Hey guys.
Today we're going to be taking a look at DIY air conditioning.
We're going to be putting to the test of design
made popular by the HouseholdHacker,
and then we're going to see if we can tweak that design just a little bit
to make it a little more effective.
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] [Music]
[Music]
One of the things I like best about the HouseholdHacker's air conditioner
is how quickly it goes together.
You can make the whole thing in just a few minutes.
As the HouseholdHacker's design show,
we've got a styrofoam cooler,
and a fan that we had lying around the house,
or one that we had the pick up at Walmart,
because we don't have many fans.
His original design showed using two dryer vents,
angling the air out of the cooler to wherever we wanted it to point.
However, I couldn't find those for the low price he said he found his,
so instead, I've got two 2-inch PVC elbows.
These should work pretty much the same way,
allowing our air to be angled up and out,
and when these choose where to point it.
Here's the basic idea.
We'll build the air conditioner with the fan and two elbows
following the design given to us by HouseholdHacker.
We'll then see if we can improve on the design using cubed ice,
and a few methods to try and improve the circulation within the container.
To get started,
let's get our fan prepped, and ready to go on our cooler.
We want to remove this front grill and this base clip as well,
so we just have the fan by itself,
and we'll have the blades exposed,
which will let us put the fan closer down onto the cooler
without losing any air off to the sides.
With our fan prepped,
it's time to cut a hole in our lid that will let the air flow into our cooler.
The lids on this particular styrofoam container
are not quite as flat as the one he was using,
but it should work pretty well anyway.
We want to cut a hole that's just barely bigger than our fan blades.
You can see that on this cooler,
that's going to involve cutting down into the sloped portion of the lid.
I'm pretty sure it's still going to work.
Got that circle traced, let's cut it out with a razor blade.
[Music]
We've measured this correctly.
We should be able to place our fan onto our lid,
turn it on,
and not have the blades hit any of the sides of the container.
Hey, I think we did it.
I think we've also invented a super cheap hovercraft...
[Music]
Which only works if you're actively blowing a fan into it,
by holding the fan above it.
We now need to cut two holes for our PVC elbows,
and those are going to go on the sides of the center hole.
[Music]
Because of the slope, I think it is going to be
just a little bit tricky to get our hole cut to the perfect shape,
but I'm not too worried.
It's just gonna take a little bit of trial and error.
[Music]
It's a pretty good fit right there.
Our tube is coming up out of the inside of the box,
pointing at a 90 degree angle,
and if we want to change the direction that it points in,
it spins quite easily.
Let's do the same thing on the other side.
[Music]
We've got all the holes we need for both the fan and the elbows.
We should now be able to put this lid onto our container,
place the fan on top with some cooling elements inside,
and get some nice cold air conditioned air flowing out.
In the HouseholdHacker's video,
he used frozen water bottles as the source of the cold air.
So let's load up seven of them into our cooler,
put the lid and the fan on,
and see what kind of cooled air we can get blowing out of the elbows.
[Music]
We've got air flow.
I attached these little strips of plastic on there,
not because they're important to the function,
but just because they show when the fan is on or off.
Although there's enough static electricity on this styrofoam
that they still like to just hang out sometimes,
you can see how much it's being drawn to my glove here.
Now, by putting my hand or my face in front of this,
I can say that it does feel like the air coming out
is colder than what's around,
or even if I just had a normal fan blowing on me.
But just to make sure I've got some actual measurements,
I have here a little thermometer,
and this is actually a food thermometer,
but it should work pretty well.
Right now, it says that it's about 72 degrees in this room.
Let's see what happens if I place the temperature probe
in front of the air coming out of our cooled box.
[Music]
On this thermometer,
it seems to have stabilized at about 65 degrees.
That's certainly cooler.
That's about seven or eight degrees cooler than the ambient temperature.
So, if it were 75,
and you thought that was a little too warm,
you could bring it down to maybe almost 65 degrees.
That wouldn't be too bad.
10 degrees colder is nothing to be upset about,
but I think by adjusting the design,
we can get some better results.
With the current design on this air conditioner,
all of the air moves from the fan over to the vents,
and then leaves,
and hopefully circulates down among the ice before it does that.
But I think we might be able to get some better results if we force the issue.
If the air had to travel down past all of our ice before it got to the vents,
we might get some colder air out of it.
Here, I've got a piece of 2-inch ABS tubing,
which is designed to fit right into these elbows.
I want to cut this ABS pipe to just the right length,
so that it almost reaches the bottom of our container,
forcing the air to go down past all the icy bottles
before it goes into the tube,
and then out the top.
