Breezair Supercool Range

We've recently built a new house and have been using a portable evap cooler. It's been doing little more than our pedestal fan in the way of cooling. After another 38° day I researched evaporative systems (grew up with evaporative cooling) to find out which one would be best. Most forums I read pointed me in the direction of BreezAir so I got a quote from a couple of local suppliers and had it installed late last week. It's still early days but we've had a couple of 40° + days and it's kept the house lovely and cool. The control panel is easy to use, and even on days when it hasn't been hot we've been using it to bring fresh air into the house. So far so good!

Yesterday, today and overnight Melb was at 36-44degC and my Evap cooler kept us an our house survivable especially during 44deg,s Thursday night we kept the house at 23 deg, and we were all able to sleep well. So I thought I would take the time to say thanks for very cost effective cooling. Ps we have had a breeze air unit for over 2 decades, we did replace 8-10 years ago from the belt drive to the direct drive fan. Brilliant product

Very happy with our Breezair Evap cooler! Cheap to run in our dry climates, only thing stopping me from giving it a 5 is that after the first year the drum fan failed but it was replaced under warranty very quickly. Adelaide made and owned makes it an even easier decision to go through Seeley International.

Have had the unit for 5 years and it has performed very well. Unfortunately while we were away, it stopped working right at the end of the warranty period. My 100 year old Mother In Law had a few bad days and did not know who to contact. When we got back and contacted Seeley Internationals local agents and asked for it to be repaired under warranty, they put me directly in contact with the manufacturers and after a chat with an extremely helpful person they came to the party and charged me only for the labour.
It has been repaired by Thermelec here in Perth promptly and without fuss.
The unit is quiet, efficient and effective.
I have no interests or relationship with either of the 2 companies (Thermelec or Seeley) whatsoever.
I simply believe that good customer service should be praised when it happens. Which is a rarity.

We have just recently built and installed a breezair supercool exs220 and it seems to work very well for an evap.
I have lived in homes with evaps before and they usually struggle with hot days but when i come home and its mid 30's outside i can put it on flat out for about half hour and it cools the house down nicely, usually turn it down to about midway after that and it blows pretty cold air.
You need an evap with the extra thick pads like these have. Would definitely recommend

I bought and had fitted an EXS 180 to replace my 13 year old Breezair 170 model, the 170 had performed very well, but had broken down on a regular basis, and had cost thousands to keep running AFTER the initial 7 year warranty expired.
The 180 surprised me by it's whisper quiet running,the controller is easy to use, and the thicker pads certainly seem to make the house feel cooler, it's only been in 9 months so time will tell with reliability,
I am approaching retirement age, and have now decided it's cheaper to replace my roof unit every 7 years or so after the warranty runs out than to spend big $ repairing a unit. If I had had the previous unit repaired (Again.) I think my repair bill for 7 years would have exceeded $9000, and the exs 180 is definitely superior to the earlier model.

The new super cool range have very thick celdek pads, which are supposed to generate cooler temperatures. When we upgraded our old Breezair to the newer EXS200, the first thing we noticed was how much more humidity it generated. Thicker pads equate to greater evaporation, which in turn creates more humidity. The quest to improve evaporative airconditioners has these units pushing out 95% humidity, as opposed to there earlier counterparts at 75 -80%. Not only is it heavy experience for those living in the house, its not good for your other electronic appliances. If your considering buying an evaporative airconditioner, buy one that uses the older aspen pads.

I recently purchased and had a Breezair Supercool EXS180 installed to 5 points in my house. The installation day was on a 35 degree, after the workers installed the unit. I felt the Breezair was quiet and made very little noise, and it actually did the job pretty well. The rooms were cool and when the outside temperature reached 35 the inside temperature was only 23 degrees and we were running the unit at a low fan speed setting.
I live in Melbourne, we had a week that the humidity (80) and temperature were very high. No matter how low you set, you still felt the heat. If I could choose it again, I would go for air conditioners.

