FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Is the CoolBot just a thermostat?/Does the CoolBot include a Thermostat?
The CoolBot is NOT just a thermostat! Check out the short "How It Works" section. And yes, the CoolBot does include a digital thermostat so you can set it to run at whatever temperature you want (down to 32 degrees).
Does the CoolBot REALLY run down to 32 degrees without freezing up?
We cover this at length in other parts of the website, but to summarize: A CoolBot system will NEVER freeze up BUT it can not always be able to get you down to 32 degrees! If your door is being opened and closed a lot, 32 degrees is impossible (for us) to reach!! This is a problem with the physics of the small fan and transfer surface area in air conditioners. A "real" walk-in cooler compressor could do it, but we can't!
Really, anything below 36F becomes difficult for the CoolBot to reach if fresh hot material is being put in the cooler and it's being opened and closed more than once every 10 minutes. We have hundreds of customers happily using Coolbots at 33-34 degrees, but it works because they open the doors only a few times a day. (Bars and pubs for example with secondary coolers or keg coolers that might be plumbed in). It's super easy for the CoolBot to cool down to 38 degrees and even 36-37 are not hard with normal use (but again, it's a stretch if you are opening and closing the door more often than every 10 minutes.)Will the CoolBot also work for a floral cooler with the much higher humidity caused by buckets of water?
Yes, it will definitely work even with the higher humidity. Florists and flower growers seem especially happy with the CoolBot. We are often told that the CoolBot allows for more humidity in the air which keeps the flowers better. We're pretty sure this is just an illusion. The flowers are happier, yes, but it's just because you have so much less air blowing around the room with one fan instead of four, so they aren't getting blown on and dried out that way as much.
For florists (and cheese-makers) that need to keep a lot of humidity in the room, it has been our experience that using a larger than recommended air conditioner is a good idea. The larger air conditioner means the compressor runs less often keeping more humidity in the room. If you undersize your air conditioner from our recommendations (as lots of people do to save money) it runs more often. You will probably reach your desired temperature BUT the air in your room is CONSTANTLY running over the cold fins and moisture is (constantly) condensing out. In a correctly sized system the air conditioner compressor is generally running less than 25% of the time (although the circulator fan might be running, but that doesn't cause dehumidification). Bigger systems might be running only 1/6th of the time with very little dehumidification. Would the thermostatic control on the air conditioner be operational and accurate when the coolbot device is installed?
No. It doesn't need to be because the CoolBot has it's own digital thermostat with dual temperature sensors. You just use that instead of the thermostat on your a/c unit. The CoolBot thermostat can be set to from 32-60 degrees (see above note that 32-35 degrees is hard to achieve unless you've oversized the air conditioner and aren't opening the door a lot)
Wow you guys are pretty smart -repair costs are what kills me on my current unit. This costs the same as my last repair bill. My question is, what if I have a walk in that has no outside walls? Could I set a room ac in the ceiling verticaly and have it blow down?
THANKS! Unfortunately... no... you can't mount a/c unit's in a side-ways orientation on the ceiling, you'd have to build a sort of alcove on top... and that doesn't seem worth the trouble. You COULD use a "split a/c unit" but they are much more expensive than standard window a/c units and most require professional installation, so... it would seem like it makes more sense to stick with what you have. Another (seeming) option is one of the "portable a/c" units which use something that looks like a drier hose to vent the hot air out. We've had several people try these and they do NOT work, so don't waste your time. We've had some warehouses (and more than a few restaurants) mount the a/c units so they are blowing into the restaurant. This is great when it's cold out, but the extra heat that you throw into the place during the summer isn't so great! You have to double the size of the a/c cooling the room - so it's not just uncomfortable it's not a good decision from the perspective of "responsible energy use".
You have got to be kidding. No way it will be as efficent as a "real refrigeration unit."
THIS IS A LONG ONE, but the summary answer is YES! INDEPENDENTLY VERIFIED!
Our original efficiency claims were based on an earlier study done by University of Georgia on cooler efficiency (that study has nothing to do with CoolBot it was just looking at where the energy use is in Walk-In's and they found that it was not the compressor as much as the fans). If you just think about the number of fans operating in a standard reefer unit (4-6 that are on ALL the time inside and an extra 1-2 outside) vs. the number in operation in a window a/c unit (there's just one and it doesn't have to be running all the time if you are in 'Energy Saver' mode) there's an immediate reduction in electricity use right there that is very significant. Obviously in both cases we are running similar sized compressors (in fact we up-size the compressors for coolbot installations so there is actually somewhat of an energy penalty if you JUST looked at compressor use) but the penalty is very small and the savings from the fans is HUGE, so there is an obvious net gain.