[Music]
You can see that now the air will have to flow down past
the ice bottles into the entry at the bottom,
up out the top vent,
where it should be a little colder than before.
Ambient temperature measuring just about 72 - 72 and 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit.
For any interested, that is 22 and 1/2 degrees Celsius.
Let's try and measure the air in front of the vent
that doesn't have the extension,
and then the vent that does have the extension.
We'll see if there's a difference in the temperature.
[Music]
All right.
Seems to be leveling off.
It's not a huge difference,
but we are looking at 3,
3 and 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler on the one that vents down below the ice.
So, we definitely have a proof of concept.
It is colder when it has to travel down past the ice
before it can vent out to us.
Well, that worked on one side.
I'm going to put another pipe on the other side to see
if we can just get that same effect out of both vents.
We're getting pretty good results with our vents being fed by pipes
that reach all the way down past the cooling ice.
But I think we can probably do a little bit better.
Frozen water bottles certainly have some advantages.
They're cheap, they're easy, and they're reusable.
Once they melt,
you can pop them back in the freezer,
and refreeze them again.
Then they're ready to go a second time.
However, because of their shape and the plastic around them,
they don't conduct the heat quite as well as some plain ice cubes.
So, I want to try this test using some ice cubes
rather than the frozen bottles.
[Music]
Our thermometer is now reading under 50 degrees Fahrenheit
when the air has to travel through the ice to get to the vents.
I would say that's quite an improvement.
We're getting some pretty good results.
Less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit,
is going to keep you cool on pretty much even hottest of days.
There does need to be a fair bit of the ice down in there
for the air to really circulate through it.
So, I have one more modification I want to try that hopefully
will let us circulate the air through the ice without having
to have quite so much of it in there.
I got this sink mat at a dollar store for you guessed it, $1,
and I want to try using it to suspend the ice up off the ground
with the pipes passing down past it,
so all of the air has to travel through the ice,
down below the mat,
and then enter the vents from below.
I'm gonna go for about halfway down,
and it looks like right there,
we have a width of about 8 inches.
So, that's what we'll trim our mat to.
[Music]
That's a pretty good fit right there.
Although with the weight of all the ice,
I'm pretty sure that would still fall down.
So, one more thing that I do want to do is
use a couple of thin dowels stabbed through the size of our carton
to support that weight.
[Music]
Lovely.
Look at that little tray, all ready to suspend ice,
and just let air flow right down through it.
Of course, we're going to need our pipes to reach
down through there as well.
So, let's throw our lid on,
drop these down,
and then mark off where we need to cut some holes.
[Music]
Let's fill it up with ice.
[Music]
All right, ambient temperature of about 72 degrees.
See what this drops down to.
46...
Bam!
46 degrees Fahrenheit, that is pretty chilly.
You're almost down to the temperature of a refrigerator right there.
That's not bad at all.
There's one more thing I do want to try though,
and that's just see what happens if we also put ice
on the very bottom of the cooler.
So, we've got ice, and then the vent opening,
and then more ice suspended above it,
so the air has to travel down through ice,
and then there's still even more ice below.
I think this could give us our best result yet.
Let's give it a shot.
And it's just going to fall on its own.
Shake it to get it evenly dispersed.
[Music]
We are leveling off right about in the 42 degree range,
that's in Fahrenheit of course.
Switch this over to Celsius,
and we can see that we are measuring at less than 6 degrees Celsius,
5 and 1/2 approximately.
That is nice and chilly.
Now, as for whether or not one of these will cool down a whole room,
it's hard to say.
I don't have a perfectly enclosed room that I can do side-by-side test with.
But this is the kind of thing you probably want to set on the couch next to you,
while you're just sitting watching something.
That is some very nice cold air blowing on there right now.
The original version of this DIY air conditioner was
designed by HouseholdHacker,
and he called it an $8 air conditioning system.
Now, of course,
that assumes that you have a little fan that's just the right size,
and some water bottles.
Water bottles are very cheap, but you do still have to get them.
This version does cost a little bit more.
I had to actually go out and buy a fan,
because I didn't have one lying around.
These elbows were a little over $2, each I think about $2.20.
The fan was $10.
The elbows together were about 5.
The cooler was less than $3,
I think it was $2.80 at Target,
and then added the plastic grate which cost $1,
and the two pieces of the dowel.
I think that dowel was about 60 cents.
So altogether, after buying everything,
including the fan and the ice,
this air conditioner costs about $20.
That's a pretty good price.
If you live somewhere hot,
and you don't happen to have air conditioning,
or maybe there's just that one room in your house
where the AC doesn't quite do it,
this might be a good solution for you.
It's pumping out very cold air,
and it should last quite a while.
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