Is this the holy grail of RV/van Air Conditioners? DC Airco

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bardo said:
are you under the impression that in the highly unlikely event AC goes down intermittently the dog will die immediately? for crying out loud she's stated multiple times she plans to go out every few hours on top of having a monitor system.

No not immediatly.. and I never said "intermittently"  I said "FAILURE"

Are you under the impression that in 100+ degree weather the dog will survive "a few hours" if the system fails?
 
I think if you have a backup system of some sort in addition to the A/C it is enough.

My doggie door thing might not really have been a practical idea but to throw up the argument that you cannot do this because multiple systems might fail is a bit extreme.

If the probability of the A/C failing is 1% and the probability of the doggie door failing is 0.01% (it is much simpler), then the probability of both failing is one in a million.


Does she also need to worry about how the dog will survive if North Korea manages to launch a nuke onto the continental USA?  Because that is also a non zero probability and the dog likely would not survive the thousands degree temperature from the fireball.
 
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itsmeagain said:
You're asking too much of a pet to be alone in a van, climate controlled or not, for 16 hours straight so you can peek in every 2 to 4 hours, then get off work completely drained from mitigating risk all day, and the dog wants nothing more than some healthy exercise and fresh air.  By the way, at that point, you have just 8 hours before you need to get to work again.

You're handing your dog a prison sentence, and it's selfishly for your own emotional benefit.

^ This point still stands.



All of the light switches will be easily within reach, and you can visually scan for intruders with a turn of your head.
Just because you want to live in a 300 cubic foot metal box, doesn't mean the dog does.



Don't expect miracles from the summa cum laude group using your van as a school project at the University of Utah. I graduated with cords from FSU, and as you can already tell, it doesn't take much. College students can be very bright, but there's a fundamental lack of real world experience on the table.
 
IGBT said:
... North Korea ...

You're really equating the risk of a budget oriented solar a/c failure with an attack from the DPRK?

It's almost as if we don't have actual dead dogs to serve as examples of this happening.

This isn't theoretical.  This isn't a "What-if"  Your analogy is ridiculous.
 
itsmeagain said:
You're really equating the risk of a budget oriented solar a/c failure with an attack from the DPRK?

It's almost as if we don't have actual dead dogs to serve as examples of this happening.

This isn't theoretical.  This isn't a "What-if"  Your analogy is ridiculous.

No, it isn't.

If you would actually read the post, you would see where I was advocating redundant systems, both a cooling system and some sort of backup system in case the cooling system failed (my doggie door as one example, maybe not practical).   It is simple math that if the probability of one system failing is 1/X and the probability of the other system failing is 1/Y and the two systems are not related (don't use the same battery, etc.) then the probability of both systems failing at the same time is 1 / (X*Y)

So let us say there is a 1 in one million chance that North Korea launches a missile at the USA and it hits near the dog (it might be less than that).   If you design your A/C and backup systems such that the probability of both failing is less than one in one million, then it is totally fair to say your dog is more likely to die from a NK missile strike.

Q.E.D.  (might want to look that up)

edit: This does not mean the dog is safe. There is probably a 1 in 10000 chance a tweaker steals the van and kills the dog.
 
keightley said:
@Scott7022... there is a big difference between a service dog and an emotional support (ESA) dog.  An ESA dog is not a service dog and thus is not protected by the ADA.   A service dog as been individually trained to work or perform one or more tasks for a person with a disability.  Emotional support is not a task.  People who claim their ESA dog is a service dog gives true service dogs to people who really are disabled a bad name.   She may keep me sane. She may turn on the lights and wake me up out of night terrors.  She may search my apartment when I irrationally believe someone is in my apartment after waking from a night terror.  But I do not need any of these services as work.    I am not going to add to the problem by claiming my dog is a service dog just because I want to take her to work.
Ok, I am sorry you didn't find my honest attempt helpful and if that was the extent I would've just silently bowed out of this discussion. I don't know the laws in the USA and so my suggestion was based on the knowledge I did have. Many Canadian veterans suffering from PTSD have these dogs. They do a service similar to the ones you went on to describe. I lend my popularity, writer of military fiction, to help them get traction for their cause in getting these dogs recognized. I don't remember off the top of my head how many provinces, cities, municipalities we have got the service designation for but it is growing everyday. I get PTSD is not visible and it is easy to dismiss a person as not disabled. It has taken a great deal of effort in Canada and in America with the Wounded Warriors to change this discriminatory and ignorance towards our countries heroes. 
http://woundedwarriorhomes.org/service-dogs-ptsd/
I am sorry you thought my usage of the word "tactical" was implying underhanded. The friend thing wasn't an option either? 
I look forward to your build.
 
IGBT said:
... It is simple math .. let us say there is a 1 in one million chance that North Korea launches a missile at the USA and it hits near the dog (it might be less than that).   If you design your A/C and backup systems such that the probability of both failing is less than one in one million, then it is totally fair to say your dog is more likely to die from a NK missile strike.

Let's say?   If?

1 in one million?  You're picking arbitrary numbers based on nothing to prop up your argument. Complete conjecture.
What if I feel it's one in a billion for the attack?  Now how do the numbers skew?

Let's throw another number in there..   How about her inexperience with battery maintenance?
Think that might affect the equation?

I think it was a SternWake post that I read years ago that stated something like..  your first batteries are learning tools, because there is a very high probabily that you'll murder them due to maintenance inexperience.  

I'm just trying to keep the murder rate down here, fellas.


Tell you what..  I can tell that I'll be changing no minds here, and she's definitely going to do it, so I'll stop checking in on this thread as my posts will only serve to turn people off. Hope it all works out, have a great day.
 
