Homemade Air Conditioner
From Professr's Lair
Design
Need:
- Reservoir - preferably something with a water return distributor (like a shower head) to dissolve the ice and enhance cooling. Either a coffee machine (built-in water distributor and good piping), large styrofoam cup (good insulation), or other random plastic container (funnel, cooler, bottle, jug, etc.)
- Tubing - standard PVC flexible tube (we have a ton of medical-grade stuff from oxygen systems for old people)
- Water pump - aquarium probably won't work, since there's no outlet nozzle to attach a hose to. i still have the pump for the computer water cooling system, but i dunno if it still works or even has the capacity I'd need.
- Radiator - needs to be big, so an old car radiator from a junkyard will have to be obtained.
- Fan - high flow, low noise, and I think we have a vornado that will do nicely.
More thoughts:
- Definitely a styrofoam cooler as the water reservoir.
- Closed system - we'll use those re-freezable cooler packs so no new water gets added and users don't have to re-fill anything.
- Probably need an oil pump or something, as I don't think the tiny little computer cooler pump will be enough.
Effectiveness
It'll need to be fed with ice pretty regularly. If they had a water source in the building, that would save a lot of effort. If all goes according to plan, it should cool the room off pretty quickly though, as it's a small room and a pretty big radiator.
Update: June 18, 2009
Since this is for a classroom, apparently maintenance staff will go berzerk if they see some sort of cobbled-together machine sitting around. Also, amazingly you can't buy a radiator on a school expense account. So, the new solution will probably be ravaging the insides of a $99 air conditioner from WalMart, and sitting a styrofoam cooler unobtrusively on top of it. Hopefully maintenance won't notice the cooler is glued down.
