Any cheap / free ideas to cool a garage?

I have the same issue in Florida with the heat. It is a 'wet' humid heat. I tried one of those "Portacool" machines, the one you fill with water and a fan blows over a stream of water yada yada.... No dice. The Portacool is an evaporative cooler, and in the Florida humidity nothing evaporates. Wound up giving it to my parents for their patio, and my father threw it out with the garbage one day.

PERHAPS it would work in a very dry environment, like the OP in California. But it was worthless in the humidity. And they are not free lol.
 
Had the same problem in my garage in my 1st house....Detached garage. Took a sawzall and made cut outs on the back wall near the roof. Installed 2 belt driven exhaust fans. The fans were not that expensive. ( Harbor Freight Garbage), but it worked. There's nothing free that will solve you're problem, unless you work jobs on the graveyard shift to beat the heat. Then I bought a Harbor Freight Commercial size stand up fan to blow air into the garage. I still sweat doing jobs, but it was bearable. Next house I had a mini split installed. That solved heat and cold problems. Again, not cheap, but it's worth every penny I spent on it. Now I have total climate control no matter what season it is.
 
Your morning lows are in the 60s it looks like, a decent size exhaust fan in a gable end would push the hot air our and pull in cooler morning air. Will still be hot in the afternoons. Maybe find a used side exit house swamp cooler on CL or marketplace to mount up on a wall or I've seen a cooler on a cart that could be moved around the garage. The guy dumped water in the pan as needed. I see used evap coolers on CL, if the pan isn't rusted out you can replace everything else as you know.

My garage has finished walls/ceiling so I mounted a fan like the first one above in the access hole and I run it early to pull cool air in. It moves a ton of air.

If you know an HVAC guy maybe you could score a used cooler that was going to be scrapped. It's been brutal this summer here.

Whoever sells evap coolers to guys in the East could sell ice to Eskimos :ROFLMAO:
 
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I have 3 large & 2 smaller portable/roll around evaporative coolers in my shop, I just put one right on me while working & at least 2 more just to circulate the air in the shop.
My shop is insulated well & makes a big difference.
 
Evap coolers work with low humidity air. In a closed space as they raise the humidity of the air they cool less and less. A side exit cooler in the wall at one end with an open door or window at the other end to move the air through the garage and out. You can get 20+ degrees of temp drop with low humidity and a properly working evap cooler. I had to service about a dozen industrial evap coolers at work and got pretty good at keeping them working well or I'd hear about it.

A cooler is about your only option that meets the cheap requirement. They ain't rocket surgery.
 
I wish that I could put into words the difference it made by having that garage door opened up on the opposite side. A window just doesn’t allow the volume of air that a garage door allows to move through.
The hot air wasn’t trapped and it created a breezeway. It may not be the perfect solution, but it’s the cheapest solution in the long run. I just don’t see a cheap or free alternative in your situation.
I lived in Mesa, Arizona, so I know what a desert climate feels like. In all honesty, the climate here in Arkansas is a lot harder to overcome in the dog days of summer. A setup with optimal airflow is the way to go, unless you spend a ton of money insulating and paying to keep it cool.
That’s my 2 cents. It may not be worth a penny, but there it is. 😉
 
AZjeff said:
Evap coolers work with low humidity air. In a closed space as they raise the humidity of the air they cool less and less. A side exit cooler in the wall at one end with an open door or window at the other end to move the air through the garage and out. You can get 20+ degrees of temp drop with low humidity and a properly working evap cooler. I had to service about a dozen industrial evap coolers at work and got pretty good at keeping them working well or I'd hear about it.

A cooler is about your only option that meets the cheap requirement. They ain't rocket surgery.
Click to expand...
I tried this one. Supposed to cool 4x the size of the garage and it won't do anything. I put it in our bedroom window and it's still not a good cooler at all

Screenshot_20250810-190538.webp
 
Chris142 said:
My garage is 20ftx24ft. We put insulation on the roof when we reroofed it. No insulation in the walls.

It gets unbearably hot in there during the summer. A few years ago I put an evaporative cooler in a window which only pushed the cool air out the whirly bird on the roof without effecting the inside temp.

Anyone have any ideas I may not be aware of? Adding insulation to the walls would be a serious job and not something I'd want to do in the summer.
Click to expand...
how high are the ceilings? 20'x24' you're at 480 sq ft factor in ceiling height plus no insulation in the walls i would go with a 1 - 1 .5 ton split unit with heat pump. unless you dont need the heat.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Karl-ho...ith-Heat-Pump-230-208V-935043170673/328839292
 
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