Thanks for the tip! Does it matter if I use salt or anything to perserve the ice?
Salt won’t preserve the ice, but if before hand you put salted water in your freezer, you’ll be able to get the temp of the water below 32 degrees. Whereas ice water (as described above) will bottom out at 32 degrees becuase ice (made from normal tap water) will freeze at 32 and not get any colder.
(I hope I’m remembering this correctly)
I just wanted to point out on the off chance anyone is thinking of attempting something like this at home that you would want REALLY GOOD VENTILATION in the room that contained all this dry ice. Otherwise the buildup of CO2 as the dry ice sublimated could be quite dangerous.
A cold artic one might be better.
I’ve seen a/c’s for sale less then $100, and someone selling used ones for $25 each (though I suspect they were stolen out of other people’s windows. But I suspect that you are more concerned about the power costs, and the temptation to use it at other times (and increase your power bill)
Start saving for an air conditioner.
I don’t really understand. Maybe Air conditioners are really expensive outside of the US? I just went to Circuit City here in New York, and found an unboxed model for 60 dollars. Sure it was a lowly 5050 BTU unit, but another one around 8000 was selling for 79. There is the cost of running it of course, but still…
Sorry, you aren’t.
Normal ice can get all the way down to absolute zero.
If you put a box fan in the window where it draws only outside air, it will do a wonderful job of bringing the temp down to near ambient. When my A/C went out here in LA, I used that set up for 2 summers until I broke down and fixed the A/C.
A block of ice in front of the fan that brings air IN will be nice, and not very expensive. Be sure to put it in a shallow metal basin.
A 'swamp cooler" might be a lot cheaper out there.
The problem with swamp coolers, as I understand it, is that in high humidity situations they do not work. All they really do is add more moisture to the air making it muggier. They are best suited to dry climes like Arizona or the Sahara.
Well it may be able to approach absolute zero but might change into some boses-einstien matter before it gets there.
A mixture of ice and liquid water won’t really go below 32 till all the liquid is gone, but this is really for the interface between solid and liquid.
Ice can be any temperature below 0 C, but I’m not sure that it is “normal” ice at extreme lows. There might possibly be a change in the structure. Anybody know for sure?
I guess I missed the post just ahead of mine.
This is a stupid idea I thought of a while ago during a heat wave. It should work as an improvised air conditioner… But I never bothered trying it, because we have A/C and I’m just too damn lazy. I’ve heard of
Take your fan, put it somewhere decently high.
Go find some small copper tubing… about 5-10 feet of it. (Plumbing supply)
Then get two big garbage cans. (Unused…)
Put them under the fan, but put one up high, like on a table or some books. You want this one to be plenty high. Place the other one beside it on the floor.
Wrap the copper tubing all around the fan, so that when you turn it on, all the fan, you have as much air as possible blowing over the tubing.
Now fill the elevated garbage can with as much ice and water as you can. Put one end of the tubing in to this ice water (make sure it’s at the bottom)
Suck on the remaining end of the tube to start syphoning, when it starts flowing, stick it down in to the can. (This will be difficult, depending on the tube’s diameter and length.)
So now, you should have cold water flowing out of the elevated can, through the tubing, which is wrapped around the fan (so the air coming off the fan is being cooled), and being dumped in to the lower garbage can. When the top can is empty, you can reuse the water from the second can, because it should still be pretty cool. This should be decently efficent, and provided you already have the fan, quite cheap.
Guess if you had a water-pump handy, like say off a liquid-cooled PC, you could hook that in, and do without the crazy-looking syphon system, and it would work just as well (if not better). And you’d only need one reservoir for the icewater.
Have fun. Good luck.
Apparently you weren’t the first person to think of this…
http://mirror.lerfjhax.com/www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~gmilburn/ac/
Whoa. Guess so.
Even in the same city… I guess I’d seen it somewhere and forgotten. Hate it when stuff like that happens.
[Insert Peterman from Seinfeld saying “It’s a Ziggy! To the archive!” here]