My ac unit went out tonight. It's a $6,000 repair I didn't plan for. I just made 2 of these. My dogs and I are much cooler now, which is no easy feat in this Texas heat. Thank you!
This approach would be good occupational therapy for those unfamiliar with thermodynamics. On the other hand, my brother somehow ended up with a giant (10ft by 10ft or so) evaporative cooler. I'd never have suspected how efficient it was in the 90% humidity of an East Tennessee summer. I've got a 20 to 30 foot irrigation well and I've considered working out a mathematical model to see if the water temp from such a shallow well would be low enough to make a geothermal chiller.
Excellent idea! I personally like how you used ice using water, and not dry ice like an unnamed person would do two months after you posted this. Well done for the original content!
Nice DIY vid. I am stationed in Europe and in Germany it can get up to over 90 degrees but Europe doesn't believe in AC. I'm gonna go buy the stuff today and do this. The only thing I will change is forking out a lil more money for an actual cooler. Good shit man. Thanks.
I think you did a great job and kept it light hearted. Some of the other videos I saw on this concept were either too involved & not useful (dripping hoses and pumps?) or didn't explain very well the whole concept. Good job!
"You don't want to be one of those people that takes one step forward and three steps back," ...he says while cutting styrofoam with a knife going towards his other hand.
Love this idea. It makes perfect sense and I could see the benefit of something like this while out camping. Have u done follow-up vid showing how to hook up solar panel?
Hi Mitch, real good video and idea. We did it the same way here on worksite at the Turkish coalfields. It's working fantastic and all of us are now equipped with this AC. To the other comments: there are not all over the world styrofoam coolers available!
What a great idea. If you are using a solar panel then this air-conditioner will be running free of cost the only cost will be the cost of the ice. What room size can it cool? After how many hours do we need to replace the ice?
Great idea, you almost lost it when the 2inch drill bit flew off and tried to get your hand! I was wondering, why not cut the circular foam first, that way it goes into the bottom first creating a better seal all the way around the floor of the bucket? what do you think? Robert
Since he is putting the ice in a bag it does not make any difference. Either way will work the same. You can put some foam in the lid or around the bucket to get a little bit more insulation but I am not sure if that would be needed.
Wow. This is such an inventive cool idea. haha! I was thinking there had to be a way to create a small air conditioner. Heck just about anything can be done. Perfect for the tent trailers or camping out this summer. Thank you for sharing.
Few thoughts on this: 1) Where are you getting the ice from? From your freezer? Your freezer is not going to be able to make enough ice to keep this thing moving along for 5 hours. If your house is really warm the ice will melt in far FAR less than an hour. (You could use dry ice but then this would go from an OK air-conditioner to a death trap) 2) Problem with thermal dynamics. You see, the compressor in your freezer does not pull the thermal energy out of the refrigerant and send it off to magic land. the thermal energy that is pulled out of the refrigerant and is then exchanged and put back into the air around the refrigerator. If you have a single room apartment you would basically just be wasting energy by pulling the heat out of the refrigerant and putting it into the space around the freezer. Refrigerant then cools the freezer which then cools the water and turns it into ice. Then you take this Ice and use it to cool the air in the room; the same air you earlier heated up making the same ice. Cool little project and it does have some applications. But, it is not by any means cheap air-conditioning. A few design points: INSULATION: it is not really necessary. You can make this in a copper bucket with little heat-sinks on it and it will actually work even better. Your goal is to heat up the ice while cooling down the room. Only time when insulation would be important is if you want to be able to transport the ice in it and then turn it on when you are ready. But if this is so then you also need insulating plugs for the exhaust vent and the insulating cover for the fan to keep the ice from melting prematurely. THE ICE CONTAINMENT PROBLEM: Putting the ice in a plastic bag lowers your efficiency. You need a basket setup which is going to hold ice and keep it relatively dry (increasing your surface area and efficiency since ice is not cooling the water but just the air moving through. Remember, your goal is to cool the air not to have a bucket/bag of cold water) while the bottom catches the water form melting ice. Preferably making it in a way that it can be easy to remove and dump. Also, it would be possible to lower the temperature of the air coming out by adding some salt to the water ice before turning it on. This, of course, would also make the ice last shorter.
