I cool my entire 5000 square foot off grid home with a system similar to this, and that setup will rain water out of it like crazy from the condensation. You'll want to build a water catch with a drain outside I love using my resources at home instead of buying everything. I've been living completely off grid strictly on solar energy for over 10 years and love it. I run 2 full sized electric refrigerators, 2 full sized electric deep freezers, a deep well pump, and everything else a normal home has and all without outside power
Yeah , but how much $$ do you have in your System. I pay less than five hundred a year for electric year round. Grid. I lived your way for years... Still have my stuff...1,400$ total. It all depends on your needs and abilities. Retired veteran Age 67.
In 1982 I rented an apartment in a complex with 600 units that had geothermal cooling & heating. It was nice, the electric bill was about 1/3 of normal costs.
Very nice. Now insulate the inlet hose from the well to the cooler so you don't lose any coolth there. And if you paint the inside of your shop with pure white paint, it will give you twice the light inside that you have now and require 1/4 to 1/2 the amount of LED lighting to make it very bright. I painted the shop floor white, too, and it makes dropped screws easier to find.
Haha, "coolth." Oh yeah, ended like the word "warmth"! But I wonder why I had never seen or heard that word "coolth" before even though we hear "warmth" fairly often. Hmm!
Not just a well but a wide shallow well. My last home had a 7inch well at 400 feet. You can't really make a cost effective system with deep wells. Unless of course you're pumping the water into another insulated container??
@@azteacher26 You need a heat exchanger and two circuits, one circuit from the heat exchanger to the well with a pump and then a circuit connected to the heat exchanger to the cooling unit with another pump.
The concept is solid, but the straight water through the heater cores will corrode them quickly if they aren’t first plugged by trash in the water from being an open system. Also the condensation on the coils would make a mess in the shop with no drip pan under it. A closed loop system in the well would work better, but antifreeze might leak into the water system eventually.
you are looking for problems where there arent any. corrosion? he will replace it, how much stuff you find in the AC unit? there is brass corrossion and radiator corrosion too and lots of electronics.
I like the video, but lets try to be realistic here' about that last comment you made... A small 5000 BTU A/C is only about 350-500watts. That's all you need for a shed that size. A 3,000 watt A/C would be overkill. A/C's have become very efficient over the last decade or so. Other than that, I know it's not really about power-draw and more about sending a message, so still, fantastic video!
I would rather build a cooling system myself than to pay for an air con unit from some faceless mega corporation. He could upscale this with a copper coil in the well, insulating the lines from the well into the house, and use a larger heat exchanger in the house. Or he could use and old HVAC air handler unit from a house and instead of refrigerant he pumps the ground chilled water through the refrigerant heat exchanger and it would even have drip pans to catch the condensate and be easy to hook to a digital thermostat.
Agreed. Look at the temperature delta between the water coming in and the water going out. If that's all the temperature differential you needed, there are lots of ways to do it just as efficiently. That said, the well is a huge asset. So much thermal capacity, and it's right there. Being able to easily return your cooling water to the well makes the energy transfer potential really big, though it also leads to questions about safety for drinking water. (Not saying you shouldn't try it, just I'm pretty sure regulations prevent us from trying this on a larger scale because safe water is a high priority for municipalities.)
I actually have a 5000 BTU window unit cooling the entire first floor (1112sf) of my house and it is not well-sealed and insulated at all due to undergoing a remodel. I also have a 5000 BTU window unit that does a great job of cooling a 12x24 (288sf) outbuilding that is poorly insulated, and this is in 95deg Southern U.S. weather.
Was going to say something like that too. Its easy and anyone can do it. First, you need a machine shop and thousands of dollars for tools and equipment and a water well handy near by and oh, skills in using all those things too! Nah dude, I just buy a $150 5000 BTU running at 300watts and its more than enough, thanks.
So I was trying this on one of our properties, thought I was doing good using the well in the backyard! Only to find out later on as I was told, we don’t have well ! It was the septic tank!
You don't need a well if you have a property where you can dig a trench a couple dozen meters. Or hundreds. Unfortunately, I haven't find a good tool for calculating soil heat disspation and saturation so I can't calculate the trench length for a given property size to cool. I paste my comment from above I found to do this: dig a 1-2 meters deep (as above) a long trench; put large diameter plastic tubing in it; route one end of the tube out the soil, the other end of the tube into the shed/home; attach fans to the tube. This will blow fresh (and hot) air into the tube, goes underground and cooling down, enter the property cooled.
