Energy conservation and increase in performance of air-conditioning systems could be achieved by pre-cooling the air intake of the condensers. This paper experiments three different methods of pre-cooling the condenser air; the cooling pad (CP) setup, the cooling mesh (CM) setup and the shading setup. The CP and CM setups are two different methods of evaporatively cooling the air. The three methods have been applied to three identical, 2.8 tons, split air-conditioning units during the peak summer time period in Kuwait, under ambient temperatures ranging from 39 to 45 degrees C. The results yielded a drop in the power consumption ranging from 8.1 to 20.5% and an increase in the cooling load ranging from 6.4 to 7.8% by using the CP and CM setups, which, in turn, resulted in an increase in the coefficient of performance (COP) of the units by 36-59%. The shading setup has resulted in an increase of power consumption due to air trapped below the shaded area, which resulted in heat being generated. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.