I replaced the faulty evaporative cooler about a week ago with a BreezeAir after speaking to a few installers and obtaining a few quotations. Braemar LCQ, BreezeAir EXQ & EXS models were recommended to me. The proponents for LCQ550 were on high airflow; BreezeAir EXQ190/210 on quietness & energy efficiency, and EXS200/220 on quicker cooling on top of EXQ's.

I selected EXS220 which has all the features of all those recommended models (high airflow, quietness, energy efficiency, quicker cooling). And I thought the models would be consuming the same amount of energy if I throttled the airflow by varying the fan speeds (running the bigger unit at lower fan speed, or running the smaller unit at higher fan speed for the same amount of cooling and energy consumption). This was where I went wrong.

I now learned that I should have calculated what airflow (L/sec) my house needed, not just the number of air vents on the ceiling. Borrowing from HVAC guide for public space air refreshment rate of 1 time every 4 minutes, for 1 cubic metre of room space, the airflow is 4.2 litres per second. If a house space is 200 sqm with a ceiling height of 2.5m, the estimated air flow will be 2,100 litres per sec. This information would have guided me to select EXQ170, or EXS180 (quicker cooling), or LCQ350 basing on the nearest lower advertised airflow values because there was no need to move more air than necessary (toilets, bathrooms, wardrobes, pantry, store room space could be excluded). This mean I could have selected a model 2 sizes smaller than the one I installed. Even if I had wanted to be on the safe side, I could still have selected one size smaller.

An oversized unit means it is an energy guzzler. It was like buying a truck when an ute was sufficient. But when I was deciding which model to install, I was afraid that I selected a small hatchback when an ute was required.

I checked the power meter reading over a few days after the installation, I came to realize that the big power fan motor consume a lot of power even at very low fan speeds. The power consumption is so high that it is many times more than a dollar a day to run.

Airflow should have been my only selection criterion. If I had known and used the HVAC guide for air refreshment rate, I would have selected sufficient airflow with a fan motor half the power rating of the one I had installed.

I hope you will find my sharing helpful. After all, we don't buy evaporative cooler every day, and the next time I will make such a decision again will probably 10+ years later .....

February 1st 2018 Update: More Feedback after a Week of Use: Some Deficiencies

I last shared about selecting an oversized model. After a week of use, the unit does what it is supposed to do well - cooling. I now found out it consumed more than 1 unit (1 kWh) of electricity per hour to run even at very low fan speed at night. And I also discovered a few deficiencies:

1. The MagiQTouch controller in the Program Mode stops airflow completely when the room temperature reaches the pre-set temperature. After a while, the air becomes stuffy and loses that feeling of coolness. It will be ideal if there is still some airflow to keep the air moving and fresh at very low fan speed.

2. Because the Program Mode and the Manual Temprerature Mode stop the airflow completely when a a pre-set temperature is reached, I switch to the Manual Fan Mode. But the Manual Fan Mode does not allow me to set Auto-On & Auto-Off time. Very much unlike the split type air-conditioner's controller which I can set auto-on/off time and everything else. The irritation is that I have to get up in the middle of the night to switch off the unit when it gets too cold on the Manual Fan Mode.

3. When I registered my warrranty on the breezeair.com.au website, it asked for the model of the MagiQTouch Controller (whether HomeMaker or Harmony). I cannot verify which model I have from the owner's manual, the user instructions, the website, the product brochures or the google search engine. I did not ask the installer because the tax invoice just state MagiQTouch Controller, no mention of which model.

I bought a brand new system - Breezair - EXS220G, the one their agent recommended, i paid the price he asked for in full, and the system did not even last 3 weeks.
Worst service ever.

The further worst part is that they did not even have technicians available to come same day or even next day, to look at the brand new system, which further makes me believe that i have been conned into buying a low quality crap product with no support.

After the technician came, he was not sure what’s wrong as well, so he changed the digital panel. Guess what, after 2 days it stops working again. And the cycle of lodging a complaint with installer starts again.

