This is garbage
Today I'm gonna try and make something useful out of this garbage
But I'm not alone- the awesome Australian creator over at the YouTube
channel I Did a Thing reached out to me a while ago. Together we decided to see
who could make the most useful thing out of garbage. Now while most of you know me
for my ability to repurpose items from Goodwill and Craigslist this isn't
actually my first time working with literal garbage; like the time that I
made the radio-controled can of beans
or when I've used cardboard and foam to help my microphones sound better
or that time that I had to make that remix of a Nickelback album
We decided to keep the rules simple: we needed to use items that
were found in the trash bin...
Okay, uh, more specifically items that were meant
to be thrown away or recycled
We could also use fasteners like zip ties or hot
glue or duct tape
The first project I attempted was turning a cat litter
container into a water pump
There's some holes in the bottom of the bin with
balloons stretched over the top. This acts like a one-way valve: air or water
could go in but it can't come out There's also some holes in the top of
the bin that have a one-way valve where air can go out but not go in
I cut some trash bags to make a bladder for the lid when you pull the lid up it creates a
vacuum that will suck air or water through the bottom of the bin and then
when you push it down on the lid it will push the excess air out the top of the
lid and this way you could set it in a puddle of water and pump it up and down
and it would fill with water and you could carry it and dump it out somewhere
Unfortunately my holes were probably too small and it was very difficult to
secure the balloons and I basically ended up making the world's crappiest
accordion
Instead of trying to improve the design I switched to a more relevant problem
The temperature lately has been crazy hot where I live
To make matters worse the air-conditioning in my car has got that
weird thing where like it doesn't... work
I needed to build an air conditioner that would take regular air from my car vents
and cool it significantly
It turns out that the vents in my car are the same
diameter as the inside of a can of beans
In order to get the air from the vent
down into the container that I would be using for the body of the
air-conditioner I had to make some ductwork by attaching bean cans to a
protein powder container. I cut holes in the protein powder container
and then glued the bean cans
As a side note, if you want your air conditioning to have
that extra beanie flavor make sure you don't rinse the cans before you use them
I cut a hole in the top of the cat litter container and then mounted the
ductwork
It turns out that when warm air comes into contact with water it causes
some of that water to evaporate and that removes some of the energy from the air
causing it to cool down The trick with this type of cooling
is to get the air to come into contact with as much water as possible
If I simply fill the bin with room temperature water and pass air through it
there will be almost no perceivable effect on the temperature (21 C)
By putting some wet newspaper into the bin
I was able to increase the amount of wet surfaces that the air was able to come
into contact with and therefore increase the amount of evaporative cooling that
took place
(22 C > 20.7 C)
Initially I wanted to use the foam I had collected from all the laptop
batteries I had purchased for harvesting 18650 cells
The problem is that I needed a material that would wick,
or pull the water upwards against the pull of gravity
When you look at this piece of foam and this piece of newspaper
side-by-side you can see the water travelling up the newspaper but not up
the foam. In order to use the foam,
I would need to install some sort of a pump to spray water onto it
and I didn't see any good pumps in my garbage, so...
The trick now was to figure out a way to maximize the amount of wet surface area
that the air passing through the chamber would come into contact with
and my solution was a newspaper radiator of sorts
I designed the top of the radiator out of styrofoam and cut slots in it for
mounting the strips of newspaper. There are large openings on each side one for
the air inlet and one for the outlet.
The outline shape of the whole part is designed to fit inside the container
I then cut newspaper to fit the width of the slots and inserted it one piece at a time
The idea is to have the newspaper dangle straight down, wicking up the water in the base of the container
and allowing air to pass between the sheets, maximizing the amount of evaporation
taking place. I knew that some of the sheets of newspaper would
probably cling to each other towards the bottom when they got wet but this really isn't that
bad of a solution for... trash.
I put a barrier between the inlet and the outlet.
This way the bean-vent air only goes into one side and then passes through
the wet newspaper before coming out the other side
I connected the trashy air conditioning to my vent and let the container sit in my car on a sunny day
for several hours to allow the water to match the temperature of the car
This is to help prevent any false results from having water that's cold
For my first reading the air coming out of my vents was about 83 degrees
Fahrenheit (28.3 C) and the air coming out of the bin outlet dropped down to as low as
68.7 F (20.4 C); a 14.3 degree difference!
For my second reading the air coming out of the vents was 79.5 F (26.4 C) and the air
at the bin outlet was as low as 62.7 F (17 C); that's almost a 17 degree difference!
(the difference in Celsius was 8-9 degrees)
Unfortunately the volume of air being moved just wasn't enough to make a real
dent in that overall temperature of my car Also this type of cooling is known
as a "swamp cooler" because although it lowers the temperature, it does so by
increasing the humidity This type of a cooling system is really great for a
more arid or dry climates, and I was actually really surprised to see how
well it did given the fact that it was already working with air at a 50 percent
humidity level Now at this point you have got to check out
my "trash" competitor, I Did a Thing and leave a comment to let us know:
Who do you think won? I'll even put a link to his video
in the description below. Now while you're over at I Did a Thing,
Do yourself a favor and binge watch all of his videos
because this dude is hilarious and the projects that he makes are super
entertaining and thought-provoking and- -Me?- Yeah you!
-Please! Stop-
-You're too kind...- No dude, dude you're
hilarious you know this, right? -Me?-
Yeah you! Oh, come on...
This guy! This guy, come on!
Thank you so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed
the music, and the video... and if you did, consider dropping a Like and subscribing
I will see you next time