It takes 144 BTU to melt a pound of ice. The smallest window air conditioners are rated at 5000 BTU per hour. That is the equivalent of melting 35 pounds in this device Every Hour. This kind of air conditioner can work but you need Lots and Lots of ice. BTW, you may have heard an air conditioner called something like a "one ton air conditioner." My house has a 3 ton unit. This weight measurement means the air conditioner provides cooling equivalent to melting however many tons of ice over a 24 hour period.
We have a large tent and use a large fishing cooler loaded with ice from the 24 hour outdoor ice house, we have a good size fan in it and lasts all night. Its worth the 10 bucks in ice. Fishing in the florida keys
It's much easier to buy a stirafoam cooler and cut out a hole for a fan and 1 or two dryer elbow tubes then put in it and set the fan on top of the cooler , just cut the hole a little bit smaller and put in the frozen water bottles and enjoy
Dude, awesome project !!! I'm building one, you see leaving in Houston Texas ... talk about HEAT..HEAT and more HEAT, this will work perfect while I'm out in the garage. Thanks again ... great video !!! -Albert,
Bad idea. This thing will grow deadly bacteria. Legionella aka Legionnaires Disease. Just sit on a bag of ice. Its safer and more effective at cooling you off.
I can see that everyone or at least a lot of people are very excited by this idea. There are tons of similar projects posted here, mainly using styrofoam coolers. The problem is that it will not give you any noticeable cool. It's just like opening a refrigerator door and keeping it open in a hot apartment. Sorry. BTW, a small window AC unit can be had for less than $100 on sale, and it will probably burn only $2-3 of electricity per day, so what is all this big fuss about? And to match that store-bought AC unit output one will probably need 50 buckets like the one in the video. )))
You could use the plastic camping ice 'bricks' instead of ice, or the plastic bubble stuff for making ice cubes...............the fan looks like the one I had on the dash of my motor home, easy to come by I would imagine.
Nice, as a mom of four paying 300 a month in electricity,altough somewhat ghetto for the public to see..lol i would use about 3 of these!! But tell me ...im in florida,although not as hot as Texas,its hot! but what about the humidity/mold problem?Or maybe just use in the day time and at night ise the ac's????
You are NOT the safest person with shop tools, I've ever seen, but your project is BRILLIANT! If you could clean up the interior design a bit, and design some good packaging, you could probably SELL these and make some money!
One thing to keep in mind that if you use ice that isn't encapsulated inside your cooler you will be put moisture into the air. That could cause some mildew problems with extended and repeated use.
The AC to DC converters waste power makeing the DC voltage out of AC even when the fan is turned off. Just some info some dont know about. I try to by an AC powered fan. They dont use much power. Thanks for the video
If you're putting the ice bucket in one room and the ice-maker or freezer is in another, there's some merit to this, although it's not particularly efficient. In a studio apartment, though, the heat taken out of the water during freezing is moved into the kitchen air, and putting the ice in the same room later to remove the heat in the air results in no net heat removal. If you include the heat from the fan running (there won't be much, but there will be some) you'll end up with a net heat gain. Heat pumps and other A/C units work by MOVING the heat from the indoors to the outdoors via some type of exchange mechanism.
More of a swamp cooler then ac. Not that it's going to cool down a room but swamp coolers raise humidity so they are no good for a humid place. I can't see this working for more then a foot in radius and definitely no where close to a bigger fan you could get for free on craigslist, cheap on Amazon or battery/solar fans for outside. It sounded like a cool idea but the more I think about it the more I see easier and better solutions. Srill, thanks for the the video
...you probably could have just sacrificed an ice chest. anyways, I believe that geothermal cooling is a better option, The earthship concept makes pretty good use of this. circulating cool water from tubing weighted down in the bottom of a pond is another great option.
