I made a sort of Homemade air conditioner today.
It’s based of a powerful fan (150 w, sounds like a large aircraft) and 5 meters of copper tubing in a coil mounted on the fan. Cold water (around 10 degrees Celsius) goes trough the copper tube at around 2 liters per minute.
I also added strips of 0,2 mm thick copper plating to help disperse the heat.
I measured it’s cooling capacity today at around 2000 BTU/H, but I’m going to reserve judgment until tomorrow (it will be around 30 degrees Celsius, just like today).
Tags: air conditioning, fan, home improvement, hot, water
So, how did it work?
Well.. It works at around 2000 BTU/H, so it is making the air cooler, and it is working as a dehumidifier. But based on the size of our living room / kitchen, a AC with around 12’000-15’000 BTU/H is recommended. So the effect by this homemade AC is barely noticeable. Instead I think I’m going to change it so that I get the fan, and make a water cooled bed for the ferrets instead
very cool unfortunately in the summer tap water is often lukewarm rather than icy cold. How much better would this be if the water was hovering around 0 celsius?
At least here in Norway the tap water holds around 5c even in summer. Not sure how much more cooling you would get from the heat exchange if the water was 4-5 degrees colder.
Cooling the water would also require energy, and if you used for example a freezer inside your house that would generate more heat than you could cool with the resulting ice.
If you could get some “free” ice and salt I think you could improve the cooling quite a bit. But I believe the main problem with the one I made was that the surface area of the coil was to small.