Aircon for tent

KOOL ! Just what the doctor ordered.

Alby.
To aircondition a tent don't you just open the door flap? Some even have flow through too.

And what was the noise like ?

Didn't notice so must have been quiet unlike a lot of the rooftop caravan units.

I assume it was an inverter type.

The no idea campers are frequent. Air cond in a tent... ffs.

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That is a fascinating link you provided Peter. A contract for 50,000 Breezair evaporative air conditioners manufactured in Australia. Our industries are perhaps not quite dead yet! I take my hat off to Seely.

I was introduced to the Breezair conditioner way back in 1954. They were the standard house coolers in Woomera and were a pretty basic unit, but certainly provided effective cooling in the low humidity. From reading Seely's report the Breezair has developed much since 1954 and is a very acceptable system where the air is dry and water is available. But they are not very effective north of Brisbane.

I worked for Seeley for 25 years, mostly in product development. I went to some "interesting" places too. Like Libya, and I was in Bagdad 2 weeks before Gulf war #1.
Interesting that you say that they are not effective north of Brisbane. They are actually used in some large Darwin shopping areas during the dry season then they swap to refrig. as it gets humid. That is simply to take advantage of the power savings.
Some of their later products are quite sophisticated. Variable frequency inverter motors for instance. All designed and manufactured right here in Adelaide for 20+ years.
Cheers,
Peter
OKA196 motorhome

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No Pete. I actually said "not VERY effective" alluding to the periods of high humidity. Even so, I have seen a few in the tropical zones and wondered how much use they got.

In your time with Seely maybe you saw in their 'museum' the old window-mounted Breezair as we had at Woomera. It was no more than a vented sheetmetal box containing a radial (read exhaust) fan surrounded by a drum covered with a fibrous matter which rotated through a water-filled pan. I thought it to be neat simplicity.
On my return from Woomera I constructed my own but with a small pump that distributed the water to vertical pads on 3 sides as per the Coolgardie safes. I considered it worked better than the original, but then, I was viewing with a proprietary eye.

On the Woomera range we used Kelvinator 'Coldmakers' which were refrigerant aircons in a transportable form about 1.5 metre cubed with a pair of insulated flexible hoses to circulate chilled air through the instrument or radar vans. They were very effective. Evaporative type may not have been appropriate for fear of introducing water condensation into the electronics.

Totally agree with Allan, evaporative systems do not work well in hot humid conditions. The evaporative air conn units used in Saudi Arabia were only used in the internal parts of the country, and not near the coast where the majority of the population is. Near the coast in summer humidity is 99.9% most of the time. When going outside from an air conditioned building, it is like walking into a brick wall.

Macca.

Allan, that early unit you describe was not a Seeley product. I can't remember where they got the Breezair name, but it goes back a way. I recall one exactly like that at the Horwood Bagshaw factory at Mile End in Adelaide in the early '60s. The fibrous stuff on the drum was horse hair.
Seeley International (originally Seeley Bros.) was started in 1972 (50 years next year) by Frank Seeley (currently Chairman of the Board) and his wife Kathy. It is still owned by the family.
The "technology" of evaporative cooling was originally commercialised in the USA, but a continuous effort to make them cheaper effectively destroyed the product and the market. Seeley sell some there now at a large price (and performance) premium. Many thousands are manufactured in the Middle East and India. My trip to Iraq in 1991 was to help negotiate a manufacture under licence arrangement with a factory there. They already made many times the volume that Seeley made, but wanted a good quality product and had chosen a Seeley product after an extensive testing comparison. And they had an excellent test lab. Pity about the war.
Cheers,
Peter
OKA196 motorhome

Peter,
I thought that the "Woomera" units were called BreezeAir. Mind you, I never saw it written, only phonetically. And that was "back a way"!
I knew that the drum was covered with horsehair but chose not to say so because I thought that I would be ridiculed.

"When did Seeley International take over breezair cooling?
In 1984, General Electric exited the rooftop cooling business, letting Seeley International take over the Breezair brand name. The Breezair Evaporative cooler is found all around the world cooling everything ranging from houses to houseboats, greenhouses to factories."

Well there you go :)
So those horse hair coolers might have been GE?
Cheers,
Peter
OKA196 motorhome

After all the negative comments and not answering the question - why would he.