Home made Airconditioner for $20

[yesican]

Just came across this $20-30 home made air conditioner and thought about all you hot people down south.<br><br><a href="" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>

 

[Willy]

Ice=$$'s though.. and having to go out and get the ice. On the other hand, if you have a compressor style cooler running off solar, just freeze up a buncha water (or those gel packs) and stuff 'em in the unit.&nbsp; ..Willy.

 

[ontheroadagain]

I just saw something cool recently. it was a soft style gel cool pack held to the front of a fan with some stretch type netting. turn the fan towards you and your good till the cool pack warms.

 

[DollarJoe67]

Its a good idea, but I worry in a closed vehicle you would be blowing a lot of extra moisture into the air.

 

[mobilekev]

Instead of ice I think it'd be pretty easy to make a small scale DC powered evaporative cooler. <br><br>You could use either a car or computer fan to force air through a swamp cooler type of membrane with a drip feed system.<br><br>If it was built right that would drop the temp at least 20 degrees (depending on the humidity).<br><br>Then to drop the humidity you could force the air through calcium chloride. That would retrieve a lot of the water. You'd&nbsp; want to size it to be good for a day and rotate the wet batch out in the sun to dry.<br><br>If that didn't get you cold enough I believe you could set up a two or three stage system that would freeze you out.

 

[VanLifeCrisis]

Too humid here...i think i could wring a liter of water out of the air if i spun a dry rag around.&nbsp;&nbsp; Still, i love seeing people do stuff like this.

 

[creationode]

The moisture, water, from the ice could and would condense in certain outlet bends, reducing the amount released through the cold air stream.<br><br>Various membranes and/or hygroscopic materials added to the outlet would reduce the moisture even more.<br><br>Moisture is not a huge problem if you simply air vent the 'sealed' area properly.<br><br>It is worth considering to build your own small cooler/conditioner if you are thin, can sleep with higher heat levels, do not want to or cannot spare the power, and want to learn.<br><br>Not everybody has solar/generator power.<br><br>I want solar and batteries, but I do what that video shows.<br><br>I sleep alright.<br><br>Being dirt poor makes one learn.

 

[cleanheart]

Being dirt poor this is a great idea!!!!! Love it!

 

[creationode]

Even better is to circulate water through a Wort chiller AKA copper or stainless coil of tubing, then set the fan against that coil.<br><br>It leaves the cooler part completely contained without any warm external air passing through it.<br><br>One could make a very effective, low wattage, and hassle free cooler this way.<br><br>The ideas are limitless.<br><br>The industry uses Peltier technology and Vortex cooling in all of their cabinet air conditioners.<br><br>The best stuff costs more than most cars.<br><br>It excites me!

 

[Blue]

Ice does not =$$$ ice is free, you can find it at just about any hotel or motel. bring a cooler fill it up in the morning and they assume your just checking out, try and find the ones you dont have to walk through the lobby to get to the ice machine though....

 

[VanLifeCrisis]

You can do that but as some one who works at just such a place, please show moderation. I've gotten complaints a dozen times over no ice cause some people want to fill entire ice chests like the machine makes cubes magically.

 

[Zil]

if you are not registered at the motel, that is called stealing. another reason to ban and harass van dwellers.

 

[Patrick46]

Good Point!!!

 

[Blue]

Load of crap. I work at a hotel too right now, and yeah people in the mornings will complain when one of the construction teams who use the hotel clear out all the ice in the mornings for their huge coolers and water tanks (happens all the time), but those industreal ice makers will have another 2lbs of ice in less than a half hour. Its not magic but those things produce a heck of a lot of ice really fast.

Plus I've never seen signs saying "Ice is for hotel guests only" and if there is no sign saying "guests only beyond this point" your not even tresspassing, so generally I dont see it as stealing or tresspassing. They leave an ice machine out in a public area, I dont see anything wrong with taking some ice.

Heck, dumpster diving for cans is probably tresspassing, and stealing, and worse but I'm sorry I just dont see anything wrong with doing it if ya need the money and dont leave a mess. If you think that would also "lead to harassment" well, I guess thats why so many of us go for stealth vans. Harassment is guarenteed, lots of spare money for necessities or emergency repairs... not always the case, and if I can save 6 bucks by getting ice at a motel rather than a supermarket... not even an afterthought or a twinge of guilt.