Ok, so to make the ice, you're using a small-scale A/C system called a freezer. It takes heat from inside, transfers it outside, INTO your KITCHEN (or where ever the freezer is located). So to make ice, you remove the heat from water, and put it into your home, plus add the heat generated by the compressor motor of the freezer. Then take the ice out, and use it to absorb the heat in the air of your home, cooling it in the process. When the ice has melted back into water, place the water back in the freezer and repeat. After each cycle, you are actually going to have more heat in the system (e.g. your home). Even if the freezer is located outside your home, the energy used to create the ice is going to be no less (most likely GREATER) than the energy required by a dedicated Air Conditioner for providing equal amounts of cooling. This type of device would be great in a small area that cannot support a dedicated Air Conditioner (think old, small RV or something), or at least a neat solution if you have a small room that you want to have a couple degrees cooler than the rest of a building.. but it is not going to save money over running a proper AC unit.
What about a 3ftx3ftx6ft 200lb steel box is small scale? In the end he's got the worlds least efficient a/c unit here. You would literally be better off to sit on a bag of ice. Literally because at least the ice would cool your ass off, instead of dropping the air temperature of a room by 1/64th degree per hour.
What about making a round cardboard insert leaving about 1/2 - 1 inches to the inside wall of bucket and spray expandable foam? Also, I think a guy could use a shop vac and blow the air out.
I may try this using an empty box wine bladder. Keep a spare or two in the freezer and you'll never need to mess with ice. The bladders keep the ice water frozen for a very long time.
I couldn't find the round insert either, so I did the same thing with a sheet of Styrofoam, with one difference. I beveled the sides to eliminate gaps. cool vid though thx
In layman's terms; If you are cooling a room, you don't need a cooler- just the ice on a pan and a little fan to move the exchange quicker. The faster the ice melts, the faster you are cooling the space. You are changing the temperature of the air, not "conditioning" it as in removing humidity- in fact, you are adding humidity. The cost to make the ice and cool the room at XX temperature for XX hrs is the same as running a small a/c, since the refrigerator must use XX btu's to remove the heat from the water to make ice. If you were to get free ice, then you have cheap cooling. If you must buy the ice, expect to pay much more for cooling this way. This is not free or low cost air conditioning since no natural energy source is used. *40 years in HVACR experience here. Nice video though.
Hey.......Here's a simpler way to cool off.... Get a large spray bottle....fill with water....put in freezer......when you get hot just sit with box fan facing you.....spray water towards fan........the mist will cool you off........repeat often as necessary. I even take it in the car and spray towards open window and mist blows back at you.
I have a question, this AC model wont make the air humidity sky rocket? (I'm asking this because I imagine it could cause some damage to my pc because I keep on the ground... or floor i dont know the right word for that.)
well, it's called a water evaporator but with ice in there...and oh yeah you need to buy a bucket of ice or spend the electricity cost to make the ice. In the end, it will cost way more to cool a room than a A/C unit.Oh, it probably won't be powerful enough to cool a room anyways.
You're cute, so it was easy to watch the whole video.. :) I really like your idea better than the styrofoam coolers I've seen in other videos.. This is more pleasing to the eye, and it looks like it would maybe be more efficient. I'd love to another video of your solar panel hooked up. However, if it's inside a house, how would the panel get the sun it needs to provide electricity? Also, now that you've had your A/C for a while, how many hours do you get out of it? I have A/C in my house, but my room is above the garage, and it's also facing west, so I get all the afternoon sun, and my room can get in the 90s. I'm hoping if I make this, that the ice wouldn't melt too quickly. I would have a plan of freezing about 10 two litre bottles to keep on hand to swap out whenever needed. I'd love to know though how many hours of cool air you have gotten from your homemade A/C.. :)
Id you add in the electricity you use to freeze the ice this is probably a looser on the efficcency scale, but for a short term cooling effect maybe ok.
This design could be better imo. I would have made a platform inside for the ice bag to sit about 1/2-3/4 of the way up in the bucket and have the holes below the ice. That way the air is forced to flow past the ice, cooling it, and then the cold air sinks and flows out the holes in the bottom.
Don"t even have to use one of those 5 gallon buckets but instead use one of those Styrofoam cooler right of the back. All ready isolated and easier to cut. But hey, just my thoughts.
