I live in a town with a lot of humidity in summer. I perspire a lot, but restaurants around here have misters outdoors to “cool things down”. How does that work? How can adding more humidity make the heat more tolerable?
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There are actually two types of misters you’ll encounter in outdoor venues. The most basic type just spray water. These work well in dry climates, because water carries heat with it when it evaporates. So the misters spray water into the air, this water lands on your skin, absorbs heat from your body, then evaporates taking a small amount of heat with it.
This type of mister works similar to sweat, but the water that lands on you is typically cooler than the sweat your body is producing, so the effect is greater than sweating alone. The effectiveness of this type of cooler is limited in humid environments though. Eventually everyone is just drenched in sweat, and the water isn’t evaporating quickly enough to carry heat away.
In more humid climates, a slightly different system is used. The water in high-pressure mister systems is put under a lot of pressure, chilled, then sprayed out of the mister nozzles (under high-pressure). As the water exits, the pressure drops, which causes the water to become even cooler. The mist extracts heat from the air around it, actually reducing the ambient temperature. Water still lands on people near these high-pressure misting systems, and it doesn’t evaporate like it would in a dry climate, but the water is cooler, so it still has some benefit.
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