Basically a plastic bucket with a fan grafted into the top which blows air over a block of ice to produce cooler air.
I'm not convinced that it will cool enough volume, but an interesting DIY approach.
You do, of course, have to have enough freezer space to produce the ice (or buy it from an offie).
Cheers
Dave R
Oh, and the "just FIVE MINUTES" is a load of bollocks. Probably take days to get all the bits together.
Yes I tried this once with a number of small bags of crushed ice sticky taped to a fan.Not really very successful In order to make this work you need a fan with much more output and more surface area on the cold material.
I cannot see the mentioned idea would work either. What you describe is a bit like what a diy smoke machine used to look like but you needed dry ice for that. Brian
which will remove heat from the inside of the freezer and pass it back into the room ...
Owain
Thus evaporating more moisture into the air, increasing the humidity and nullifying any benefit of the reduction in temperature!
Not if the freezer isn't in the room.
While the ice keeps the air around it below the dew point it will actually dry the air. Its not an evaporative cooler.
Some finger-in-the-air calculations...
My air conditioner is something around 1kW. It doesn't run continuously - I haven't measured the duty cycle, but it's probably something like 50% in hot weather. That's an average of 500W being used to pump heat.
My freezer is around 100W. If it runs continuously just freezing bags of water, it can only extract about 20% of the heat that the air conditioner can. So it will not be able to provide a continuous cooling at anything like the rate of the air conditioner.
What you could do though is to fill it with bags of frozen water over time, and providing you only needed the cooling on about 20% of the days, it could just keep up with that.
As someone else pointed out, if the freezer is in the house, you aren't actually pumping the heat out.
Something similar was a proposal for air conditioning of deep underground trains. They can't pump the heat out into the tunnels and stations because it would become unbearable for people on the platforms. The idea was to make large blocks of ice at the terminus (mostly well outside centre of London), and to load these into heat exchangers on the trains which would blow air over them as they run through London. (Trains on some of the near-surface lines use regular aircon, as the tunnels are much better ventilated to the outside.)
Not if the air is dry in the first place. That is how evaporative coolers work, what the yanks call swamp coolers.
Yeah, because it feels like you are in a swamp if you use one. If the air is dry then a fan will keep you cool using your own sweat.
How are you t'day Rod?
Not when the air is dry.
Not when its over 40C
Obviously need to use dry ice :-)
AAAARGH! Causes Global Warming!
If you run the freezer at nigh (if it is cool enough) then run the cooler during the day that might work, but as pointed out already freezers do not have comparable cooling power to aircon units.
Thought it sounded like bullshit.
Unless, as I said, you buy in bags of ice from a commercial freezer.
Had one here and it worked fine - but in Melbourne very hot tends to go with low humidity. Would be different in tropical Queensland. Swapped it for split system aircon, used mainly as a source of cheap heating.
interesting I was thinking of getting this at the weekend.
That sort of cooler doesn't work in the UK. OK, it will cool down, but it raises the humidity in the process, which means it won't
*feel* any cooler at all (i.e. wet bulb temperatature will stay the same, or even increase). It would work best just used as a fan without any water in it. You can buy a fan for less than 1/10th of the price.These sorts of coolers (often called swamp coolers) work in hot dry countries.
FSVO "work".
We stayed in a hotel in Arizona that had them. They were crap.
well the last one I had from them seemed to work for nearly 3 years. and it was the ex demo model they were using in the shop at the time I went in they had to go find the box.
it definiotaly felt cooler to me.
I tried that and it didn't work very well.
it was pretty hot and dry in my frontroom in London.
I experienced one at one venue, and it did produce moderate cooling, both in centigrade and feeling. It certainly doesn't have anything like the effect of ac though.
You can always split the evaporation and cool air streams to get cooled dry air. Presumably it means a diy job.
NT
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