Okay technically it’s not an air conditioner it’s an evaporative cooler aka a swamp cooler but definitely provides a level of cooling to your room. I’m not going to lie to you. This is not a 2 minute fix, nor is it for the faint of heart, and finally it’s not the most attractive of contraptions (as was evident from the laughter from my wife and her girlfriend) but it does work.
Quite the sales job Paul so why did you build it? As they say necessity is the mother of invention and we are currently experiencing a heat wave in Seattle where it’s expected that we will break the record for hottest day in our history at 101 degrees. If you know Western Washington State you know that we can take the rain for a year straight no problem but when the mercury heads past 80 degrees the apocalypse is soon to follow. I thought I might take a casual stroll this morning to our local Home Depot to see what kind of cooling options were available. I’m not kidding when I tell you it looked like Whoville on Christmas Day after the Grinch had come. There was a bare area of concrete with a tiny piece of ripped cardboard the only evidence that they carried any form of AC unit or fan. So after a few unsuccessful calls on Craigslist I started scheming to build my own cooling unit.
As you may or may not know evaporative coolers can raise the humidity level in your room hence the name swamp cooler. They are more applicable to less humid areas like my home state of Washington. Odds are if you live in one of the more humid areas you’ve already got an air conditioner that will also act as a dehumidifier.
Components of a Homemade Air Conditioner
Essentially what we’ll be doing is using the power of evaporative cooling and a fan to bring down the temperature in your room. In this case we’ll be using ice water stored in a cooler that will then cycle through a copper loop in front of a box fan. I’ll leave it to you to head to wikipedia to read up on how the process works, it’s not unlike you sweating to cool down. Myself I’ve done enough sweating so I’ll let the air conditioner do it for me. (Note: this is the perfect project to do some scrounging and modify your design and tailor to whatever you may have on hand that would fulfill the same function). Okay for this project you’ll need to assemble the following components:
- A Fan (box fan is ideal)
- A cooler (you could use a Styrofoam cooler or whatever cooler you may have on hand)
- An aquarium pump (or a pond pump, the higher the Gallons Per Hour the more cooling you’ll get mine is a 132 GPH, also be sure your pump has enough power to push the water to the height required to reach the top of your coil)
- Copper coil tubing (the particular type of tubing I used was 3/8″ outer diameter copper coil – 20 feet)
- Vinyl tubing (my pump called for 1/2″ Inner Diameter tubing about 10 feet worth. Hopefully you get better tubing then I did I believe mine is the autokink brand)
- Reducers and fittings to connect your copper coil to your vinyl tubing and ultimately to your pump. If you are unsure a conversation with a hardware store plumbing expert should get you going in the right direction. They were terribly excited about my project so they were glad to help. (I used 2 1/2″ to 3/8″ couplers that were then fitted with 5/8″ threaded couplers and then screwed in two 1/2″ barbed brass adapters to connect the tubing, finally I used 3 1″ hose clamps to firm it all up)
- Wood for making box fan outriggers
- Zip ties for attaching the tubing to your fan
Assemble the Air Conditioner
- First you need to get the copper tubing laid out and get your fittings in place. It was a simple matter of 6 screws holding the protective screen on my box fan so I was able to easily remove it and use it for laying out the copper tubing. Since the copper tubing was already coiled it was a simple matter to gradually and carefully bend it into a spiral. Give yourself some room between each circle for more surface area.
- Attach the fittings to the copper tubing. In my case I needed to solder the joints between the copper tubing and the fittings. You might be able to find some solderless compression type fittings depending on your materials and hardware store availability. That would certainly speed things along and would allow you to avoid having to sweat the fittings together with some form of torch. I prepared all the fittings by sanding the copper tubing and reaming the fittings. I then applied some solder flux to the inside of the fitting and the outside of the tubing. I then proceeded to heat the fitting with my torch until it was hot enough to melt the solder, then I applied the solder. Repeat this for the the other end of the tubing.
Now that the fittings were in place I screwed in the barbed adapters for my vinyl hose after applying some Teflon tape to the threads.- The vinyl tubing slipped over the barbs and then I added two screw-type clamps to the barbs.
- The pump had a special adapter that I inserted into the vinyl tubing and then again used a screw clamp to secure the tubing.
- Now is a good time to test your setup for leaks. Fill your cooler with some water, submerge the pump and connect the tubing to your pump. You then run the other tubing back into the cooler. Fire it up and make sure it works like you expect.