Several customers that had "conventional" walk-in units and replaced them with a CoolBot in the same physical box report a significant drop in their electric consumption. You can find this by googling around - one guy reports that he ditched his old walk-in compressor, TRIPLED the size of his cooler, and is running the same electric bill. The problem is that all these (wonderfully positive!) reports have their cooler electricity mixed in with their other electrical useage so it doesn't really give us an exact percentage number - just that "things are much better."
We've only had a few people report in where they could actually tell us how much they saved. The savings are HUGE (like 60%+ energy) savings but... the units that the CoolBot replaced were really old and probably not made or running very efficiently, so we look GREAT in comparison, but what if you compared us to a modern new compressor -- can it really be that much more efficient?
NYSERDA, (the NY State Energy Research and Development Authority) contracted for an independent analysis to see just how much more efficient the CoolBot is than a standard cooler. We were hopeful that FINALLY we would get an exact answer to this question.
The 35 page NYSERDA study confirms that the CoolBot works great and does not stress out the air conditioner or push it into unacceptable use cycles or pressures (which is another question that we get asked a lot) so that was nice. And... the end result of the summary is that the YES! CoolBot is more efficient than a conventional walk-in cooler. HOWEVER, this study was NOT done with a real walk-in cooler and a real coolbot-air conditioner!! It was done with a modeling program on a whole-house air conditioner that uses a different compressor type and two fan motors (instead of one), so... it's not really as useful as we would have liked (we wanted them to just measure watts spent on two comparable coolers.)
I know we shouldn't be complaining, but... even though we "won", we didn't win by much at all and it was only because of fan cycling. We don't feel like it's a fair study because the comparison was with a whole house air conditioner with a different style of compressor and multiple fan motors - change any of those factors and our own calculations are back to us being 25% more efficient at minimum compared to conventional modern walk-in units. Still, we are really grateful for this study, and we agree they carried it out in an independent and logical way. But... we're still waiting for someone to do a real-world side-by-side comparison!!
Will this work cooling meat?
Yes! So long as you size the a/c unit to the size of your walk-in cooler box as per our chart AND you have a walk-in cooler built to industry standard specifications (4" of styrofoam insulation in walls/floor/ceiling.) If you meet those requirements, the CoolBot will keep whatever your want (produce, flowers, meat, prepared food) at whatever you set it at down to 33 degrees. What the CoolBot can NOT do is: 1) Keep things frozen 2) Keep things cold when you have a substandard cooler or too small of an air conditioner.
I think because our units are so inexpensive, a surprising number of people try to approach the rest of the structure in an inexpensive way, too, so they build coolers with standard fiberglas-house insulation or even just use it to try to cool an unisulated storage room. It won't work! The fiberglass actually DOES work for awhile, but outside humidity condenses in the walls making the insulation sag and filling it with mold and mildew. So... use the thousands of dollars you save buying a Coolbot to insulate your cooler with styrofom insulation (it's not THAT expensive!). We sell to a lot of hunters and hunting camps as well as people who make hamburgers and other meat-containing prepared foods and they have been very happy with the performance of the CoolBot.
How important is it to have a floor in our cooler
Please see our section on what works and doesn't work. Floors are important for people cooling below 45 degrees because cold sinks and the ground always stays warm. By skipping the floor you've created an endlessly hungry "cold sink" that is sucking money out of your pocket in the form of electricty. The CoolBot will WORK without a floor, but it's going to cost you. Below 40 degrees if you are going to skip the floor you should size up a level on the a/c unit. For hunters only running the CoolBots in the fall... it's not going to pay to put in a floor because you don't run that many months of the year, but everyone else should (below 40.)
For people installing CoolBots on trailers you MUST have a 4" thick insulated floor or the CoolBot will never be able to keep up with the cold you are dumping down the highway.
Standard insulation is 4" thick styrofoam on walls, floor and ceiling.
Just as important as the floor is that you use tape, caulk or sprayfoam to seal up every edge and corner in your cooler. Even a 1/4"x2" hole dumps an ENORMOUS amount of cold (and your electricity $) into the environment.
