Comment by nyrikki

Comment by nyrikki 17 hours ago

2 replies

As other have stated, evaporative cooling is most of the usage, AC dries the air and requires adding moisture to the air to prevent problems with static electricity, this drives a much smaller portion of the usage.

Note that evaporative cooling also produces significant amounts of brine, as it is similar to distillation, producing a brine that is difficult to treat and often not useful for other purposes.

Ekaros 17 hours ago

With AC can't you just well re-introduce it? The cold side could be almost closed system as nothing demands you to remove water in such location. For occupied spaces lower humidity generally feels better so moisture is removed. But for data centre it could be re-introduced?

  • nyrikki 14 hours ago

    You still have to transfer the heat to something.

    Note that it is quite common for the refrigerant or chilled water to be a closed loop, but still have an evaporative cooling tower etc.

    People are trying to use geothermal etc...

    Evaporative cooling efficiency in dry climates is hard to beat for capital, energy and space.