- Now you need to attach the copper tubing to your fan screen. This is a simple process, just plan where you want your tubing to enter and leave
your setup and then start attaching it with the zip ties. I put about 4 for each circle for good holding power. You can also fine tune your coiling as you go. - Once you’re done attaching the tubing to the screen you might want to build your self some outriggers for your fan. Mine was a bit tipsy to begin with so I cut up part of a 2×4 about 16 inches long and screwed to the bottom of my box fan.
- Reattach the fan screen with the original screws
- Now you need to figure out how you are going to get your vinyl tubing into your cooler. You’ll need 3 holes, 1 for the inlet to the copper tubing, 1 for the outlet and 1 for the pump power cord. I had a drill bit the same size as my vinyl tubing so it was a straight forward process, just make sure it’s in the lid or at the top of the cooler, obviously you don’t want water leaking out.
- Okay you should be ready to give her a try.
Operating the Air Conditioner
Alright you’re going want to put your fan and cooler in place, get your tubing cabled appropriately and you’ll want to get some form of pan or something underneath your fan to catch the condensation from the coil. Fill your cooler with enough water to cover the pump and then put in a bunch of ice. I used 3 bags to start. Turn on the pump and adjust the fan speed. Now bask in the coolness of your own evaporative cooler.
This sucker does go through the ice so you’ll want to do something other than buy hundreds of bags of ice. I took a variety of containers, yogurt, cottage cheese, paint buckets, etc and made larger blocks, they seem to last longer. Some alternate methods instead of straight ice are 2 liter bottles filled with salt water. They last longer and are colder than standard ice. You’ll just want to keep the salt water sealed so that you are not cycling it through your setup. Also you could use the freezer blocks that you can reuse. Good luck and stay cool.
Now if this seems a bit much for creating your own AC unit (you might be right). I wholeheartedly recommend Air & Water they have Portable A/C Units Starting at Just $289. I have purchased a dehumidifier from them in the past for my damp workshop and they are awesome. I wouldn’t recommend them otherwise, but the last thing I want to do is distract you from your own project, now get to it!
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Funny, all that is left now is a cooler full of water and you are off to work in your AC office. Think I’ll give her a real test and bring it down stairs where the kids and dogs are trying to lay low. I’ll give a full-fledged report after a sweltering day of abuse. Think we’ll pop out to the store and get a big block of ice….
This post makes me wish I was not in Florida, so I could actually try this advice! Maybe next time I visit my parents in upstate NY I will be able to give it a shot!
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Amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it and I’m from the south….
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Sensational work. If it survives, can you ship it down for the Australian summer season?
Maybe I’m missing something (entirely possible) but wouldn’t the melt rate of the ice be directly proportional to the cooling rate? Hence the larger blocks would melt more slowly, but also provide less cooling power?
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Kosmo I think you are exactly right as our testing goes, there isn’t the crazy amount of condensation that the ice cubes cause. You know I can’t be bothered to research the science behind this, I’m trying the brute force experimental approach.
Justin: if you don’t already have AC you should get some before we head down there to visit, I’m not bringing this thing on the plane, I might be spending some time with homeland security if I did.
Paul–You remind me of the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, all you need are some vines and a couple of coconuts and you can build a car.
You’ll be a valuable person to have around in the Apocalypse! (I’m linking you on my site, just in case)
Back in grad school I lived on the third floor of a three-storey house (essentially in the attic). During the heat waves it could easily be over 90 at bedtime. I had no AC. Instead I would put a bunch of cooler packs on a cookie sheet and blast a fan over them, facing me. It’s the same idea as your set up only took me a lot less time.
Still, as a recovering engineering nerd I love this post.
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Thanks for the love everyone Kevin I love the Professor reference. Thanks for the link!
“Okay technically it’s not an air conditioner it’s an evaporative cooler ”
Ummm, where is the evaporation. This is an Air Conditioner! You are using the ice for you cooler. An Evaporative Cooler uses evaporation (a process steals heat) to cool the water and the air/substrate holding the water (upto 20 deg F). What is a Swamp Cooler?
That is an awesome idea!
It’s very similar to the air-conditioning system we had in the 1950s and early 60s, when I grew up in a company town on the coast of the Persian Gulf.
The company had a central cooling plant. Pipes were laid underground extending from the cooling plant ultimately to each house in the camp. In your house, piping would come up and run through a big fan unit, which would blow air through vents into the structure. Water leaving the cooling plant was very cold. As you can imagine, the further from the plant your house was, the less cool your cooling system! We were on the far end of camp from this lash-up, so we got lukewarm air out of our fan. Better than nothing…but since my mother was a San Francisco girl, you can just imagine how much she enjoyed that. LOL!
