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Heating and air · Keeping it running

Evaporative cooler service

Pads, pump, float and bleed-off, serviced for the water that is actually in the pipe here.

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One flat fee to find out what is wrong. You are told it on the phone before anyone is dispatched, and it comes off the job if you hire us. Read our Plain Terms

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 liter 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?

What we can show you in writing

Every line traces to a document we read in full. The number after a sentence points to the research below.

  • The Department of Energy's Building America Solution Center publishes that an evaporative cooler can reduce the temperature of the air entering the home by 15°F to 40°F. The drier the air, the larger the drop. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why an evaporative cooler works in a dry climate and disappoints in a humid one.1
  • DOE publishes that evaporative coolers can use about one-fourth as much energy as central air conditioners, and cost less than half as much to install and operate.1
  • Where the water carries a high mineral content, DOE names two fixes: a bleed-off valve in the recirculating line, which increases water use by 10 to 50 percent, or an auto-flush system that empties the pan and refills it every 8 to 12 hours of operation. The pan should also be emptied whenever the cooler will sit idle more than a few days.1
  • Evaporative cooler efficiency is not measured in SEER, and no national or international organization rates these units, though the federal source notes some testing guidance exists in an ASHRAE standard. So any SEER number on an evaporative cooler is meaningless, and an effectiveness percentage is the manufacturer's own claim rather than a certified rating.1

Where this comes from

Every line above traces to a document we read in full. The number after a sentence points to the research below; hover it for the section. If you find a line wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say so.

  1. Heating and air research, September 2026 Compiled from the Code of Federal Regulations at 10 CFR 430 and the Federal Register, EPA rules on refrigerant transition, the Utah Code and Utah DOPL's licensing records, ACCA's load calculation standard, ASHRAE and the AHRI directory, Pacific Northwest and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory publications, NOAA climate normals, ENERGY STAR, and the published data of Trane, Lennox and Daikin. 3 sections cited. Hover a number above for the section.

Read before you decide

The rest of keeping it running

The quote is the number. There is no second number.

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