I don't have AC but my apartment lease covers unlimited water usage and the water is very cold. How can I best use this to cool my home?
I don't have AC but my apartment lease covers unlimited water usage and the water is very cold. How can I best use this to cool my home?
I've searched around and mostly seen people create custom radiator builds attached to their water supply, but that's beyond my skill level and I'm not sure if linking it directly to the water supply via piping would violate the lease or not. Are there any solutions a bit more DIY that I could take advantage of?
Almost no matter how you do it, it's going to be a horrible waste of good drinking water to try to extract cooling from the temperature of the water. If you are in a dry climate, make a DIY swamp cooler. Otherwise shell out for a small AC unit.
Also; using your free lease-included water for stuff like that, is probably the quickest way to no longer have water included in your lease...
So if
- Using water this way is a waste of water
- Using water this way will end the policy that permits this use case
Does that mean the fastest way to end the waste is to go ahead with this plan?
Only if that was your sole use of said water otherwise you're just going to pay more for all the water you'd normally use.
A swamp cooler would potentially be a solution; those could be used in conjunction with your ready access to water in order to keep your home cool! Sadly, this is not great for areas of the world which already have high levels of humidity in the air. I don't know if it would work well for you based on not knowing your climate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler
Swamp coolers only really work if humidity is low. If it’s already humid then any drop in temperature is negated by the increased humidity.
Honestly I get the most “cooling” by putting a dehumidifier in front of my fan. Dry air will feel a lot cooler than super humid air.
Get a kiddie pool, fill it, soak your feet in it
One of the best feelings in my life was returning to camp, consolidating coolers, and plunging my feet into the water in the leftover water in one of the coolers.
One time I took some instant release adderall and some MDMA and played Burnout Revenge on my friend’s playstation.
Wouldn't be too difficult to jerryrig a system which does that but because it's going to be a huge waste of water I feel morally obligated to not even give you any ideas. Invest in a split AC system instead. They make ones for windows as well.
Is there a reason why you can't get an air conditioner? There's tons of valid reasons why it wouldn't be an option, I'm just wondering what your situation is. Because nothing is ever gonna work anywhere close to as good as an air conditioner. If you can afford even the smallest air conditioner then it'll beat every single diy method in most situations
Take a cold bath?
Bottle it, sell it for profit, use the profits to buy a better place to live?
Or buy ice
As a kid I used tubes, a box fan, a cooler, and bucket with a siphon to cool me down.
You could easily set that up with just the water from a sink and some hardware store parts.
Search for 'diy fan cooling tub copper coils' as a start.
As an example: Homemade AC - The "Copper Coil" Air Cooler! - (Simple "Box Fan ...
Copper coils have the best thermal efficiency, but plastic tubing would also work.
Get an actual radiator instead of making coils and attach a box fan to it. It's something I was always going to do but never got around to.
Also give consideration to saving at least some of the water to use as "gray water". If you're not familiar with that, it means water you can use for many things but not for eating or drinking.
Pretty sure this guy is an engeneer.
Feasible if you found one at a junk yard, but copper tubing is $20-30 and some fittings makes a tubing idea sub-$100 probably. An AC is about $300, a new radiator without fittings starts at $70 and are built for cars not box fans so it might be more challenging to get to work.
With that being said, environmental, energy, and other contextual concerns might out weigh the cost. A mini-split heat pump is probably the most sane thing to actually install, but that's a big ask.
Why not buy a portable AC?
Grossly inefficient.
But feel great when you're in front of it.
Better than getting toasted in the heat? Lmao
Start a car detailing business. Use the water to wash the cars.
Use the money from new, low-overhead business to do anything you want.
- Find a pair of vehicle radiators that are as close to a box fan in size as possible.
- Zip tie them to either side of the box fan. As the fan blows: it will draw air in through the “second radiator” and blow it out through the “first radiator”.
- Hook the out of the first radiator to the in of the second using flexible hoses. Cheap garden hoses might even fit.
- Hook other hoses to the in of the first radiator and the out of the second.
- Run water on through the first radiator, out of the second. This makes the most efficient heat transfer possible.
This is exactly what I was going to suggest. Use the water to cool the radiators, and use fans to push hot air through the cool radiators, cooling the air in the process.
This is basically what AC does on a much larger scale. It uses refrigerants, a compressor, and some basic physics to cool the radiators, but it’s still the same basic concept.