@@Sekir80 Cool tubes were tried back in the 1970s, they don't produce enough effect to make them worth the hassle, especially dealing with liquid water, high humidity, and mold.
Thank you so much my friend! I'm glad you liked my video. Come back to my channel, there are still a lot of interesting and unusual ideas. I will always be glad to see you. 🤖
My son had a simple 1 floor home in Minnesota with a cellar with the same floor plan. The working area and our guest bedroom were in the cellar. You could live in the cellar during those hot days over there and in winter the top floor could be heated also! That was a simple house but very practical.
NOTE: Requires a welder, welding Skills, 3D printer, and a water well on your property. Awesome project tho, if you have or can afford all this stuff....
You can certainly do it without having any of those tools, and in most US locations you can easily bore your own well *with nothing more than a little water pump or electric power washer.
You could probably replicate this much cheaper without all those tools, Find a old car radiator, then dig some trenches a few feet deep bury some water hose for the cold ground loop, you could use PVC hose pipe although there are better options (Polyethylene or HDPE). Would have to work out how much hose and the depth to make it work but typically ground loops are places 3-6ft deep and have a few hundred feet of hose underground but they are large systems for whole house geothermal heater/coolers. I bet you could have some success with a much smaller system. From what i read 700ft of hose is good for 12000btus for geothermal heaters. Need to find a pump but as its not so deep as the well don't need anything crazy i bet some of those aquarium pumps could be used although you would have to work that out. There are tons of heating circulator pumps that would work well and can be found for cheap, Get some old solar panels to power it as well. I had a idea for using some large pvc pipe buried horizontally say 6 ft buried with the top exposed that way when it rains it fills up with water, get a bunch of these buried and you would have a good amount of water buried keeping cool from the ground temp, then just circulate water through all the pipes and you would have a similar effect to the well. Also you could drill them into the ground like they do oil well drilling, but on a smaller scale. Imagine a 2inch pvc pipe with one end cut to be jagged (with the end of this pipe sealed but the jagged part sticking out) so when it is turned by something like a drill it cuts into the soil making it easier to bore into the ground, you might need to build a wooden frame to make this easier. You could take small 4ft lengths and then join them together to make longer and longer bore holes until the limit of the drill.
It would work better if you put the indoor unit high up to condition the hottest air ! But nice one , I have an ac that runs off my solar system so it’s all good 👍
I would install some form of duct work as well, if only to prevent air recirculating through the heat exchanger. You want to pull the hottest air in the room through the fins and have the cold air not mix with the hot inlet air. It's most efficient when the cold air goes into the room and does the work before returning as inlet air. In a workshop that means pointing the unit to the hottest heat source, which is often the window where the sun comes in. Aim the cold air at the window to do the most work. It sounds counter-intuitive but this will give you the best effect without heat or cold spikes in the room. It will be the most comfortable. You could also add a gizzy that activates the device above a set temperature. An old school thermostat with the mercury bulb would probably be ideal. Then once it cools down to a reasonable temp, the unit shuts itself off.
When I was in high school, I considered building something similar to cool my parents' home. We had an old well to use as a source of cooling. I had planned to use a radiator from an old car and use a box fan to blow air through the chilled radiator. My hangup was finding a pump that would be powerful enough to pump the water up from the well and through the hose connected to the radiator. Another issue was how to best capture and remove the condensation water that would be dripping off of the radiator.
There are air conditioners now that use 200-250 watts. My small window ac uses 400 to 500 depending on outside temperature. If it`s only 80 to 85 outside it runs very efficiently. My June electric bill in subtropical Louisiana was $41. I want one of the 200w models with 8000 btu to use with solar but I can get three 5000 btu ones for what it costs.
For those few of us who no speaky de Celsius, according to him, that well water remains about 41 F in summer; his rig brought the inside temp. inside down to about 64 F. This might be possible in the UK, but here in S.Central Texas, this strikes me as implausible at best, but would certainly be better than nothing. Having THAT quantity of water at THAT temperature THAT close at hand is what makes this whole idea work. The Texas version of this would be need to include an existing well more like 200’ (61M) deep, an insulated shed with exterior (including roof) painted with that new IR-rejecting paint. It would be worth it to either position the shed under shade trees, or build a canopy over it with more of the overhang positioned over the south and west walls. Out here, ANY un-air conditioned structure just sitting out in the sun is going to quickly become a solar oven by the middle of the day no matter how much ventilation is available. A “breeze” of 105 F (50 C) air isn’t going to help. That means for at least 4 months out of the year, it is very unpleasant if not totally uninhabitable.
