Cooling the roving room

This is the bird house I've been improving its micro-environment lately. The roving room is long and its design allows 3/4 of it to be converted into nesting areas in future - so it is good to get the temp & humidity close to the desired levels too.



















The data collected showed it is too warm & temp reaching 38 deg around 3.30pm on warmest days with R.H. ranging between 50-60%. On cooler days the max. temp reached 35 deg and R.H. between 60-65%.












My first experiment was to see if too much heat is getting in through the roof. There is an aluminum foil under the roof and some air space between ceiling, insufficient insulation I thought. A sprinkler with timer control was installed on the roof in an attempt to cool it from there. The reduction in room temperature was insignificant. It simply points out much heat came in through the two long side walls.

I do not intend to add more wall insulation at this stage, so how to address the situation?
Good that the humidity was on the lower side. I set up a humidifier in the roving room (near the entrance hole) with a timer control; turned on from 10am to 5pm during the warmest period.

The principle is to extract the thermal energy from the air by using water vapor, similar to misting fan.















Evaporative coolers are commonly seen in countries where humidity is low. It is effective even with high outside air temperature because the heat in the air is being absorb by fine mists as latent heat converting to water vapor.















Humid air vents out through entrance hole via convection air currents. The outcome is quite satisfactory - the highest temp is now between 30-32 deg most days. The humidity is improved too - lowest R.H. of the day is about 75% and highest between 85% to 90% around 5am in the morning.

Logged data with the humidifier in use.












The lowest temperature registered so far is about 25 deg on colder rainy days at about 7am. As a roving room it don't bother me yet. At least I get the day temperature a few degrees lower. It is just a stop gap measure until the time to convert to nesting areas.