Another compressor after cooler question

[Flybyjohn]

I’m putting together a compressor and was going to use the common Derale 15300 with my own fan attached. After receiving my cooler, I noticed that the piping in the cooler makes 8 loops upward throughout the flow of the cooler. It would be standard practice to have the tubing all running in a horizontal to downward angle so gravity would aid as water flows through it. With the number of people using this cooler with mostly positive results, it seems to work without issue, but water condensing in the cooler will need to be pushed upwards around bends quite a few times in the path through the cooler.

Has anybody noticed this having any negative effects on the operation of the cooler?

 

[niget2002]

air pressure will push the water through until it hits the filter

 

[GeoBruin]

Flip it over?

You can't think of it as pushing a bunch of water around inside the loops. Only a small amount of water will condense out of a relatively large volume of air, and it's not like it all happens at the inlet and then needs to be pushed through the rest of the coils. Rather, it's happening as small droplets of condensation throughout the entire system that are so light they are easily swept along with the flowing air. It will not have a detectible impact on your flow.

That said, if it concerns you, flip it over. If you're using an external fan rather than letting the compressor's cooling fan do the work, you have even more options because you're not constrained by the orientation of the compressors fan. Mount it however you want.

 

[Flybyjohn]

Flipping won’t work, but I did make a mistake in my drawing. There is only 4 upward loops. The rest are down.

 

[slackdaddy1]

The other concern (for me) is they are 3/8" ID,, my compressor pump to tank line is 1/2" ID.

 

[Flybyjohn]

Slackdaddy1, I was considering that also. Was looking at taking one 180 loop off of the middle of the cooler and running two parallel lines through it but worried that they might be silver soldered and I’d ruin it trying to get it apart. I figure there is about 15 feet of the 3/8” ID tube with 16 - 180 degree fittings just in the cooler alone. I’m using 5/8 OD tube for the rest of my tubing.

My compressor pump instructions state to make the connection from the head to tank as short as possible. This cooler is the opposite of that but still want to try the cheapest way I could to reduce water in my already rusty tank. By the time you jump to a larger cooler, you quadruple the price.

I also considered a coil of copper in a water bath, but didn’t want to deal with the mess. The pump is only rated at about 15 cfm so hopefully the cooler won’t reduce much flow.