We're florists and we've been running it for about a month in our floral cooler with one wall of display doors. It's 10x9 and we run a Samsung 14,500 BTU a/c unit on medium so there is even less air flow on the flowers. This runs colder than our "real" compressor ever ran. We're just tickled with this! We love it! But we are also seeing that some ice has been forming on the bottom layer, and slowly creeping up over the last month. Why is this?
(From a Virgina Flower Shop)
This is easy to fix, you just need to lower where you placed the CoolBot's frost sensor to where you see the ice first forming (With Samsung A/C units it's aways the bottom left hand side of the fins).
[Addition for the FAQ page of the website:] While I'm so happy that this is working for them, I feel like they are undersized on the size of their a/c for this application and probably have lower humidity than is ideal for floral coolers. If you are a florist wanting to run in "Medium" fan mode, then PLEASE size up a level on the A/C. Also, the display coolers with windows are VERY lossy, So consider sizing up again if you are running with a wall full of glass doors.
Obviously these folks are happy even given my concerns... I know we're overly cautious in our recommendations, but part of that is because we are used to having to cool a couple thousand lbs of field-hot veggies here on our farm and it takes a lot of BTUs the first few hours to GET them cold. They are getting cold flowers straight from their distributor... and they don't weigh all that much. Also, our cooler is under shade, but it'll be 90+ here in August. Their cooler is in an air conditioned store...
Also please note that MOST all the florists are running in high fan mode without a problem. One woman did make a deflector because she had a small cooler and she wanted the air to go in a different direction (it was nailing the flowers across the way). So consider the placement of your a/c unit when you install it so that it is blowing in a safer direction!
What BRAND of Air Conditioner should I buy
By now it seems one customer or another has tried the CoolBot on every brand of A/C unit that's our there. It works on *ALL* brands of air conditioners that have a plastic temperature sensor. That being said, there are some brands that perform exceptionally well with the CoolBot.
LG Brand and Sears Kenmore (made by LG) - Sold on the internet and at Home Depot stores across the country (they are cheapest at Home Depot). All models above 8,000btu work flawlessly with the CoolBot and have plastic temperature sensors. If you have a choice of a/c unit to buy, this is our FIRST CHOICE! They also seem to be very solidly built. Of hundreds of customers with LG units, only two have reported a problem and Home Depot immediately replaced them. They run even during the fall and winter when outside temperatures fall (this is not true of all brands!). Many hundreds of people are using these with CoolBots and are happy. We've bought an LG for our new larger cooler here on our farm and we've had it for three years with no problems.
Samsung - Sold on the internet and at most of the Lowes stores across the country. Also a good choice. We have a few hundred customers using these and they are happy as well.
Frigidaire -sold at about 1/2 the Lowe's stores in the country. Ones built before summer 2009 do not function well because they shut down when OUTSIDE temperature goes below even 50 degrees. That's great if you are a home-owner and didn't mean to leave your unit on when it's cold out, but it's horrible if you are a cooler owner! FRIGIDAIRE's produced in 2010 do NOT have that monitoring system but their temperature sensors are VERY slow to react, so they don't work really great... we have wider swings of temperatures and it ends up taking a lot of tech-support time to get them (mostly) working. They WILL work, but... never so great, so we discourage their use.
GE Brand - Some work, some don't. The ones that have plastic temperature sensors seem fine from all reports we've had so far. The ones with metal do NOT work.
Sharp - sold in a number of stores. All seem to work okay. All brands above 6500 btu's that we've seen have plastic temperature sensors.
HAIER - sold WalMart... All models with digital displays (that's all we've seen so far) seem to work fine!
Brands of Air Conditioner that we know DO NOT WORK with the CoolBot are:
Emerson (all the models tested so far have metal temperature sensors)
Whirlpool (all models tested so far have metal temp sensors)
Goldstar (Actually the same as LG, but they are the "cheaper" brand and sold at WalMart. MOST models have metal temperature sensors, so they don't work. Some of the ones from 2009 have plastic sensors so they could work.
Any and all brands of "portable" A/C units. They all actually "work" but because they constantly suck (hot) fresh air into the room they are extremely inefficient and you won't be able to get the room very cold. People making cheese caves are the only people that seem happy enough with them and even still they buy the ones with two vents and they don't get as cold as people storing veggies and meat. Even if you are doing a cheese cave, for efficiency sake we don't recommend these.
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