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When it comes time to cool your home during warmer months, you may think your only options are an air conditioner or a box fan, but there’s a third choice: an evaporative cooler.
These coolers have a water tank in their base that you can fill up manually, or hook up to a garden hose. A pump circulates the water, speeding up the process of evaporation. As the water evaporates, the air inside the cooler drops by up to 15 degrees. The wet air gets absorbed into panels built into the sides of the cooler, and blown outward by a fan that sits on top.
Air conditioners can make your room colder, but require an artificial coolant (hazardous to the environment) and a compressor (energy hungry). Conversely, a regular fan just moves hot air around without cooling it down first. Evaporative coolers are a happy medium that balance energy efficacy, environmental impact, and more effective temperature control.
While they do need to be plugged into an outlet to work, the coolers in our guide are relatively portable. The bigger ones rest on wheels, so they can be rolled inside and outside without much fuss. Our smallest recommendation weighs under one and a half pounds, and can be carried around by a handle.
Evaporative coolers may not be the best-known way to reduce the temperature in a hot room, but the picks in our guide proves they deserve to be considered alongside more traditional appliances.
How Does an Evaporative Air Cooler Work?
There are many factors to think about when choosing the best evaporative air cooler for you; below are the most important ones, which we considered while we were researching this list.
Water Tank Capacity:A evaporative cooler’s water tank is the key to chilling your room. When it’s empty, the cooler turns into a regular fan. The full-sized evaporative coolers in our guide have multi-gallon tanks that can work continuously for several hours without a refill. The personal cooler we recommend has a smaller tank, but is meant to be used in smaller areas for shorter bursts of time.
An evaporative cooler’s reach is measured in CFM (Cubic Feet per Minute). The higher the CFM, the larger the area it can cool down. Each cooler we chose works best in a different-sized environment to cover all the bases.
Size:All of our recommendations claim to be “portable,” but that’s because they’re set on wheels. These coolers can be up to 37 inches tall and weigh up to 41 pounds; yes, you can move all of them easily on a single floor, but don’t plan on carrying them up and down staircases too often.
Energy Usage:The evaporative coolers in our guide consume between 18W (watts) and 228W of electricity. For reference, the average medium-sized window air conditioner consumes 900W. You’ll be saving a lot of energy by switching to one of these coolers versus running the A/C.
