kevin_standlee | Swamp Cooler Repairs

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the pump on the swamp cooler stopped pumping water into the pads that make it work. Due to our hard water, replacing the pump every year or three is something we've become accustomed to doing. Yesterday afternoon, Lisa undertook the repairs.

This is the only picture I took of the cooler work. The old pump was so badly clogged that the impeller wouldn't turn at all. Fortunately, the pumps are color-coded by their power, so I just needed to buy another blue pump.

Lisa opened up the swamp cooler and replaced the old pump with the new one. While the impeller now worked, no water went though the system. Further investigation led her to remove the top of the cooler so she could get at the screw that held a T-shaped distribution pipe. The pump sends the water up to the T-shaped pipe, which sends the water to the pads on the back and sides of the cooler. When she removed the pipe, she found that it was completely clogged. Fortunately, the build-up hadn't hardened, and she was able to get it out by forcing water the "wrong way," blowing air into the pipe, and poking at the clock with a probe.

There was also a lot of crud in the bottom of the cooler. Lisa and I carried the cooler outside and she washed all of the crud out. While we were doing this, we kept hearing a periodic thumping noise coming from the minivan, which was a few meters away. Investigating, we discovered that one of the power door lock switches was stuck in the "unlock" position, meaning that it would periodically try to unlock the doors. Poking at the switch got it unstuck, and I'm glad of that, because not only was it unlocking the doors, but it would have eventually run down the battery.

We carried the cooler back inside, Lisa reassembled everything, I brought in buckets of water to refill the tank, and she turned it on: Success! The cooler started pumping water as it should, and soon thereafter, we started getting cool air wafting through the living room.

I thanked Lisa for doing this. She's much more handy with these sorts of home repairs than I am. I can carry things, buy parts, and so forth, but knowing what to do is more up her alley.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I had an issue with hard water when I lived in Reading. First time I'd had to deal with that. I was sceptical of some of the solutions, but the magnetic "softener" I had fitted to the pipe pretty much completely fixed the build-up of deposits in the water heater. It might be worth looking at one of those for your water supply if the hassle and expense of the maintenance required warrants it. Just an idea. The one I fitted was really quite cheap, especially compared to the cost of getting the water heater fixed once a year or so.

Thank you. I'll ask Lisa about this.

The water heater is okay for now, but I suspect that it will need replacing in a few years. There doesn't seem to be any way to get at a sacrificial anode the way there is on the water heater on Lisa's trailer. The anode there needs to be changed out every year or two. The swamp cooler, on the other hand, really accumulates goop. The original cooler cost about $500, and I will not be surprised if we have to buy another one in a year or two to replace this one. We've resurfaced the bottom of the thing a couple of times, and yet it still looks like it might rust out eventually.

The parts where the evaporation happens are going to accumulate the dry weight residue. The magnetic treatment only reduces build-up in heating/flow conditions. It doesn't take the hard chemicals out, just makes them less likely to deposit, but when you evaporate, they're still deposited. A salt treatment system would probably actually make rusting worse by increasing the salt content of the water. There do seem to be some inline sacrificial filters you can get but those would probably be more expensive in the end than replacing the cooler every few years.

Swamp Cooler Repairs

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