I don't think a box fan could cool one entire 20x20in automotive radiator, let alone two.
fan -> plenum -> radiator would probably work best. The plenum only needs to be a few inches long, it's just to direct the entire square of the fan over the entire square of the radiator. Cardboard and caulk would work.
It's a low efficiency heat exchanger.
we're literally on the precipice of water wars
Gut an AC from the dump. Replace the condenser with a tube in tube heat exchanger, using your cold water as a heat sink. Brazed plate HX if you're feeling rich. Replace the cap tube with a TXV for better load tracking. Recharge with R290.
T Sure this is even further beyond your skill level but is the best possible way to use a source of cold to chill your apartment. You can locate it anywhere convenient, not just by the window. You could likely get a COP over 5 and be discharging the water in a fairly modest stream at around 30-40C.
If the actual problem is that you yourself are too hot, cool yourself instead. A trick I've picked up working in kitchens, where it's very fucking hot indeed, is to wet your nape and forearms regularly. You can wear a wet hat too. Doesn't really take advantage of the unlimited water but it gets you there.
Depending on you humidity, you could look into building a swamp-cooler. Sounds weird but works pretty great.
Could you get a fountain?
Specially if it spreads the water like rain, it'll help cool the air around, you'd just have to change the water every so often.If where you live is not very humid you could investigate into swamp coolers.
It baffles me that Walmart sells Arctic Breeze in Ohio.
I don't know how big your apartment is but why not a window unit. It's probably the most efficient way to cook your apartment down short of redesigning the building.
These are very expensive to run. They can add upwards of $200 to your electric bill.
It's either that or maintain a swamp cooler that won't work on humid days and can cause respiratory infection if not cleaned properly. A renters options are very limited and a window unit is a pretty good compromise if you don't want to loose a deposit.
If you want to sit in a sweltering room during a 100° day, no one is stopping you. I've heard it's a pretty typical thing for Europeans anyway. I'm not judging, the guy wants to cool the room down.
If you have a way of getting unlimited free ice (unlimited free cold water also works), you can run it through a radiator. Get a radiator of any kind, get a water pump and find a way to run the water in the bucket through the radiator. Put the radiator in front of a fan. As long as there is cold water running through the radiator, it will produce at least some cooling. Just don't think you can create ice in the same room you're trying to cool, a fridge generates more heat than the cold it produces. This barely works whenever I have to do it but it is better than nothing and it can make a difference if you just need the room to be a little cooler so you can sleep.
The entire problem with this is that ice or cold water is a really shit form of cooling and the only thing that's any better is.. Compressor a/c. Peltier plates look good on paper but once you hook them up to a heat transfer system, you'd be surprised how useless 500 watts worth of peltiers are for transferring heat. Swamp coolers only work on the desert. Ammonium nitrate can generate cold when it gets dissolved into water but the only way to make a sustained cooling system out of that involves boiling the water to get the ammonium nitrate back so you can reuse it so fuck that.
Alternatively, scientists invented some kind of metal that gets cold when you bend it but good luck figuring out how to make that.
Wouldn't the radiator form condensation, and make a mess?
Water does condensate on the radiator but not enough to make a mess, at least when I do it. Emptying the water and replacing it with fresh ice so it will be cold again is the part that makes a mess, so lay down towels if that is a concern.
Just get a window AC if you have the right type of windows. Otherwise, a dual hose portable heat pump from costco or other reputable source.
Spray water in front of a fan. Way faster than forcing heat exchange through air to metal.
The reason it works on Winter is that the temperature difference is about 50C or more. On a hot 35C day it would mean the radiator is at most at -15C.. And that's why you'll prefer to stand in front of the fridge that has 6C than a radiator that may run at best 15C water inside.
You could try and make a DIY swamp cooler? There's lots of instructions online for how to make them, and basically the only consumable is water. The only caveat is that they work by drawing hot air in from an open window to evaporate water, so it's not very effective in high humidity or low temperatures.
Just run your shower with cold water. Open a window on the otherwise of the house and get a fan to blow air from the bathroom to the open window.
As the water turns from liquid to gas it absorbs heat. As long as it doesn’t get too humid it should feel cool.
I've done this!
Turn the shower on just high enough to get a good mist going then put a box fan on high as close as possible pointing out of the bathroom.
Ice machine + box fan
Put ice in a container with a large surface area, aim the fan at it. Empty the container when fully melted. Put ice in all your drinks