How to make your own air conditioning

[Dude111]

www.youtube.com/v/SYS9YhAlwhM

If this works GOOD it would be quite handy in HOT WEATHER!!

[Bellingham_Scanner]

This works almost too good as it burns through a cooler full of ice in a couple hours! It would be simple to change to a 12 volt pond pump and fan for use in a travel trailer. Since I got the cooling coil from a scrap bin at work the whole project only cost me $20 for the tubing and pump.

[k3cfc]

Obviously you don't understand the concept of air conditioning.

[fxdscon]

Why settle for 12 volts when you can have the real thing!!

[mlmummert]

Originally Posted by fxdscon

Why settle for 12 volts when you can have the real thing!!


Attachment 39643

Wow. I've seen it all now.


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[rafdav]

you built there Bellingham! And it didn't cost an arm and a leg. Way to go sir.
And fxdscon, that car owner even attached his own power supply. What can ya say?!? Just a big lol.

[Bellingham_Scanner]

Originally Posted by k3cfc

Obviously you don't understand the concept of air conditioning.

For the whole two weeks a year it gets hotter than 70 degrees here and spending only $20 I think I understand enough.

[mmckenna]

Originally Posted by k3cfc

Obviously you don't understand the concept of air conditioning.

At work we have a very large chilled water plant for cooling our buildings. The chill water system distributes out to the buildings and splits off. "Radiator" type units, not unlike what he is using here are used in the ventilation ducts. It's quite common to use chilled water circuits in large buildings to cool them. It is pretty efficient for large campuses to do this. While they don't use ice and water in a cooler, they do use water run through cooling towers and cycled through the system.

Neat idea. I was in Bellingham for a few months once while we were in the shipyards. Nice town, I would have been happy to stay there.

[Thayne]

Originally Posted by k3cfc

Obviously you don't understand the concept of air conditioning.

His Pappy might own an ice company

[Bellingham_Scanner]

Originally Posted by Thayne

His Pappy might own an ice company

Actually we ended up using frozen jugs of water and enough liquid to get a flow going. That way we could refreeze the jugs instead of melting bag after bag of ice.

[kb2vxa]

"At work we have a very large chilled water plant for cooling our buildings."

More likely brine that freezes at very low temperature. Plain water would freeze in the heat exchanger and block it, the refrigerant evaporator coils get very cold. The same system can supply heat in winter by reverse cycle or diverting brine through a furnace. The central terminal buildings and toll plaza at Newark Liberty Airport utilize a central heating/cooling plant.

[mmckenna]

Nope, not brine, fresh water. Brine would be too corrosive to the copper they use in the coils. Anyway, they just use cooling towers, not refrigerant, so it never gets below freezing. I think the the last time I saw a temperature gauge on the system it was reading in the 50's. Of course in our data center they are using several traditional split systems with compressed refrigerant. My equipment room has both a chilled water system and a split compressed refrigerant system as redundancy.
They use a separate circuit for heating. We have a 2.1 megawatt cogeneration facility that generates about 75% of our power and produces the heating water. With all the different labs, offices and other facilities we have, they are constantly running both heating and cooling systems. They just started building a new cogeneration facility that will run somewhere north of 4 megawatts and provide 100% of our power. Supposed to be some variation of a aircraft jet engine running off natural gas.

I do remember making some variation of this when I was a kid, except I didn't have the pump. I basically had a wooden box with a muffin fan in one end and a bowl full of ice on the other end. Didn't do enough to actually work, but it was a cool thing to build. Surprised I never got a shock off that.

[kb2vxa]

All the brine systems I've seen use copper plumbing, the only one that had rather severe corrosion was where they used an old furnace for the heating end, galvanized water pipe doesn't like salt. Anyway, what you describe I've not seen before but as long as it works that's fine.

A compressed refrigerant system is pretty much standard for a data center but obviously chilled water does the job. Redundancy says the system was designed by someone with a brain, twice over the last few years I heard fire calls to a local unmanned server center. No fire but the heat was so intense firemen had to ventilate before they could enter the building. The climate control failed, servers put out a lot of heat and there was no trouble alarm, it takes a lot of heat to trigger a fire control heat alarm. Twice I said, those without brains can't learn from their mistakes.

There are many kinds of gas turbines, a jet engine is only one. They showed up in railroad locomotives in times past, Union Pacific had a few that burned number 5 oil thick as molasses and requires a pre-heater to burn. Before that there was the steam turbine locomotive and today steam turbines generate electricity in every power plant.

That variation of Redneck engineering that came up with what's in the first two posts and the muffin fan are nothing new nor are they entirely Redneck. When I was a kid my next door neighbor had a commercial unit that blew air over a box full of ice with a pan underneath to collect the water. Now that car with the room AC in the window of a car IS Redneck engineering. Rednecks aren't stupid, they're very clever. If you don't have what you need scrounge bits of this and that and build it. Trouble is a true Redneck would have built the generator out of a lawnmower engine and a modified car alternator.

[Thayne]

[QUOTE=kb2vxa;1883118]All the brine systems I've seen use copper plumbing, the only one that had rather severe corrosion was where they used an old furnace for the heating end, galvanized water pipe doesn't like salt. Anyway, what you describe I've not seen before but as long as it works that's fine./QUOTE]

When I first became an electrician in 1973, I think what you are describing were called absorber systems. It always seemed dumb to me to have to run the steam boilers to make chilled water; and I remember they could "Salt up" if not shut down properly, causing the need to disassemble it for repairs.

Later on cooling towers seemed to come into vogue; they also had to keep the water ph within limits & clean and of course required draining when it got to cold or the system could freeze up.
Another thing was occasionally the fan could come apart because of metal fatigue which then destroyed the whole assembly and could kill anyone too close.

[kb2vxa]

The brine system with all the corrosion was/is in a motel I used to do maintenance work for. It had interconnecting valves to divert brine through the chiller in summer and the furnace in winter, not both.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away there was a supermarket that used an evaporation cooler. Water cascaded down over slanted wooden slats and a fan drew air through it and into the building. Not really efficient in New Jersey weather being humid but most of Australia having a dry climate a friend in Gawler, South Australia state kept his house in the mid 20s with an outside temperature in the 40s all things being centigrade in Oz.

[rapidcharger]

Originally Posted by fxdscon

Why settle for 12 volts when you can have the real thing!!


Attachment 39643

Florida! What a surprise!

[W5JER]

Originally Posted by Bellingham_Scanner

This works almost too good as it burns through a cooler full of ice in a couple hours! It would be simple to change to a 12 volt pond pump and fan for use in a travel trailer. Since I got the cooling coil from a scrap bin at work the whole project only cost me $20 for the tubing and pump.

Now that's a redneck AC unit! Haha thats great!