Chill Out This Summer with A Homemade Air Conditioner

[morphector]

If I build it and put a hot water gallon jug can we call that a heat pump?

[Zooomer]

Reminds me of the Tesla forums where a guy wanted to mount a wind turbine on his car to recharge the battery while he drove down the highway.

[philb]

Zoomer, that's completely doable, with only a few minor? losses.

[NiHaoMike]

Originally Posted by Zooomer

Reminds me of the Tesla forums where a guy wanted to mount a wind turbine on his car to recharge the battery while he drove down the highway.

That's actually theoretically possible if there's wind to extract energy from. Just not very practical.
Sailing faster than the wind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[ICanHas]

Originally Posted by philb

Zoomer, that's completely doable, with only a few minor? losses.

You'll take a huge hit on gas mileage. Aerodynamic drag is the biggest drag on cars. What type of output are we talking about here?

If it's in the 100W or so level, the best way is just to use use the power from the car.

If it's at a higher power, a specialized alternator works good.

[ICanHas]

Originally Posted by Daox

An interesting idea. However, I wouldn't imagine its all that cost effective. Why not buy a window shaker off craigslist for $50?

Chill Out This Summer with A Homemade Air Conditioner

It would be a better start if you use the ice machine outside, but just like a dehumidifier, if the condenser rejection is indoors, its a net heat gain.

The concept is available commercially as ice bank. It works way better for cooling than heating since storage density is a lot higher. The heat exchanger to make and use the ice effectively is the biggest challenge since you can't pump around solid ice. You can pump slush around, but maintaining the percentage of slush as high as possible without becoming not pumpable is tough.

It takes 288K BTU of enthalpy to freeze or thaw a ton of ice.
A residential system runs at about half load or less so 3 ton system may get 10 hours of runtime a day or 360K BTU of cooling per day.

First, you'd need a big ice maker that dumps ice down the chute into an insulated and sealed dumpster or something. From there you gravity feed water like its a bed of rocks and pump the ~32F water through fan coil units. Getting enough of ice to melt to satisfy the load could be difficult.

Running the evaporator at about 20F lowers efficiency, but when you can do it at night using off peak power and lower ambient, its possible to get more MBTU per dollar of utility. It maybe even possible to use the radiant cooling effect of night sky with a very big black condenser panel or spray condensate water on radiant panel to use evaporative and radiant combination.

There's a possibility that you can use the hybrid airflow and radiant condenser as a heat pipe during the day by pumping liquid refrigerant into the radiant panel so that it absorbs the sunlight vaporizing the refrigerant which is then dumped into the ambient by the air cooled portion of the condenser so you can keep the roof cool and reduce solar gain.

Probably doable with some solenoids, pipes, timers, and an ice machine with 8,000 lbs/day capacity so it can make the 2,000 to 2,500 lbs of ice needed for the entire day's cooling need during off peak while its still cool outside.

Possible that efficiency is even better using a high performance zeotropic F-gas blends made from CFCs 11, 12, 113 , 114, 115 and HCFC 22.