To ensure your evaporative cooler is operating at its best, Duncan’s Plumbing Service and the coolers’ manufactures recommend a service every year on standard evaporative coolers and every other year on no or low maintenance evaporative coolers.
During winter, your evaporative cooler has been sitting idle for at least six months since the last time you probably used or thought of it. The system needs a little TLC to bring it back to life and to ensure it keeps doing what it is designed to do which is of course keeping you and your family cool.
What we look at when carrying out the service.
- Water levels including water sensors: if these aren’t correct the system will either be wasting water or starving the pump causing damage.
- Water distribution piping: these can become clogged with calcium also causing issues with pumps and the ability to get the correct amount of water over the pads to cool correctly.
- Water pump: this little part has to work its pump off the minute you turn the system on and the water level is correct, if it’s not happy you’re going to be the first to know about it
- Celdeck pads: generally these will last and last however sometimes they literally fall apart and again the system will suffer. Bugs and spiders love to make their home in the corners of these in the months when the system is sitting idle.
- Fan motor and fan blade: these two components rely on each other and are basically the slave to the whole system. If the fan is not supported correctly or is running hot, it won’t matter how the blade is, the whole operation will come to a stop.
- Fan capacitor: this little component tells the fan motor in what direction to run in and how fast. If it’s low in its capacitance then the fan will run hot and eventually fail. Quite an expensive repair for the sake of a little part.
- Printed circuit board. Generally the situation with this part is if it’s not broken don’t touch it, however there are some things that will break it such as water leaking into the cover etc.
- Electrical wiring: unfortunately the weather etc will slowly but surely take its toll on every exposed and sometime wiring not exposed to the elements, a visual check can save a lot of uncomfortable nights.
- Ductwork: Critical for distributing the cool air around your home. The outer plastic cover can perish and fall off allowing the heat of in excess of 60° Celsius entering the duct work and warming the cool air up to not so cool.
- Wall controller: these can sometimes be connected to the gas heater as well as operating your cooler. If you haven’t checked if the cooler is still communicating with the wall controller, you better do it now while you remember.
And you thought there was not much to an evaporative cooler.