Evaporative or refrigerated in a dry heat town
Kalgoorlie is dry. Does evaporative actually work better here?
Published 19/10/2026. Written by the Pristine Cooling team, Kalgoorlie.
In dry air evaporative works well. It is still not a straight swap for refrigerated, because the two want opposite things from the building they are cooling. Evaporative needs the building open. Refrigerated needs it shut. Almost every disappointment with evaporative cooling traces back to that one sentence.
What each one actually does
Evaporative cooling pulls outside air through a wet pad. Water evaporates off the pad, which takes heat out of the air passing through. The cooled air then gets blown into the building. It is the same principle as the box a contractor invented up the road in the 1890s, which is covered in the Coolgardie safe.
Refrigerated cooling does something different. It takes heat out of the air already inside the building and dumps it outside, then recirculates the same air around again.
One brings outside air in. The other keeps inside air in. That difference drives everything else.
The open building rule
An evaporative system is constantly pushing air into the space, so that air has to leave somewhere. Open doors, open louvres, roof vents, whatever suits the building.
Shut the place up and the system stops working. The air inside gets steadily more humid. The pads can no longer evaporate into it, so the cooling falls away. People then conclude the unit is faulty when the building is the problem.
Refrigerated is the reverse. Every door left open is cooled air leaving and hot air arriving, which is why a shop with the front door propped open costs so much to cool.
Where evaporative earns its place
Large open spaces. Workshops, sheds, warehouses, covered yards. Places with big volumes to move and doors that are open anyway.
Spaces where comfort matters more than control. If the target is making a hot workshop bearable rather than holding a set temperature, evaporative does that at a lower running cost, because a fan and a pump draw far less than a compressor.
High air change. Somewhere that needs constant fresh air anyway gets two jobs done with one system.
Where it is the wrong tool
Anywhere that has to hold a temperature. Evaporative cannot be set to a number and made to stay there. It gets you a drop below whatever the outside air is doing, which moves around during the day.
Anywhere humidity matters. The system works by adding moisture to the air. For a workshop that is nothing. For a space with paper records, electronics, stock or anything that minds damp, it is a real consideration.
Sealed buildings. Offices, consulting rooms, server and comms rooms, anywhere that has to stay shut for security, noise, dust or privacy.
The days when it is not dry. The Goldfields is dry most of the time, not all of it. When moisture comes through, evaporative output drops exactly when people most want it.
The dust question nobody asks first
An evaporative system moves a great deal of outside air into the building, all day, through wet pads.
Out here that air carries dust. Pads load up, water quality suffers, the whole thing needs more attention than the same unit would need somewhere greener. It is the same material that causes trouble on condensers, which is in what the Goldfields dust does to a condenser.
None of that is an argument against evaporative. It is an argument for knowing the maintenance commitment before signing, rather than after the first summer.
There is water to think about too. An evaporative system uses water continuously while it runs, which is a running cost in its own right. On some sites it is a supply question rather than a cost question, so it is worth raising early.
Most buildings end up with both
The either or framing is usually wrong anyway.
A common Goldfields arrangement is evaporative over the workshop or the warehouse where volume and fresh air are what matter, with refrigerated on the offices, the meeting rooms and anywhere holding equipment. Each one doing what it is good at rather than one system compromised across the whole site.
Working out which parts of a building fall on which side is a design question rather than a product question, which is mechanical services territory.
The question that decides it
Not whether Kalgoorlie is dry, because it is.
The question is whether the space can be left open. Then whether anything in it minds the humidity. Answer those two honestly about each part of the building and the choice makes itself.
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