Here in AZ, before the advent of air conditioning people used to lay a dampened towel in front of a fan, so that the air blowing through it would feel relatively “cooler” than plain air. Of course, it did raise the humidity level, but in those days the air was much dryer in the low desert than it is now, so it didn’t much matter.
In the early days of AC here, they had something called a “cooling tower.” I’ve seen them in the past, but think there aren’t any left anymore. It was a tall structure, about 15 or 20 feet high and maybe five or six feet across, built of wooden “fins.” Water was pumped to the top of this thing and allowed to trickle down through and over the fins. Evaporation caused the water to cool significantly. Then apparently air was blown over the water — or possibly over piping carrying water or some other compound and cooled by the evaporating water?? — and blown into the house. People say it was as effective as a freon HVAC system, and much cheaper to operate. It would be interesting to see if a modern-day engineering nerd could figure out what these things were and maybe revive and adapt the technology to today’s needs….
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Boy this takes me back.
Freshman year, September humidity in the South, a free ice maker at the end of the hall, and lots of engineering students with too much time on their hands.
Hope it cools down for you guys in the Northwest.
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okay, so the Washington State heat wave is almost over. I can vouch that the homemade air condtioner did, in fact, work. I can’t say that we could realistically use it all day long (unless we had access to a couple dozen blocks of ice), but to cool down a room for a couple of hours it worked well. We used to cool down the bedroom and then a few times to cool down the “rec” room in the late afternoon/evening. It goes through the ice like crazy, but it was desperate around the VL household. I’ve been in Washington my whole life and never experienced more than a week’s worth of 90-100 degree weather. All we have is a box fan and an small window AC unit in our kids’ bedroom (kids sleeping is a top priority here). I’ll admit that my box fan now has copper all over it, but at least it doesn’t tip over quite as easily! Good job, husby!
i have pretty appreciated the data that i have got from your website about the air conditioners its really very priceless . i hope to pass that to my art class since art emphasises creativity i shall really be gratefull with what you have done and am looking for more informations from you ,you can contact me through my e mail address.
thanks faruq shuaib
uganda ,kigumba secondary school
Faruq, if you would like to contact me directly you can go to http://www.fiscalgeek.com/contact and ask whatever questions you want or if you want you can find me on Twitter at @FiscalGeek
Heres a new question for u Paul…approx. how much do u and ur wife make a year off this website with ur Google Ads? Obviously, it must be sufficient enough to keep dreaming up useless stuff like this in the hope that some suckers will read it not realizing that, in doing so, they are making u incrementally richer!!! Bluntly put, the time, energy and expense involved in duplicating ur “experiment” far outweighs the cost of simply buying a cheap portable room a/c unit, such as those actually advertised on ur own site, not to mention the difficulty of keeping enough ice around for that purpose. After all, thats why freon or refrigerant chemicals were invented in the first place, so u could have an self-operating a/c system without any need to keep adding ice!!!!
Just my $.02
Tiger, if you think I am getting rich from Adsense then you’ve bought into the millions of ebooks out there. Honestly speaking I’m a geek. I would have made this whether or not i ran a blog that made a few bucks a month, it about covers my hosting fees fyi. I never said this was particulary practical, I just wanted to document my own crazy experiment. Curious as to what actually drew you here in the first place if you weren’t interested in such things yourself. Thank you for commenting nonetheless.
@Paul. I’m going to assume you’re not from Seattle, otherwise you would understand that buying a 250$ AC unit that one MIGHT use 3 days out of the year is a ridiculous suggestion. Also, wow, bitter much?
Arg, I meant @Tiger. Rant fail.
I was going to say MaliceAlice I hope I don’t come off as all bitter, sarcastic yes, but bitter no. You bet I’m a native but again I’m assuming you were targettting Tiger. I just might have paid $250 for an AC unit during the heat, I don’t cope well with that. Snow great, 95+ no thanks.
The whole set up is quite interesting and creative, to boot. I’ve seen things that are essentially not much different than this displayed as art. Paul, are you a closet artist?
I enjoy seeing people trying to solve problems in creative ways. With all the available consumer goods, often we buy solutions that are way beyond what we really need, and a lot less fun. You just can’t beat the pride of making something!
I have been accused of many things but a closet artist is not one of them. Thank you for the kind words, it was fun to make entirely unpractical in the long run but fun nonetheless. It’s resourcefulness I value above frugality, cheapness, whatever you might want to call it. Thanks for reading and hope you check back often or subscribe. I promise this won’t be my last, Christmas is coming after all and I’ve got all sorts of crazy ideas in mind.