I have 4 small (18 inches tall) fans that have tanks for ice-water, ice cubes or ice-blocks, they are portable, and between all four they cool the living room where I spend most of my time. They cost £48 and connect via USB, so cost about 1p per hour per fan! It is easy to take one or two to the bedroom if it's going to be a warm night! Being small, they are very quiet!
This is honestly a lot of work for nothing. You could just pump the cold air out, no need for an elaborate setup. Additionally you'd get fresh great quality air especially if you add zeolite filter. Ground cooling is very popular here in Poland a simple fan cools better than an AC unit.
@@Doctor-Robo yep, 36" or so and it will be as cold as that well. The only other consideration would be how much pipe you need in the ground. The bigger the room to cool, the more pipe you need. I am sure there is some engineer who has written all this down. Geothermal systems use wells instead of buried coils because wells are usually more cost-effective to install. Someone considering geothermal has to consider that cost when installing a system. Having a well dug in the boondox is going to be a bit more expensive than a few more solar cells and an extra battery bank will be so, as with anything, the cost of installation and ongoing cost of ownership need to be considered.
I think it could be optimized further. Instead of using big pump you could make closed loop with small pump similar for heating for water circulation. The advantage is much lover power consumption, you could use distilled water so your radiator won't die because of scale.
Was für ein Riesenaufwand mit Schweißgerät und 3D Drucker und dann werden am Schluß nur noch 7000 Liter Wasser im eigenen Brunnen gebraucht. Wirklich etwas für Jedermann 😎
Jup zumal moderne inverter Klimaanlage wie die neue Midea PortaSlit gezeigt haben das sie auch nur im Schnitt 350W benötigen wenn man Sie nicht auf volldampf laufen lässt. Die hier gezeigte Pumpe hat ja auch schon 200 Watt und die Lüfter ziehen auch noch was.
This system works because of the size of the aquafer and the depth under the ground. You take both those advantages away when you reduce the water size and the depth.
@@azteacher26 Depends on how deep you bury the barrel. The size of the reservoir only matters if it isn't transferring the waste heat to the surrounding ground fast enough.
@@azteacher26 That is true. You probably could make an evaporative cooler with a re-purposed AC condenser coil and fan assembly. Just mist the water into the coils. It would comsume a lot of water though.
I have a discontinued well pipe in a 8x8 foot wellhouse. The newer well is 340 ft deep. Dunno about well house obsolete well. Does anyone think a car radiator would work? Or, would pressure from pump not be sufficient?
The deeper the well, the cooler the water.. In a region where summer temperature reaches 45-50 Celsius, the water reservoir with mostly surface level two meters deep you would chill by just plunging your hands in a pail of that water.
It's frustrating watching those pipes get pinched by the lid. Otherwise, congrats, great idea and execution!..But a concern is to assure the groundwater flows fast enough through the well. Pathogens, fungus etc grow in heat. Would a larger rad increase the differential between the incoming and outgoing water? I notice briefly on the thermal image the tubes were almost the same colour coming in as going out. Perhaps another rad outside on the returning pipe to dump the heat before reintroducing the water back into the well? It would be interesting to plot the temperatures, because an exterior rad may actually introduce ambient air heat into the well if the temp is still cool leaving the inside rad. If you can create a greater difference, you could run your pump and fans less to save money. Of course, a heat pump "water chiller" water to air, might be ideal. Depends on whether the well groundwater flow can remove the heat fast enough, I guess. Your innovation might help a lot pf people, including farmers trying to cool their livestock.
You don't need air conditioning anymore..... but you need a TIG welder, a 3D printer, a couple of perfectly good automobile AC radiators and.... wait for it... a 100 foot open well located near the building that needs to be cooled. It's just that simple is it?
The first time I encountered a cooling well system, it was considerably larger than yours and used full-up car radiators, not heater cores. It cooled the Riverside roller skating arena in my home town, a western suburb of Detroit. This was around 1972. Dad wanted to drill a cooling well and make a similar system for our home.
