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The Park and Rec Trades – Taking The Heat Off Customers Can Boost Business

New High pressure fog misting systems can make summer heat comfortable, entice customers, extend the business season, and enhance employee productivity.

An integrated climate control system, the Revolution™ by Fogco, allow complete cooling of commercial areas up to 10,000 cubic feet without wetness.

How do you attract customers, have them return and refer others when they’re roasting in outdoor summer heat? In venues ranging from bars, cafes, resorts, restaurants and casinos to sports complexes, amusement parks, car dealerships, and, in fact, any overly warm outdoor site including smoking areas, managers are finding that taking the heat off customers and employees is good for business.

When shade or typical cooling methods can’t do the job, a growing number of managers are turning to a new high pressure fog misting system that can make summer heat more comfortable, entice customers, extend the business season, and enhance employee productivity.

‘Most sports parks in our area shut down in summer because it gets too hot,” says Phil Currie, Director of Maintenance at Big League dreams sports facility in Gilbert, AZ, where temperatures can reach 120 degrees. ‘But with high pressure misters in our dugouts and audience seating, we’ve been able to drop outside temperatures by up to 30 degrees. Now we draw customers all summer long, and have extended our comfortable playing season by six months.’

Out of air-conditioned indoor settings, the blazing sun can make customers run for shelter and sap worker productivity. While providing shade is a good place to start, there’s no escaping hot, dry summer air in lines, patios, or seating at many outdoor locales.

Fans just move hot air, with no actual cooling. Large, loud portable evaporative coolers can cool a narrow area in the direct airstream, but outside this area there’s little cooling. Low pressure misting systems are ineffective at cooling since they wet there target areas with relatively large water droplets that don’t quickly evaporate. Without timely evaporation, cooling is limited since the droplets take overly long to absorb heat energy from the air and change to water vapor.

Instead of traditional methods, Big League dreams, the premier developer/operator of amateur recreational sports facilities in the country, turned to high pressure fog misting systems to cool baseball dugouts and audience seating for eight fields at its Gilbert, AZ facility where kids and adults play in replicas of big league stadiums such as Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field.

The park also operates a restaurant adjacent to the playing fields that allows fans to take their food out to the stands. The facility relies on high pressure static line misting provided by Fogco Systems, a Chandler, AZ based manufacturer of commercial, industrial, and residential fog misting systems (www.fogco.com) . The static line systems mount and align tubes and nozzles to deliver mist.

By pressurizing water to up to 1,000 psi and forcing it through specially designed mist system nozzles, billions of tiny water droplets are created, each smaller than a grain of salt. The droplets are so light, they stay suspended in the air; as they absorb heat energy from the air and evaporate, air temperature can fall as much as 30 degrees with no noticeable increase in relative humidity.

‘We first put misting systems in the stands, then in the dugouts because we got so many requests,’ says Currie. ‘The misting provides needed heat relief, allowing players and their families to stay as long as they want. Customers love it, and it’s been great for business.’

‘Lots of restaurants around here are catching on to how misting can help,’ adds Currie. ‘When it gets too hot for comfort outside, the misting can make a difference between keeping or losing your customer. It’s a competitive edge.’

What’s unique about the technology is how it achieves continuous, 360-degree cooling coverage – up to five times the coverage of static line systems, with less water, maintenance and installation cost. Hung like a simple ceiling fan or mounted on a portable stand, it broadcasts a fine invisible mist outward in a horizontal circle along a stream of air. By integrating the horizontal airstream with the fog, it’s micron sized water droplets stay suspended much farther and longer than traditional systems. This provides better, more complete evaporation, and more even distribution of the cooling.

The Fogco Revolution™ can be mounted from any overhead structure, used indoors or out, and comes with an outdoor rated fan and powder coated enclosure. The mist system for cooling is portable when mounted from a custom stand. The system is designed to operate with any Fogco pulley-driven or direct-drive 1,000 psi fog pump, and is customizable by choice of the appropriate Fogco nozzles.