Roadrunner Comfort

I became involved in a joint small-business development program run by New Mexico Tech and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Feeling a strong pull to apply my skills to meaningfully benefit society, I observed desert homeowners increasingly abandoning evaporative cooling in favor of less efficient compressor-based cooling systems. Noticing an absence of modern control systems for “swamp” coolers, I set out to close that gap to encourage more people to retain their evaporative coolers.

The result was a fundamentally new controller for existing evaporative coolers. Unlike conventional thermostats, my design uses a wireless sensor to measure the air temperature actually delivered into the living space, precisely regulating water flow to the cooling pads to maintain the incoming air at the user’s chosen setpoint and deliver more consistent comfort.

I became involved in a joint small-business development program run by New Mexico Tech and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Feeling a strong pull to apply my skills to meaningfully benefit society, I observed desert homeowners increasingly abandoning evaporative cooling in favor of less efficient compressor-based cooling systems. Noticing an absence of modern control systems for “swamp” coolers, I set out to close that gap to encourage more people to retain their evaporative coolers.