Yeah I get it, but its semantics, with woodworking skills and tools you could do the same thing, or 3d print it all with those skills and equipment. Many ways to skin the cat, if you don't have some other accompanying skills, DIY might not be the best option for you. Welders nowadays might be one of the cheapest options of all the things I just listed.
Good job!. I've always wondered how to make use of the colder temp's below ground but I never thought of accessing a well. Taking a compressor out of the equation is a really big deal!
You definitely don't have electricity from Pacific Gas and Electric. They charge me 43 cents a kilowatt hour which rises to 52 cents a kilowatt hour about 2/3rds through the month.
If the temperature inside the water well is incredibly low, why not capture the cold air from the hole and channel it into the workshop? It could also go through an air filtration system.
Depending on the water corrosion can be an issue. In my area untreated well water eats right through copper . It takes several years and the internal buildup also creates an insulator slowing down the transfer of heat. It's still an awesome idea . One that I still intend to try. 👍.
Thanks a lot! There is an option to make a closed loop by lowering the cooling radiator into your well. A closed loop will allow you to simply cool with coolant and not use hard water.
EXCellent!! UNFORTUNATELY this requires a well, though maybe it would work with tap water. FORTUNATELY - I have ANOTHER ONE for you - EVAPORATION. If you use just 10 gallons a day - you can wipe 30 degrees off your internal temperature for that little shop - just sprinkle the roof on a timer twice an hour from about 8 AM until 5PM. This worked so well that after a single visit, my kid remembered it 20 years later and used it on his 35' RV.
During the Arizona summer, Even the ground is hot. Turn on the 'cold' tap and it comes out warm. Only the water in the pipes with the cool house is cold. Lol.
may not be legal in many places... as in the water going back into the ground is now potentially contaminated. Especially after lot of use... AKA bacteria grows in the cooler/exchanger and your sending that right back into the water supply of those around you. Even if your worried about the laws.... treat the returning water via UV system or mist it into the air to fall on your land and let mother nature re-filter it. Might could introduce it back into ground via a leaky pond (with fountain to ward off mosquito) or buried poly drums with gravel to get the water to seep back into the ground. Now run all that on solar. Problem with above... now your more expensive than a cheap AC..... and even with paying monthly elec. Problem more expensive too. also minerals in the well water will very possibly clog up those coolers very quickly.
You are partly right, but I show ideas and execution. There are many options for execution, as you said - barrels with gravel and the like. You can even make a closed system with a cooling circuit inside the well and the water will not be affected at all.
It is understandable why you might think this is a swamp cooler but swamp coolers work on a different principle. They evaporate water to cool the air. This one is using a heat exchanger to draw the cool temp out of the well water as the air is driven past the fins of the exchanger. The pump then sends that warmed water back into the well for recooling. Rinse and repeat... as others have mentioned it could even be modified to be a closed system unlike the swamp coolers that have to constantly have their water replaced as it evaporates. In dry climates swamp coolers are very effective to a certain temp in the high 90s after which they are useless because all they do then is blow hot air. The system would remain cool at any temp although the effective size would have to be modified based on the highest temps and the size of the room to be cooled. My 2 cents... hope this help.
My full house ac is keeping the 240m2 at 22°c and the average electric input power for the past 22 days is 240,72 watts. I'm running a mitsubishi heavy industries twinscroll inverter split ac with larger than "normal" condenser and radiator. If intrested here is the math i used: 22days x 24h = 528h Used electricity during last 22 days is 127,1kWh. 127,1kWh/ 528h = 0,24072kW Conversion to watts: 0,24072 x 1000 = 240,72W
Excelente!! Una genial idea! Voy a aportar un dato: Por más que se abra la tapa del pozo, el aire caliente del exterior no ingrasará nunca porque no hay posibilidad de circulación y por una cuestión de menor densidad del aire caliente exterior. Y por el contrario, el aire adentro del pozo no sale porque es más denso que el aire en superficie.
Great video, I think you can enhance the system with peltier modules, such system will sit outside, use your refrigeration to cool/warm the side of the peltier you need to keep stable, and transfer to the inside via the other radiator
That’s great! I made something similar, unfortunately I don’t have a cold water source, so I use a cold box and filled with bottles of ice. However it melted the ice and warmed the water so quickly I gave up the approach. Bought a portable AC unit instead
It is called a swamp cooler. You can buy them just about anywhere in many different sizes but they only work where the humidity is low. If you are in a high humidity area it does not work.
