I came across this youtube video where you can make a home made air conditioner for $8, I plan to put it in my bedroom but I live in a very muggy and humid area during the summer and I am wondering if it will raise the humidity level in my bedroom more then a normal window air conditioner? Here is the video $8 Homemade Air Conditioner - Works Flawlessly! - YouTube
As long as the ice is inside the bottles, it will tend to reduce the humidity of the bedroom air. But, it’s basically $8 worth of AC, so don’t expect too much from it.
It looks to me like it wouldn’t raise the humidity (the way a swamp cooler would) as long as you really do use sealed containers of ice, but neither would it lower the humidity, which is part of what a real air conditioner does.
I’m also not sure how much of an improvement it is over just directly blowing a fan over a sealed bottle/jug of ice.
ETA: On second thought, and after reading beowulff’s response, it may actually reduce the humidity a bit (by the amount of whatever condensation ends up inside the cooler); but, like beowulff said, I wouldn’t expect too much.
It will decrease the humidity of the air until the cooler fills up with condensate. Then it will suddenly increase the humidity of your floor.
Wait… since when does a normal window a/c unit raise the humidity of a room?
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Normal air conditioners reduce the humidity, not increase it.
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Swamp coolers raise the humidity.
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Househould Hacker is the same idiot who made things like the charge your iphone with an onion video. He basically likes to post complete crap just to see who will believe it. Some people need a hobby, I guess.
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There is no “cooling” in this air conditioner. Your refrigerator/freezer will pump heat out of the bottles and into your kitchen. Then you’ll place this $8 AC unit in whatever room you want to cool, and it will remove the heat from the air and will put it back into the bottles. Overall, you’ll pump more heat into the kitchen than you’ll pull out of the room you are cooling, so overall this will make your house or apartment hotter.
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Even though it will make your overall house/apartment hotter, it will cool the room you put the AC unit in. Slightly. Very slightly. The air coming out of the AC unit will be cool, as demonstrated.
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How slightly? A typical 8x8 room needs about 3,000 BTU to cool it. Taking a few wild guesses, I’m putting this $8 AC unit at probably somewhere between 50 and 100 BTU. Constantly swapping out water bottles for new ones from your freezer will probably add about 100 to 200 BTU of heat to your kitchen.
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Overall, the increased cost of your electric bill will far outweigh the cost of this $8 crap cooler.
Like all Household Hacker videos, a complete waste of time.
Its impossible to raise the level of humidity (much)… when its warm and muggy , thats because the air is already at 100% relative humidity…
Your confusion comes from mixing up two types of coolers. 1.Air conditioners which work with a heat pump (must pump the heat outside somehow) or 2. Evaporation cooler – does not pump air outside.
High humidity prevents evaporation coolers working of course, so don’t go there.
Without evaporation to take away heat, you need to make use of a heat pump system… and so you do with ice… , the ice is merely the result of a heat pump (your freezer). You’ve made the heat leave the water during the night when you don’t notice it… it went into the room …
The container the ice is in will condense water from the air and make your window sill wet.
Any time you lower the temperature of the very humid air, the water drops out of it… so it will condense and run onto your window sill, or drop out of the tube at the bottom of heat pump air conditioners.
Summary: the only air conditioner that will work will REDUCE the humidity of the air.
People make these for airplanes all the time. It’s great for the 15 minutes spent on the ground getting to the end of the runway. but it’s not going to do much for a room. Think in terms of transferring the heat of 1000 cubic feet across 1 cubic foot of ice.
In a real emergency you could run a hose under the sheets and cool just a person (in bed) by using a very small fan. that would limit the transfer of heat to a very small area.
While i can agree to what you said, the prices of tiny window units nowadays (at least in some places, in the usa) might beat the cost of doing what you describe.
I could see rigging up something like this for my spouse when it gets really hot in his workshop. Not to cool the workshop but placed next to him to keep him from overheating.
I could also see a situation where someone has no air conditioning and nearly no money - set it up next to your bed at night it might make sleeping a bit easier.
At best you get very, very localized cooling. The applications are quite limited.
Someone mentioned one of these devices in another thread and I made very similar points here and here.
As I mentioned in that thread, what you’re making isn’t so much of an AC as it is a dehumidifier. To solve that, you need to:
- add a drain to the bucket so the condensation doesn’t evaporate and end up back in the room, even just putting a few small holes in the bottom and setting the entire contraption on something to catch the water.
2)refreeze the water outside so you’re not pumping the heat right back into your house
Bonus)find the most efficient circulating fan you can. A fast moving fan will help you feel cooler, but the fan motor gets first crack and the cool air, so the hotter the fan gets the less cool air you get and the faster the ice melts.
These and what ECG said are ‘facts’, I’m curious as to what the opinions are in practice. But, in the end, you’re probably better off just giving in and turning on the AC, even if it’s just for a little while to cool the house down and getting rid of the humidity. Knocking the humidity down 10 or 15% (from, say, 60 to 50%) is going to go a long way in making you feel way cooler.
So would it condense on the drywall too? I don’t want mold. Also with a window mounted air conditioner you are lowering the humidity as well, so wouldn’t you have condensation on your windows too?
The condensation will be inside the cooler.
You’ll be fine unless you run it backwards…
A window-mounted A/C cools the air. That lowers the humidity, because in order to cool the air, the warm, humid air must pass over the very cold coils. The moisture in the air condenses out on the coils. The windows of the room are going to be much warmer than the air, so they won’t get condensation on them (on the inside - they might on the outside, where the glass will be colder than the outside air).
The only reason anything would condense on the drywall is if you make the drywall cold, like, if you have the thing pointed at the drywall. You’ll notice something like this if you’re driving on a muggy day and have one of your AC vents pointed at a window. You’ll see that window fog up.
This type of “AC” doesn’t really have a backwards or forwards. It really doesn’t matter if you blow air into the box and out the pipes or suck it in through the pipes and blow it out through the fan. It’s going to do the same thing. The pipes are just there to direct the air towards you. That has the added effect of making you feel cooler. But, yes, the condensation is going to happen inside the cooler on whatever frozen things you put in there.
Just to add one more thing to this. On a window AC, the evaporator coils (the ones that get cold), are inside your room, they condense the moisture in the room which drips to a pan, flows under everything and leaks out the back of the unit.
FWIW, it’s considerably cheaper than this one, which is the same thing but nicer looking and intended for use in small airplanes. (Add $105 for the larger model, or subtract $30 for the smaller one.)
But then you have to buy a plane to put it in and that turns into a whole hobby. Then the OP will wish they took my advice to just flip the [real] AC on for a little while.
Yeah, I know. I have an A-7E ejection seat. I still need to get the rest of the plane.