Affordable off-grid air conditioning

[Ralph Day]

Hi
This is for laughs and giggles. Possible use would be in a jail cell.

http://safetycentral.com/coboxpobaopr.html

Ralph

[Rob Beckers]

Good one! :nuts:
I especially like the "great for hurricanes" part. Better have a large stack of batteries as well...

-RoB-

[Dave Turpin]

And ice. Since it only works by melting ice. Something that might be hard to find during a hurricane.

[Dale Sheler]

LOL, and guess what? They will actually sell some of those things! You could save 120 bux and just buy a two dollar bag of ice and just put it on your head.

[Joe Blake]

I bought one of these a couple of years ago

http://www.oo.com.au/prod/HMVBF10A/1b.jpg

except that it came with two ice bottles that were inserted just behind the fan blades inside the box. It cooled the air (a degree or two) but was even more effective when an absorbent paper kitchen wipe was soaked in water and draped over the back.

The beauty is it only drew 40 watts at maximum speed and the ice was made in a 12volt/24 volt/240 volt camping freezer, which drew about 25 watts. So I could run them both off my free standing photovoltaic panels via a small inverter.

Not exactly the thing one would carry on the bicycle, but I guess if all else failed, I could keep a little bit cool in an emergency.

However, our weather here has been chronically hot, with about 20 consecutive days with the maximum temp over 38 degrees C (100 degrees F) and minima over 20 degrees C, so this would have been fairly useless.

However, yesterday we had a big storm come from the north, dumping just over 1 inch of rain in about 30 minutes, dropping the temperature from 42 to 24 in about an hour. But the rain was only on a track about 10 km wide, and the city itself was still in the low 30's last night, with no rain. Amazing. Heaps of damage to houses etc in the storm path.

Luckily my 1600 watts of rooftop PV is sufficient to run a "wheel about" refrigerated air cooler with (occasional) capacity to spare, so as long as the cooler has been running, the internal house temperature doesn't get above 30 degrees.

Joe