I have no idea how I stumbled upon your site but keep up the good work! Highly entertaining! I built a lens for one of my cameras last month out of a plunger (can’t take credit for the idea, found it of course on the net) and some basic home depot odds and ends. So much fun. Now I know that 50% of the stuff that I make at home are just for fun but there have been those few items that work just as well as their very expensive counterparts and I love using when I’m on a shoot. Yes, it would have been a lot easier in many cases to run out and just purchase what I needed and be done with it BUT I would not have been able to make it myself! It’s all about the fun….guess you just have to find entertainment in challenging your own creativity and ability. Great ideas!
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Swamp coolers are popular here in the desert Southwest. Though usually they don’t cool the water first, and don’t work too well when it is humid outside. However, cooling the water, as you have done, will mitigate this problem. A nice solution for a few days of heat!
This is a great little project, Paul! I’d love to see you mod this system into a swamp cooler, just by building a towel on a conveyor belt of sorts and having it dip into the cooler filled with water. Something I’ve been thinking of doing in my spare time, as well. People need to realize it’s not necessarily the functionality or overall efficiency of the end result, but the fun of taking on the project!
can i use coolant or antifreeze like for cars instead of water?
I would definitely not. You don’t want Ethylene Glycol flowing around in your house unless it’s in some form of closed system which this is definitely not. I also couldn’t tell you how the pump would react to that.
Okay. So it’s been a while since you lasted posted, Paul. This reminds me of a design in college that I came up with. I just mounted a bucket above my window for the ice and had the cold water drip down a slotted towel in front of a fan into another bucket. I would dump the water from the lower bucket into the upper for a refresh once a night. I was stuck in a Texas dorm during a remodel in August (preseason), so a few degrees made my dorm room very popular. Now living in Mexico where electricity is expensive and unreliable with high drain, I’m thinking about using a similar design.
So, my question is: any new info before I make this? Have you ever tried Peltier Cells?
Thanks
Tommy
Hey Tommy. I really didn’t do much more experimenting past this first model. Our weather quickly cooled down, Seattle’s only hot for a bit. If you’re looking for a longer term practical solution I don’t think mine’s the answer. For short bursts works fine. No I haven’t dealt with Peltier Cells at all. If you do go a homegrown route shoot me a picture I’ll throw it up as a readers ride so to speak
.
Paul – This is hilarious and awesome! Living in SF, the average temperature here is 64 degrees and gets down to about 50 on average during the winter. It only gets up to 80 like 1 month a year MAYBE, so I haven’t had the pleasure to use AC.
Maybe I can create something like this back home in Honolulu!
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Interesting experiment. Not to be a wet blanket or dampen your creative spirit; I’ll offer a few thoughts. It is NOT an evaporative cooler. What is….it’s a homemade chiller. Evaporative coolers use the heat absorbing affect of water evaporating to cool the air and do not work in humid areas. Commercial chillers use mechanical refrigeration to cool the water; you’re using ice. Ice created from salt water is not colder than fresh water ice. Both are the temperature of the freezer they came out of, typically 0 to 5 degrees F. I think there may be a tendency to think this is “free” cooling; don’t forget there is a very real energy cost to freeze the ice. I would have to assume it costs much more to operate due to the inherent inefficiency of a home made system. You can by a 5,000 btu window unit for $89.00. and as a matter of comparison( I’ll round up a bit for convenience) a 6,000 btu window unit, a half ton unit, would be equivalent to melting 42 pounds of ice per hour. A ton of cooling is equal to 2000 pounds of ice melting in 24 hours. 2000 divided by 24 equals 83.3; cut it in half you get 41.65 pounds. A two bag of ice goes for about $1.85 in New Jersey. That’s about $38.00 an hour to run this thing.
A fun experiment to be sure. But that’s all it is. Support your local Wal Mart…..buy an air conditioner.
Very interesting project. I suppose it is a very cheap way of creating cool air in your home, however, if you dont be carefull things can go wrong. I personally would buy one of the new generation heat pumps that are available from some great manufacturers. Not only are they alot cheaper than they used to be, they are also ver energy efficient and will almost certainly help to reduce your energy bills.
Wow. Seems like alot of time and energy to make the thing and then alot of ice to run it. But it did pass the wife test! Kudos Paul. Cool idea.
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wow its simple i like it
Just a crazy thought if not looking to make this portable. What about the idea of digging down several feet and use the geo-thermal properties of a constant cooler temperature to circulate the water? could make for lessening the need to chill water! Or better yet, using well water?
I like the way you think Gary. I’m not on a well so that’s not an option but I know others have used that exact method.