Anyone here air condition their garage? I bought a swamp cooler but all that does is add humidity and it is only cool right in front of the cooler.
I'm real curious if any of you ever totally insulated your garage and put in an A/C unit and how you did it.
I have a two-car garage all made up for the S. The wife uses the single garage for the RAV. My workshop and car are out in the baking garage and of course I simply don't go out there for the few months of our extremely hot summers.

Word?

 

Swamp coolers are totally useless during the Monsoon season. The wetter cooler air feels worse than drier hotter air. Get rid of it. Install an insulated door, especially if your garage door sees direct sunlight. The insulated door will also quiet your air tools for your neighbors, if any. If you spend a lot of time out there then permanently install an A/C unit in the wall. There are slim profile units made just for this application. If your roof is directly over the garage put extra insulation in the attic. If you only work in the garage occasionally buy a portable A/C unit on wheels. You just put it where you want it and run the hot exhaust hose out the door. It won't cool the whole garage but your work area will be decent.

Or you can be like me and do the white trash thing...I propped open the laundry room door with a box fan and heated up half the house to cool the garage 10 degrees. I only did that once, it wasn't very effective and made the house smell like hot tires. Then when I came inside to cool off it wasn't that cool and I was too dirty to jump in the pool, etc. Just don't do it.

Have Cesar work on your car in the summer.

 

I'm having the same problem dealing with this heat so that I can work on my cars. I'm thinking of installing one of these Mitsubishi Mr. Slim units.

http://www.mrslim.com/Products/Category.as...ctCategoryID=24

We put a bunch of these in NYC Public Schools to cool off Server Rooms. Not cheap though so I don't know if that's an option.

 

I've been milling this over for a while now. I think William (WLaurent) has AC so he will hopefully chime in. I'm glad someone else tried the swamp cooler. Those things don't work past dew points of 55C, so they're fairly inexpensive but useless during monsoon months.

Checker Auto has a portable unit that's 12,000BTU for around $400-500 I think. It's supposed to be capable of cooling a 400 sq ft area. My brother has one in his house for his office upstairs and it works very well, but he says it is fairly expensive to operate.

 

Cool idea. Do they work well?
-Lee

 

I have seen people use sheets of styrofoam to insulate their garage doors for people with portalbe AC units... though i must say it takes a while to even get it semi comfortable....

Turbo PWR... what kind fo garage do you have?? a sheet metal one? the full sheet ones??? insulating those are useless...

 

You are talking about the door and not the walls right? The door is sheet metal, the walls are made out of the same material as the house, sheet rock and whatever that stuff is that every house around here seems to be made out of. It's got to be 120+ degrees easily in the garage during the day. I have North - South exposure and the only windows in the garage are on the west side. I'm a do it yourself person, so to not be able to work in the garage is going to be a major PITA.

Lee - they work very well, different companies make different units. We probably had some kind of deal with Mitsu though since we installed a ton of them. You basically just need to route some small piping for drainage.

 

The house I used to rent with my brother and friend of ours had the ghetto version of garage AC. They had insulated the garage door (which made using a door opener a major pain in the ass, but that's neither here nor there) and replaced the entrance to the attic. Instead of a flat board there, they had installed an industrial fan, used to pull smoke/vapors away. The thought was that everyone who lived there was a smoker, and Phoenix in the summertime is just WAY too hot to go outside every little while to burn a dart, so you duck into the garage.

However, the thing worked wonders. If the door was shut, you'd pull that fan and even in July within 30 seconds or less it was tolerable and within a few minutes it felt pretty nice.

 

I have a 10,000 BTU window unit in my garage that is built into the wall (does not hang out the window or side of the house). It works pretty good up until around 3PM on a hot day. It is only cooling my single car portion of the garage, as it is seperated from the two car side by an industrial curtain from Goff - http://goffscurtainwalls.com/

It really just takes the edge off, making it tolerable.

I just recently was at a friends house and he had just installed a 2 piece AC unit in his 2 car garage and it kicked a$$. I have already ordered the same unit and will be installing it once it arrives to replace my existing unit. Here is a link for the one I ordered (ordered it this week):

http://cgi.ebay.com/1-5-Tons-mini-split-He...1QQcmdZViewItem

They also have a 2 ton unit available but it is much more expensive. My friends is the 1.5 ton and it works very nice on his two car garage.

They do recommend that you have an AC tech pump down and connect the lines.

My garage doors are insulated and face north. I have also blown insulation in over the garage - since it was not done when the house was built.

 

hhaha i read what i wrote and I was like huh?

what i meant was... there are garage doors that open that are one full sheet, there are not4 -5 horizontal ones that seperate but linked together.. if you stuff the latter garage door with styrofoam it helps...

you can always just wait until it cools down