Excellent project and experiment. Condensation will become a problem except in the driest of conditions and the well water temperature will likely increase as the weeks pass unless there's an underground flow of groundwater that keeps cycling water through the well. It's still a great setup and it would be interesting to see how it performs over a longer period and how you deal with the condensation. Thanks.
Thank you too! Yes, condensation is not shown in the video, but it appears during system operation. I am already making a humidifier from this condensate to humidify the room. The water will not heat up in the well. I have an underground river and the water level is renewed constantly. The volume of the well is 7 tons of water and it is constantly renewed. Come back to my channel again, there are still a lot of interesting videos)). I will always be glad to see you. 🤖
You could upscale this with a copper coil in the well, insulating the lines from the well into the house, and use a larger heat exchanger in the house. Or you could use and old HVAC air handler unit from a house and instead of refrigerant you pumps the ground chilled water through the refrigerant heat exchanger and it would even have drip pans to catch the condensate and be easy to hook to a digital thermostat.
in oklahoma the well would reach outside temps in 1 hour and be useless. also 200 watts is half the power of an ac unit that is pbly 20 times more efficient
Maybe it's just the parent in me but I feel that well should be fenced off and also have an internal ladder in case someone falls in it.. that well is giving me the heeby jeebies... 😅
New and unusual as in the ancient Romans did this with their country villas. Why do people insist in thinking they are so clever for reinventing the wheel. The ancient method of just having air tubes buried underground to cool the air and painting your chimney black to create an updraft hence pulling air through the buried air tubes into your house is also a passive system while your solution requires pumps and fans.
Excellent Idea!!! Cooling for a small fraction of the price of a normal A/C system!!! You've basically made a 'GeoThermal' system for penny's!!! I wish I had a well I could use where I am ... 😞True Genius on a budget ... 🙂
Thank you so much my friend! I'm glad you liked my video. Come back to my channel, there are still a lot of interesting and unusual ideas. I will always be glad to see you. 🤖
New radiators.$ Welder.$ Fans.$ 3D Printer.$$ A deep well with a huge cover on it.$$$ The experience needed to do this...priceless. AC units in the windows and solar panels on the roof. In the northern climate of the US, that's all that is needed. In the South, more AC and more solar panels.
Indirect evap cooler. We run a much larger version to cool a 20, 000 sq ft shop. Dropped the ambient temp from 100F in summer to a tolerable 78F. (wish I had access to a 3D printer).
I like the well as a cold source, but you should consider something to collect condensation at your heat exchanger. If you want to reduce noise you can increase the surface area of your heat exchanger (more radiators) and hang them on the ceiling so the cold air will just drop on you. I myself have a closed loop system at home meaning a heat exchanger 140 m below surface as my cold source with salty water running through it and then through my ceiling to cool us down. It combines very well if you just power it with a solar panel or 2 because when the sun shines you need cooling the most. I keep my ceiling above the dew point to prevent condesation by measuring air temperature and humidity, but for that you need a very large surface area so you have sufficient cooling.
Hola, gracias por tu vídeo, tiene un concepto bastante interesante. Sugiero que cambies los ventiladores por los de 12 voltios y los conectes en serie.. con un módulo controlador de temperatura variará las RPM de los ventiladores.. hay pequeños inversores de 9$ que elevan la corriente DC de 12 hasta 60 voltios.. porqué en serie? Porque la corriente sería mínima y hasta con un pequeño panel solar lo puedes alimentar. Igualmente felicidades por el proyecto.. P.D. La manguera que viene del pozo debe estar protegida del sol para que no se pierda el frío.
suggestion if the well is not being used for consumption. An idea would be to clean up the tubing and just dig a hole, add your container for your reservoir. That way you don't have an obstacle while mowing or have to look at the plastic tubing
I love the idea, but a 600 watt window AC could also achieve that in a small shed then cycle for even less watts, so it’s probably only ⅓ the power. A solar panel powering a DC water pump and fans could be very interesting. If the well water is potable, check the water temperature and get it tested. Warming an active well can introduce bacteria.
I built this for my computer: It's a 8' tall Water Bong. Hot water falls from the top.. hot air gets vented out of the top.. hot water drops down into the 'well' reservoir which has hundreds of salt water aquarium filter balls. It just uses a water pump, truck oil cooler, and a couple 125mm computer fans.
Paint the outside of the shed with primer then gloss white paint, and insulate inside with foam board and your cooler will be able to keep it cool easier.
