hey everybody brandon mason here with eastmans and today
i've got a new yeti 65 so we're going to turn my
old yeti cooler into an air conditioner for the tent
i love this time of year it's late summer we're heading into early fall
and i love spending time on the field chasing antelope and mule deer
problem as you go back to your tent mid day it's about a thousand degrees in
your tent i love tent camping i'm i'm mostly a
tent camper i tend to steer away from rvs and
campers and things like that but i miss the air conditioning i'm kind
of a diva when it comes to my air conditioning
and so we're going to turn this yeti cooler into an air conditioner
for your tent and it doesn't cost very much money at all
we're going to show you some cheap and simple ways to do it and it takes
less than an hour to build so that is basically all you need to build this
cooler and then we're going to put ice inside
and show you what happens so we are first going to take our
components lay them out on top where we want to
place them
and then we're going to trace them now we're probably not going to trace these
because the holes we actually need to cut
our these here and these are going to go on top so we can turn them however we
want to we're not going to glue them on obviously so they can be flexible
these will be glued into the top of the cooler
pretty slick system for this fan i'm going to take off
that front shroud so i can trace the outer perimeter and that's just
going to sit in there like that and this is going to be attached to
either a power inverter battery supply that you can have in camp
or something like a goal zero charger um whatever that there's
almost an unlimited amount of options i'm going to show you a couple different
ways to do that okay let's go ahead and trace where we
want to put these so these are just pvc extensions so i need
this adapter to hook onto this elbow that's
the only purpose for that
and we are going to put this these two right here trace around them and then
once that is glued in there this will be able to
just turn freely whatever direction you want there
to throw on the tent
upside down like this this will be inside
of the top of the lid of the cooler and that air is going to go
down into the cooler blow over the ice and come out these vents
and it will dramatically cool the air it'll probably be blowing out somewhere
in the neighborhood of 45 degree air out into the tent which is
pretty sweet
i'm using a pin instead of a sharpie to get a little bit
more precise line so it's not quite as wide so i know exactly where i'm going
to need to cut for that to slip in there the nice thing
about this the ridges that are used to normally tighten this or pipe on the
piece of pvc is that's going to be a nice little lip
to just hold that in place over top of the glue so it should be
pretty stable and should be about the right thickness
that we need to go through the lid as well first we need to
drill our pilot hole which we're going to try and stick to the
inside here well there's no going back now i just
drilled a hole through a 400
cooler
let's see if that made it through it did not make it through
okay so that's to be a little bit of a challenge we're going
to retrace those holes because this isn't long enough to go through
there the inside of a yeti lid looks like
nice and foam packed
here we go
and this is gonna snap back back under there
and sit right in there perfect okay it's time for the
glue to let these set up
again the first one here we're going to try some fletch type by boning
that i use for a lot of different things
there that's a pretty quick drying adhesive
we're gonna let that sit for about five minutes and then we'll come back and
check on it all right so the glue is just about dry
it'll take a full 24 hours so that's fully set up
but um it's dry enough to show the next step so we're going to use
these elbows and they're just going to sit on here we're not going to glue
those on and so what this is going to do is let's
say you have this towards the entrance of your tent
you have a cot over here and a cot over here
you can angle this to whatever direction you want to
and get direct air flow on the individual so now i'm going to tape some
little plastic pieces from a plastic grocery sack and then we're going to
turn on the fan so you can see the airflow that's coming out of here
and before we do that i'm going to show you what it looks like
on the inside so that air is going to be pushed down
from the fan over on top of the ice going to circle
around or cycle around and go out through these vents
and what we're going to do is we're probably going to put
the ice blocks or ice cubes or ice jugs whatever
you want to use the ice blocks will work the best and
i've got these smoker trays i'm going to set inverted
in here the ice over top of those and that's going to allow
air to come in underneath the ice and on top of the ice
and flow through and get more of that surface area
to cool it a little better okay here's a trial run
i'm going to plug this into my power source here
turn on the power source and then we're going to turn on low
first see the plastics just start to move a little bit
it's circulating in there
we'll stat a piece that's going to stick to the cooler
so you can see it's moving air just a nice steady breeze and then i
just have a simple meat thermometer that we're going to put
in there to get the ambient temperature before ice and
we'll do one after ice okay so you can see the
temperature coming out of there is between 60 and 70
degrees not excruciating hot today but it's
gonna give you an idea on how much cooler we can get this
once we put ice in okay one got some lock ice
power source back up there
and 70 degrees
and see where it takes us okay so we got three blocks of ice in there
it's just over 50 degrees and that is with it on top
of those inverted smoker trays on the bottom
to get airflow maximized well it's day three of early archery
mule deer season and the temperatures are scorching we
actually had the little homemade ac unit in the back of
the suburban we're going to put it in the tent this afternoon but
we're so far back in here on this ridge that we drove into
that we didn't want to waste hours going back to camp
because this is where we wanted glass tonight so we also can't sit here with a
vehicle running for hours as we chill out and it's 35 mile an hour wind so
it's miserable to be outside so we have the yeti air conditioner
working in the vehicle instead okay so there's a couple different ways
you can power this and one is
if you have a goal zero power bank that works pretty good
but if you don't or don't have the budget to do so
you can buy a power inverter and a simple battery
and you can also either use goal zero or other solar
chargers to recharge the battery um and there's so many good ones on the
market right now that really don't break the bank like
they used to and so this will power this thing for a
very long time and then put the solar panels up to it
and recharge it all right as you can see in the tent we
are now in mule deer camp early season mule deer uh
camp early september in the sagebrush
desert to wyoming and it is just over 90 degrees
in the tent so now we're gonna put it in here to measure like we did
back home
all right it seems to have stabilized and we're right around 50 degrees so a
couple degrees a couple degrees cooler than in my shop
at home
we got the breeze flowing out so not only is this working to cool the air
obviously but again we mounted these elbows two
elbows in here that we didn't glue down they're just
sitting on these adapters so you can
channel the airflow wherever you want so we have one cot there one caught here
or if your buddies out of the tent you get both
well there you have it the yeti tent air conditioner project that i
worked on for this early fall hunting season
and it's working blue blowing cool air and uh don't forget to subscribe to our
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we can send you updates when we come out with
new videos just like this usually they're not quite so out of the box
but lots of good gear reviews lots of hunting action and
once in a while a little creative project like this