Several weeks ago I was approached to try a product designed to reduce the costs of running a central air conditioner by the manufacturer.

Being a curious fellow, I said sure. Send me the product, I’ll look at it and if I try it I’ll write an article about it.

The product is Cool-n-Save, designed to reduce (per the packaging) up to 30% the electricity costs incurred to run central air conditioning units.

You can see it installed on top of our own central A/C unit in the picture below: 

Here is how it is supposed to work and reduce air conditioning operating costs. the device is connected to an outdoors faucet or garden hose. When the air conditioner starts, that large ping-pong paddle looking flap on top of the unit is pushed up by the air being pushed out through the top of the A/C unit.

When this occurs, a valve inside the knob at the end of the handle part of the flap releases the water from the outdoor faucet or hose into the small sprayer valve at the end of each of the three small tubes. This is said to create an (again, per the packaging) ‘ultra-fine mist into the air, which evaporates almost instantly’ that cools the air being pulled into the A/C unit.

The theory is that the cooled air coming into the unit takes less effort on the A/C’s part to reduce the temparture even further. If the air conditioner unit has to work less, it will consume less electricity.

Sounds plausible, so I gave it a try.

Upon receiving the package I removed the contents. 

The package and marketing materials states that it can be installed in 5 minutes with no tools. It did not take me 5 minutes; it took 15 minutes as I think it will most people since they will have never previously installed such a device.

Yes, I did not need any tools. The installation was actually quite easy. In the above picture you see three short ‘misting arms’. After removing the flapper from it’s plastic sleeve, I simply pushed each of the three short water lines into the 3 openings in the ball link part at the end of the flapper, as shown below.

 Then, I placed the control valve (what I call the ping-pong paddle type of flapper) on top of the air conditioning unit and started the unit’s operation.

I wanted to see if there was an area on top of the A/C unit in which the air was pushed up more an another. My logic was that I wanted to place the control valve on top of the A/C unit which has lots of heated air pushed out to ensure that this control valve was pushed up to release the cooling water into each of the  misting arm water lines.

Sure enough, the corner in the above picture where I loosely placed the control valve was where I felt the greatest amount of hot air being pushed out of the A/C unit.

Tomorrow, we conclude this short series by completing our installation and opinions.