This recent study of domestic evaporative cooling and refrigerative cooling in South Australia and surrounding areas involved monitoring of one evaporatively cooled and one refrigeratively cooled house, followed by computer simulation of performance of a range of houses, cooling systems, and modes of operation in a representative range of South Australian climates. The study showed that evaporative coolers use about half as much energy as refrigerative coolers in well insulated houses in Adelaide and Mildura, ranging to about a quarter the energy in poorly insulated Alice Springs houses. Life-time costs are reduced to 50#x2013;65. The use of evaporative cooling is shown to have important implications for choice of economic insulation levels and materials: improvements to the building fabric have little effect on the energy consumed by evaporative coolers, and such improvements are generally not justified by savings in evaporative cooling costs.
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