Do not buy anything from Breezair.

I recently purchased and had a Breezair Supercool EXS180 installed to 5 points in my house, it replaced an old Brivis Sundowner which was 30 years old. The difference I noticed immediately was the Breezair was quiet and made virtually no noise so we could sleep and run the unit on hot nights. The rooms were cool and when the outside temperature reached 34 the inside temperature was a mild 22.5 degrees and we were running the unit at a low fan speed setting. The overall cost of the Breezair was about 10% higher than other brands. The reviews for this model v's the other brands showed the Breezair was far superior. SO we felt the money was well spent.

Don't get fooled by the hardware advance over normal fan type. It's true- quieter, but 5 years of pretty much standard reliability is just not good enough to choose Breezair. When you buy almost most expansive unit in market, you should at least get average life out of the unit. Ask any Breezair owner - they'll tell you average 5 years life out of their units. Mine just conveniently died 3 months after warranty, blown controller receiver board and motor, only pump and drain valve working. Besides my Breezair never can compete with other medium price range brand in cooling.

After a lot of research I also decided to purchase the above with the MagIQtouch controller.

I won't start with the spill of not being affiliated with any company etc, etc.. as when you read this you'll see it's come from a genuine user/purchaser.

I have 3 young children at home and didn't like having a refrigerated unit as it tends to dry your eyes, nose, skin etc. This unit does work well and puts moisture into the house which works very well on hot dry days.
Unfortunately the trade off is the unit doesn't perform well on humid days as it makes everything feel damp.

As I live in SA the days are usually hot and dry so only doesn't perform for a small number of days over the summer.

As the summer is very hot and dry there is a lot of dust in the atmosphere hence why you'll never be able to blow fresh air into the house. I recently took the vents off and cleaned them as there was a lot of black dust from the summer weeks on them. This is not really noticeable until they are removed but it's the same dust that will enter your house anyway by opening your windows. It's just with the Evap you are blowing more in as it draws air from outside in. So I disagree with the claim of fresh air entering but it works better for us as a family as the children are always in and out over the summer.

The MagIQtouch Controller is very user friendly but if you read other reviews on this as I did you'll see the main negative is the software the unit is installed with is a bit dated for 2016 as it sometimes doesn't register your touch and you have to press it a few times. This is the only main annoying thing about it. Apart from that it's worked well so far.

Regardless of the settings you use as you can choose to set the unit at 18 degrees or just manually control the fan you'll never be able to achieve the 18 degrees with the Evap. I tried the temp setting at first and now only use the manual fan setting to blast the heat out first on hot days and then turn it down once achieved. Again realistically even though this unit is a Supercool with thicker pads it is good and does blow cool air but will only get the temp of the house down to about 10 degrees cooler than the outside temp. So again works great for the 30's days but once it goes into the 40 above it will start to struggle. However, is much better than having nothing and again I am not a fan of the alternative so this will come down to personal choice.

It also doesn't cost as much to run but you will see a hike in your water bill.

Overall I am glad we installed the unit but the reality of these things when you read the glossy mags and ads never live up to expectation.

I’ll start with letting you know that I am in no way affiliated with any company that supplies, sells manufactures or has anything to do with any coolers at all. I am just a guy that spent a few months researching and analysing and eventually purchased an evaporative cooler.

If you are in the market for a cooler, seriously consider the Breezair Supercool range.

I have two young kids that don’t like the heat, so I sought quotes to cool my house with an appropriate ducted system. I didn’t care what the system was it just had to work.

The living area of my house is 176 square meters. I wanted 8 outlets of varying sizes throughout the house. We are in Canberra so our options were open to either refrigerated reverse cycle as well as evaporative. Both coolers work really well in Canberra due to the dry heat we get in summer.

I received quotes from five different companies offering their in house selections of refrigerated split systems as well as evaporative coolers.

