads and the tray take everything the incoming water carried. It is the reason the bleed-off matters here more than it does in most places, and the reason a cooler that was fine last summer can be useless by August.
What to ask anyone quoting this, us included
- Is the bleed-off working, and what is it set to?
- How often will these pads need replacing on this water?
- Is the float set right?
- How many windows should I have open, and where?
- What do I do with this during monsoon?