Do Homemade Air Conditioners Really Work?
Whether climate change ends all life on this planet is an open question (hopefully), but the fact is that no matter where you live, you will be dealing with warmer temperatures at least part of the time. . If you have air conditioning in your home, that means you need to figure out how to make it work better and more efficiently . But if you don’t have an air conditioner at all, desperate times lead to desperate thoughts – and there are plenty of DIY tutorial videos out there to show you how to put together a working air conditioner from a few relatively cheap components. But does any of them work?
A typical do-it-yourself AC installation includes a foam cooler, some ice, PVC pipe, and an electric fan . The idea is that if you’re moderately savvy, you can put together a survival cooling solution without spending a lot of money. After all, ice is cheap, and while electricity is expensive, a small fan won’t use much. However, these projects are based on the evaporation of water, and these are not heat pumps – they simply cool the air and then force it into the room. So the answer to the question “do they work” is a frustrating “sort of”.
Your DIY Options
There are many different ways to make DIY air conditioners, from delightful models made from milk cartons that serve as personal coolers, to more complex models that include small water pumps . Some of them require a little understanding of the technique or the ability to solder the wire without hurting yourself. For those of us who regularly spend a few minutes thinking about how to plug in a USB cable, one of the easiest approaches is the concept of a foam cooler and a small AC powered fan (big buckets can work just the same), which requires some power tools, but no real experience with anything other than plugging into a wall.
All these homemade air conditioners are based on the same principle: cool the air with ice, and then pass this air through a tube of some kind. Theoretically, you can see how this should work: when you pack a fridge with ice and beer and head to the beach, the air in that fridge gets noticeably colder every time you open it, even if the sun is beating down. It goes without saying that if you could pump that cold air from the cooler into your room, it would have some effect on the ambient temperature.
Will such a thing have a noticeable effect on room temperature? Not many of one . For a well-built AC unit made by hand from a cooler or a large bucket, you can get 1-2 degrees cooler in a very, very short time. One of the reasons a beer cooler works is because it has a small space that is airtight. cool down. The constant movement of cold air from the cooler means the ice has to melt and transfer more heat energy into itself to compensate, leaving you very quickly with a puddle of water and a room that probably doesn’t feel much cooler. People sometimes think it only works because they feel cold air coming out, but if the thermostat doesn’t budge, it’s just an illusion.
On the other hand, how’s a close-up of a personal cooler? This will work. There will be a constant stream of cool air that will concentrate in the tube and blow in your direction, and a homemade air conditioner can lower the temperature in its immediate vicinity by 10-20 degrees, which is noticeably cooler. This means that having one relatively close to you will provide some relief from the heat – essentially, you’re building a sort of superfan that blows slightly cooler air around you. This will not change the overall temperature in your room, but it may make sitting in the box more bearable.
The reason window and central air conditioners are so expensive is because it takes a lot of energy to move heat from one room (your painfully hot bedroom) to another (outside, where it becomes a natural problem). Some ice and a small fan will never do the same job, but they can help keep the fraying tips of your sanity the next time a heat wave sweeps through an area. Given that you can build one for less than $50, this might be a worthwhile experiment.