This guest article is about patio misters and what a big difference they can make in the summer heat.
You can make a budget patio mister fan by combining a low-pressure mist ring with a fan. The fan helps to disperse and evaporate the mist, so you can cool off without the expense of a high-end patio mist system. See our article and a video on how to build an outdoor mister from a fan and a misting ring.
Patio Misting Systems Really Work
I remember several years ago I took a job in the California desert, where the temperature regularly reached the triple digits. One day with the temperature in excess 100 degrees, we went to an upscale restaurant with friends and they wanted to sit on the patio. I was shocked that they would want to sit in the heat.
I was even more amazed when we went out to the patio dining area it was at least 30 degrees cooler than the outside temperature. In fact, the patio dining area was a more comfortable temperature than the inside dining area.
This was caused by a misting system that sprayed a fine mist into the air. The mist evaporated before it reached us, and cooled the air temperature by 30 degrees. We had a great dinner, outside in the California desert, in the middle of summer. This quickly became one of our favorite restaurants to go to and to take visiting friends to.
We later moved to another location that still got extremely hot in the summer, and we missed the patio misting system of our favorite restaurant. I started wishing that we could get a system for our own patio. However, the systems, if you could find them, caused several thousand dollars.
About that time, the big box stores started carrying a misting system that was a lot less expensive (also known as cheap). These systems cost less than $200, so we got one for our patio. I hooked the system into my sprinkler system so that I would have a ready water supply and switched it on. It worked, the patio temperature dropped about 10 to 15 degrees, getting the air temperature down to about 80 degrees. Much more comfortable.
The down side, the misting system did not produce the fine mist that the upscale restaurant produced. As a result, the deck got wet, and we got wet and the furniture got wet as well. Most of the time, this was not a problem, we were a lot cooler and could turn off the misting system before we got too wet.
But we were still disappointed. We could not afford the really good system, and the inexpensive system just did not work as well.
Fortunately, there has been a lot of progress in the past fifteen years. You can get a power system now, just like the restaurants had for about one fifth of the cost. They are still expensive, but much more affordable.
They have also made a lot of progress with the misting heads and other fixtures on the less expensive systems. They now produce a much finer mist using regular house hold water pressure. So you can get the lower temperature (as much as 30 degrees lower) without the soggy mess that the old cheap systems used to make.
You need to be careful which system that you buy, some of the inexpensive systems still use the misting heads that have too large an opening that produces the big water droplets that will get you and your patio soaking wet. So it pays to shop around.
If you want to cool your patio, a patio misting system is the way to go. At http://www.patio-mister.com you can learn more about how a patio mister will keep you cool.
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