What if your A/C used 90% less power?

One of the MAJOR sources of power-draw in our house (and thus the MAJOR source of wallet-draining cost) is our central air conditioner. While we love the ability to cool and filter the air, it comes at an extreme price in both money and power. What if there were a way to do the same job for 90% less? There is! And believe it or not, it was invented here in America.

The new, patented system abandons the power-hungry compressor-driven refrigeration process used in many domestic (and virtually all commercial) air conditioners in favor of a couple of high-efficiency pumps and fans. But it also uses water for evaporative cooling — a concept familiar to many people living in the arid West who have roof-mounted “swamp coolers.”

...“We’ve designed all that into a single core, in which the drying and the cooling are accomplished sort of instantaneously as the air passes through,” Judkoff says. “We got rid of all the disadvantages of evaporative cooling, but we kept all the advantages — evaporative cooling is a very efficient form of cooling.”
In modeling how the DEVap system would perform in Phoenix, “we get on the order of 90 percent savings” in electrical demand, Judkoff says, when compared with a high-efficiency 18 SEER vapor compression air conditioner.

They say the technology is about 2 years away from being available to consumers.

Things we take for granted

This observation is profound, and reminds us of some unique strengths of America.

...The colleague had been touring the young democracies of Eastern Europe during the American election, and he found it wasn't so much Barack Obama that immediately knocked out observers but Mr. McCain's concession speech. This is the first American transfer of power they'd seen in eight years, and they couldn't get over the peacefulness and grace with which Mr. McCain accepted the people's verdict...