125051697.jpg

Granny: WHOOEEE! JED! WHATS all that cotton pickin noise all about ya reckon? Sounds like two old goats about to go to TOWN!


Jed: Oh dont worry granny, them's just the nayberhood tomcats all riled up fighten over Miss Ellie agin...ya know, her and her passel of critters seem to git a fair bit of them boys atttentions....


Jethro: They aint got a lick of sense Uncle Jed! why just look at em, tearing each other up lak that....if they had 6th grade ed-u-ma-cay-shun like me, why, they'd know better, huh Granny?

:p
 

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itsmeagain said:
You're really equating the risk of a budget oriented solar a/c failure with an attack from the DPRK?

It's almost as if we don't have actual dead dogs to serve as examples of this happening.

This isn't theoretical.  This isn't a "What-if"  Your analogy is ridiculous.

you shouldn't leave a dog in your house either because if the AC goes out there the dog will die.
 
bardo said:
you shouldn't leave a dog in your house either because if the AC goes out there the dog will die.

I leave my dog in the house without AC on all the time for 20 hours a day and he's fine.

He growls at me when I come home.

I cant remember his name either.

Oh that reminds me, I haven't fed him this week.

:dodgy:
 
itsmeagain said:
as was so perfectly stated by tx2sturgis:


Don't you guys realize it's a woman you're arguing with?

:p


Couldn't have said it better myself.   He might apologize for it, but I won't.

Pardon me while I channel Lenny Flank for a moment:


I find the blatant sexism to be ......disturbing......
 
My advice also is get a swampcooler (or build one) , you can build one with 2 fans and 2 pumps, so it will be redundant if one fan or pump fails. But I been using swampcoolers for the past 4 years and a fan or pump failure is extremely rare and I run them all day long on the weekends. Just make sure the dog can't reach the power cord to pull it out.

The one I use right now uses a max of 3 amps at full power with 2 fan running. You can run that all day just on battery power alone, with solar you can run multiple swampcoolers at the same time. 
The bigger ones I built with car radiator fans (use about 6 amps) put out the same air as a fantastic fan. Those fans arent as robust as the smaller 120mm fans, but using everyday they will still last you about 1 year. 

With swampcoolers, the misinformation that they don't work is that they arent setup correctly. They need to have outside air to work. In other words the air intake needs to be right next to an open window, or like mine be ducted to the outside. Parked in the hot sun, regardless of outside temp or humidity, the swampcooler will cool you down. It won't cool the whole van but your dog will be smart enough to lay down next to the swampcooler hopefully. And depending on the temperature, the swampcooler might use 2 to 4 liters of water all day long, the small swampcooler I use holds 2 gallons of water and can run all day without refilling. 

The holy grail for real AC use is "lithium batteries" and then figure a way to fully charge them at night. 

Picture of side vents I use for my swampcooler. Without ouside air swampcooler will not work, it will just recirculate warm humid air.
side vents.jpg
small swampcooler
celdek small.jpg
 

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IGBT said:
600 watts per hour when running at 100% duty cycle (continuous).   For 12V that is 600W divided by 12V which is 50 amps per hour of continuous use.

At night if you have it come on half the time, 50% duty cycle you would use half the power per hour or 300 watts per hour.  300 watts divided by 12V is 25 amps per hour.
Sorry to be that guy.

25A makes sense, it is a rate, IOW already has a time element factored in.

At that rate (same continuously, or averaged out) the total static quantity used would be 25 AH per hour, 600AH per 24 hours.

There cannot be any sense in "amps per hour".
 
Building such a system for even moderate reliability, say one failure per decade, would cost at least 5-10x doing it normally.

And likely be too heavy and large to be practical.
 
John61CT said:
Sorry to be that guy.

25A makes sense, it is a rate, IOW already has a time element factored in.

At that rate (same continuously, or averaged out) the total static quantity used would be 25 AH per hour, 600AH per 24 hours.

There cannot be any sense in "amps per hour".

Uhm, yeah dude, you do understand that AH is Amp-Hour or amps per hour?

25A has no time element factored in.   You can have 25 amps flowing in a microsecond when discharging a big capacitor.

If you want to talk about current used over a time period you use amps per hour or AH.   If you want to talk about power over a time period you use watts per hour or watt-hr.

You could also use joules as that incorporates power and time in one unit, a unit representing energy. You would say the air conditioner consumes about 26 megajoules in a 24 hour period.


I guess we need a third party to settle this.   How about wikipedia?

"An ampere hour or amp hour (symbol Ah; also denoted A·h or A h) is a unit of electric charge, having dimensions of electric current multiplied by time, equal to the charge transferred by a steady current of one ampere flowing for one hour"
 
IGBT said:
AH is Amp-Hour or amps per hour?

25A has no time element factored in.   You can have 25 amps flowing in a microsecond when discharging a big capacitor.
Sorry, you're just wrong.

Amps measures electric current, the flow of electric charge. It is already a rate over time, specifically one coulomb per second. 

It makes no sense whatsoever to say "25 amps flowing in a microsecond"


IGBT said:
If you want to talk about current used over a time period you use amps per hour or AH.   If you want to talk about power over a time period you use watts per hour or watt-hr
No, ***per*** hour, is dividing.

IGBT said:
electric current multiplied by time
...
one ampere flowing for one hour
Exactly what I am saying.

WH is static quantity of power, AH if volts are known, total capacity stored in the case of a battery, total power used in the case of a load.

Nothing to do with any time, you can use up a kWh over five seconds or five days.
 
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