Guess that poor guy with the mercedes is gonna have to wait 20 minutes if I dont wanna pass out in my van from heat stroke on a hot summer afternoon.

 

[bvanevery]

Stealing ice from a motel is doable but not as practical as you might want to believe. To get ice on a regluar basis, it implies that you're usually near enough to a motel where it's easy to walk in and load up. That's just not every city you're going to be in. If the theftable motel isn't near where you usually are, then it costs gas to get there, and gas is not free.

I never drive in to steal ice. I'm too paranoid that the one time in the universe that anyone would care about such a worthless commodity (frozen water), they'd take my license plate number and vehicle description. I'd be more willing to do it if I was driving through an area and not planning to stay there. In cities where I live, I'll walk off the street with 4 plastic grocery bags, doubled up into 2 bags. Fill up quickly but not weirdly, walk off the property to my car parked a few blocks away. Theoretically someone could chase after me, but I could drop the worthless ice and not go back to my car, until the coast is clear. In the real world nobody's gonna know or likely care.

Creating ice on demand, is one of the gadgets I'd like to invent but have been stymied in all efforts to date. For my food I've just kept paying the ice tax, although I've got some tricks for stretching it. One is that you don't have to dump just because the ice is melted. Cold water is still a refrigerant, wait until it warms up some. Not too much though because if you're protecting spoilables you don't want any bacterial problems.

For AC I say it's solving the wrong problem. Leave the geographic area. In the summer I go up, to Asheville in the mountains. My car has AC but it's old and needs R12, which cannot be cheaply obtained in the USA anymore. I have done without. We live and die by shade. Dry climates are like magic, it can be hot in the sun and completey cool in the shade.

 

[VanLifeCrisis]

Blue: Ice machines arent public anything, the whole property is private. And we have a security guard patrolling and if he sees you up there he will run you off the first time and call the police if you ignore him. So keep thinking everyone who thinks differently than you is full of crap and giving travelers a false sense of security rather than presenting the possible risks with the rewards. The ice does run out, and i do get complaints. If another person not as laid back and more diligent were getting those complaints then they would be calling security.

 

[bvanevery]

I think the public generally overstates the value of what is taken. I've had several battles over electrical outlets in public parks before, not at picnic shelters. The public tends to imagine that massive amounts of someone's electrical bill are being taken from the taxpayers, when actually, the amount of money paid to a LEO to even talk to someone plugged in, exceeds the value of the electricity they'd likely use for an entire year. The homework problem would be to study the amount of wattage it takes an ice machine to make given amount of ice. That's what one would be fighting about, as I assume the cost of the water is trivial. One could factor in some kind of wear and tear on the machine over time but again I'd expect that cost to be trivial.

It is possible to make structures that will create ice, for free, for everyone, not using electricity. However there are some "tragedy of the commons" problems to overcome with that. What do you do about health and safety if someone decides they want to puke or urinate in your public ice making gizmo?

 

[owl]

Where do you draw the line at stealing? Would you take gas from the hotels van? How about the breakfast they offer paying guests? What about an unlocked car in the parking lot? Baggage left in the lobby? If you take anything you haven't paid for you are wrong. Rationilize any way you want, you are wrong.

 

[Bdog1]

I pass motels that proudly advertise " free hot breakfast" on their marque! Can't argue with that!!! Take luggage with you, watch TV and eat breakfast! No... I never tried it, but.

 

[bvanevery]

Where do you draw the line at stealing?

The value of what is stolen, the material conditions of the society that produce it, and the equity of how the society distributes it, are all relevant factors. Theft of ice is, for instance, theft of water, electricity, and a potential inconvenience to a guest's level of service. There would be no actual inconvenience if one is taking a couple of plastic grocery bags of ice to put in a cooler. Everyone in the geographic area who might like some ice could steal it, but in the real world, they won't. Supply and demand matters; that is part of what I mean by "the material conditions of production".

Rationilize any way you want, you are wrong.

If I told you that private ownership of land is "wrong," in some kind of absolute sense, I doubt you would agree with it on just my say-so. You'd probably expect a long argument unpacking the historical notions of property rights. You'd reserve the right to think for yourself and form your own opinion before you' just agreed with me, and you probably wouldn't expect me to convince you.

So similarly, I do not accept that you say "rationalizations" are "wrong". I think you have a point of view, others have different points of view, and the merits of these views can be debated. It may not change your mind, or my mind, but it might change the mind of someone who's watching the debate.