Dont buy a chiller ... use a heat exchenger

[RuGlu6]

Originally Posted by mike31154

Some interesting info I read in the local paper since it's 'water wise' week here. Not saying this would be the same for everyone, but food for thought. "Running a tap for 5 minutes can be equivalent to running a 60 watt bulb for 14 hours".

If you take time to read my OP, you will find that i am not "running a tap", a slow drip of 2-4 drops per second is far cry from running a fully open tap.
When you have a car rad with fully open tap running thrugh to cool a house that's different, but at least the guy was watering his grass at the same time, got to give him a credit at least for that.

[Reef Pilot]

And when I was cooling the solarium/house with the car rad, I didn't have the tap wide open either, just enough to make the water sprinkler work so I could water my grass. My point also was that it didn't take a lot of water flow to provide a lot of cooling with the rad.

As to which way costs more to the environment, running water or using electricity to run a chiller or air conditioner, I don't know...

I do know that at our cabin at the lake, we have the best solution. We have solar power for lights and small appliances, etc (no hydro connection). Fridge, stove and hot water runs off propane, and costs us about $40 per year. And in the late evening the cabin gets shade from the mountain side trees, so it is cool enough to sleep. In the daytime, when it is hot out, we just jump in the lake to cool off. When it is cold out, we burn wood (no shortage of that out there) in a fireplace.

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

Fridge, stove and hot water runs off propane, and costs us about $40 per year. .

man either you don't use it much or you have super duper high efficiency stuff. most propane fridges will burn 100 bucks of propane in a summer by themselves.

Steve