My room, y’see, is a loft conversion. It’s the only double-glazed room in an old Victorian town house, and the ceiling above it is quite well insulated. This means that, in the summer, it gets just a little bit warm. Today, windows open and fan blowing, it was still too hot so I finally snapped and decided to do something about it. I drove over to B&Q in the Trafford Centre and bought a length of pre-coiled copper tubing, 4m of rubber tubing and several hundred cable ties. I then went to ASDA and sought out a plastic cool-box (I had intended to buy some freezer blocks too, but I couldn’t find any)

I attached the copper piping to the front of my fan using the cable-ties, and then connected the rubber tubing to the ends of the copper pipe. I filled the coolbox with icy water, positioned a receiving bucket lower down than the cool box, turned on the fan and started the sipon going. Bingo! Home made air-conditioning.

I wish I could say the whole thing had been a roaring success and that my room was now lovely and icy cool. Sadly, so far I’ve not really bean able to detect a real difference. However, the whole thing does look very cool, so it’s not all bad 🙂

Pictures just here.

EDIT: I’ve added flow control (uh… an adjustable kink in the output pipe) now – restricting the flow seems to have improved the efficiency somewhat. There’s now a noticable difference in temperature (to the touch) between the input pipe and the output. Using a cooking thermometer, I reckon I’ve got about 10°F difference between the two, which is alright. I’ve closed the windows in my room and left it going to see whether it’s capable of making the room bearable. So far, it’s not too bad.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.