The choices I had were:

1. Replace my ducted gas heater with a reverse cycle refrigerated system.
2. Retain the gas and add on a ducted evaporative cooler.

Option 1 meant that I either had to install a unit that was not capable of heating and cooling my house, or pay close to $2000 to have three phase installed at my house. Either way, it would have cost between $12,000 and $20,000 all up for a range of models.

Apparently, these units are cheaper to run (but not as effective as gas) in winter than the ducted gas which is a bonus and in summer they are really cool (but expensive to run) provided you seal the house and stop the sun coming in the windows.

Option 2 meant I did not need three phase power at home. I could install a unit that would just do, or upgrade two sizes larger for a small amount more. Quotes I received were between $4500 and $6500 for a range of models.

The Supercool range is supposedly the cheapest evap to run electricity wise, and apparently the water usage is very reasonable as well. Again, you do need to stop the sun from coming in the house for it to be really effective but you can (actually must) leave windows open to let the hot air out.

I was very dubious initially with going the evap route, as my experience with them is that they don’t cool very well and the house always feels sticky and humid. Further investigations and enquiries show that that is from improper use of the coolers (not having enough windows or doors open) and not the coolers themselves.

We almost went with the $20k reverse cycle until the dealer advised us that we would have to seal all of the windows as well as keep the blinds down and doors shut during summer for it to work effectively. Also, as it recycles air, you don’t get any fresh air like you would with an evap.

We ended up going with the Breezair Supercool EXS200 for a number of reasons.

- All ducted evaporative coolers are really good when used properly. The small mobile units are absolute rubbish compared to this.

- Breezair (from my own personal research and conclusion) appears to be the market leader. I am happy with my decision, though I am lead to believe a lot of other brands are good too.

- The EXS range has amazing technology. The Direct drive motor being the standout which is very quiet and maintenance free. At the highest fan speed, the Breezair was as quiet as the equivalent Braemar on its lowest fan speed (as witnessed in a side by side comparison on the Scandia showroom floor). Thicker pads which equals better cooling.

- The house is always full of fresh air (any ducted evap would do this)

- We can open windows and doors to let in natural light and not worry about kids not closing the doors behind them. (any ducted evap would do this)

- You can select to have the cooler running or just the fan to draw in cool air from outside to save water. (any ducted evap would do this)

- With the MagIQ touch controller you can either use the thermostat to control to a set temperature or set to a certain fan speed.

- The company that we purchased from. Again no affiliation. Scandia at Fyshwick were fantastic to deal with. The sales staff were very patient with my numerous questions. They confirmed what I had read about evap coolers and their quote was for a system that was bigger than what I needed not what would get the sale. They were not the cheapest and not the most expensive. They quoted me on the EXS180, EXQ190 and the EXS200. There was only about $200 between the three. Apparently the Breezair model numbers loosely represent the square metres that unit should be able to cool in a perfect world. I.e. EXS180 could cool a 180m2 house. Other companies were quoting me on units that were only suitable for 150-180m2 houses. Not big enough.

- The Breezair Supercool has no maintenance. At the end of the season you drain the water pipe to stop the unit freezing, but no getting on the roof to clean pads or put covers on it.

I have now had my unit in for a month and absolutely love it. The kids sleep better at night in a cool house. I can set for a temperature and forget it or I can crank it when I get home to blow the hot air out of the house really quickly. I leave all of the windows and doors open and it works even better. I can enjoy the sunshine and natural light in the best part of the year and not worry about blowing out on electricity bills. Best of all, and I’m not sure if it just the Supercool that does it, it actually feels like refrigerated air a lot of the times. It really feels that cold. I highly recommend this unit. It looks great, it’s easy to use and cools the house perfectly. Scandia in Fyshwick are highly recommended also.

My advice, go one size larger than you think or two if you can afford it.

On another note, the wife hates the unit. She now has to wear a jumper and track pants around the house when it is 30+ degrees outside.

Enjoy.