air conditioning

25 Articles

Is This The Oldest Open Source HVAC Project In Existence?

August 22, 2022 by 19 Comments

Homebrew HVAC systems are one of those projects that take such a big investment of time, effort and money that you’ve got to be a really dedicated (ideally home-owning) hacker with a wide variety of multidisciplinary skills to pull off an implementation that can work in reality. One such HVAC hacker is [Vadim Tkachenko] with his multi-zone Home Climate Control (HCC) project that we covered first back in 2007. We now have rare opportunity to look at the improvements fifteen years of part-time development can produce, when a project is used all day, all year round in their own home. At the start, things were simple, just opening and closing ventilators with none of those modern MQTT-driven cloud computing stuff. Continue reading “Is This The Oldest Open Source HVAC Project In Existence?” →

The Benefits Of Displacement Ventilation

July 7, 2022 by 27 Comments

The world has been shaken to its core by a respiratory virus pandemic. Humanity has been raiding the toolbox for every possible weapon in the fight, whether that be masks, vaccinations, or advanced antiviral treatments.

As far as medicine has come in tackling COVID-19 in the past two years, the ultimate solution would be to cut the number of people exposed to the pathogen in the first place. Improving our ventilation methods may just be a great way to cut down on the spread. After all, it’s what they did in the wake of the Spanish Flu.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Air Conditioning

October 27, 2021 by 41 Comments

I’m always amazed that technology can totally wipe out industries. Sure, some people make a living making horseshoes, for example, but the demand for them is way down compared to what it would have been when horses were the normal mode of transportation. But even so, people still make horseshoes. But think about the ice harvesting business. Never heard of it? Turns out, before refrigeration, there was a huge business of moving ice from where it naturally occurred to other places and storing it, usually underground with a lot of insulation. As far as I know, that business — including the neighborhood ice man — is totally gone now except for some historical exhibitions. We take refrigeration and air conditioning for granted, but it hasn’t been that long ago that ice was a luxury and your own reprieve from the heat was a fan.

Early Cooling

The story starts a little earlier than you might expect. In the 1840s, physician John Gorrie was concerned about “the evils of high temperature.” His hospital in Florida imported ice using the aforementioned ice trade and it wasn’t cheap nor was it very effective.

Undeterred, he developed a machine that used a horse, a waterwheel, steam, or wind power to drive a compressor to create ice. He got a patent in 1851 but it failed to catch on before his financial backer died. In fact, Oliver Evans had the idea in 1805 but never built a working machine. Jacob Perkins patented the first compression cooler in 1834, again with little practical use.

When U.S. President Garfield was shot, Navy engineers built a cooling box using cloths soaked in ice water to cool the president’s hospital room by 20 degrees. Since the mortally wounded president survived 80 days after the shooting, we presume he appreciated the comfort.

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Even With AC, Hazmat Suit Isn’t Really Cool

June 21, 2021 by 30 Comments

We’ll admit that the coolness factor of an air conditioned faux spacesuit made out of a hazmat suit will largely depend on where you wear it. At your next chess club meeting, maybe a hit. On a blind date, probably not. [Saveitforparts] apparently doesn’t mind and the combination of very warm weather and the donation of an expired hazmat suit, spurred his imagination as you can see in the video below.

A battery pack, a blower, and a box full of frozen water bottles completes the ensemble. Wireless temperature sensors show the outside temperature as well as temperature inside different parts of the suit. Does it work? We guess it must, but the roar of the fan is deafening and we have doubts about the frozen water cooling system. On the other hand, if you’re shooting a low budget science fiction thriller, this might be just the thing.

Even [Saveitforparts] admits this isn’t really practical and, as we suspected, he decided to get out of it as the condensing water started to run down his legs. Turns out astronauts and tank drivers use an undergarment made with small tubes of flowing water to stay cool.

This project reminded us of the positive pressure suit we saw a bit ago. Not to mention the one that went full body.

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Air Extractor Automatically Gives AC A Boost

June 3, 2021 by 39 Comments

Portable air conditioning units are a great way to cool off a space during the hot summer months, but they require some place to blow the heat they’ve removed from your room. [VincentMakes] got a portable AC unit for his home, but he found that the place he wanted to put it was too far from the only window he could use to dump the hot air. Having too long of a duct on the hot air exhaust increases the back pressure on the fan which could cause it to prematurely fail, so [Vincent] used an extractor fan to automatically give is AC unit’s exhaust a boost on its way to the window.

Because his AC can operate at low, medium, and high speeds, he chose an extractor fan that also supported multiple speeds and took care to match the airflow of the AC and extractor fan to avoid putting too much strain on either fan. He designed a system to automatically set the speed of the boosting fan to match that of the AC using a Hall effect current sensor to measure the AC unit’s power draw and an Arduino Nano for control. A custom PCB interfaces the Nano to the Hall Sensor and control relays, and we have to applaud [Vincent] for keeping the +5V DC and 230V AC far, far away from each other. In addition to this fine electronics work, [Vincent] also built an enclosure for the fan controller that allows the fan to be mounted on top at an angle, which helps avoid having hard bends in the exhaust duct.

If this has you thinking about smart air conditioners to keep cool this summer, check out this ESP8266-powered smart AC system, or this Raspberry Pi-based system that controls both AC and blinds!

PC Overclocking With An Air Conditioner

February 11, 2021 by 51 Comments

We never insist that a hack be practical. [Tech Ingredients] is living proof as they modded a computer case to use a window air conditioner for overclocking a computer. They think they haven’t hit the ceiling yet, and got their AMD Ryzen 8-core processor up to 4.58 GHz.

An advantage of forcing air from an air conditioner is that the air forced into the system is quite dry and clean. The trick is to create a simple duct to attach to a 5,000 BTU air conditioner. It doesn’t actually interface with the CPU cooling block, instead it just forces cool air into the case and this tends to cool everything inside. Admittedly, it isn’t any worse than plunging your computer in liquid nitrogen, and we’ll admit that air conditioning units are made to keep large areas cold and work at high duty cycles. With the air conditioning running, they disconnected at least some of the stock fans. The temperatures stayed cool even at high speeds.

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Cold Tube Draws The Heat

August 27, 2020 by 63 Comments

If you live anywhere near the tropics, air conditioning isn’t a luxury but a necessity. The problem however is that humid climates can cause conventional air conditioners to draw more power to dehumidify the air than it requires to just cool it, which increases the power needed to run the unit. Back in 1963, there was a proposal to create a cooling system that didn’t foster condensation and couple it with different methods of removing humidity. Researchers in Singapore have now created such a system. It uses a membrane that is permeable to infrared radiation but prevents condensation around the cooling unit.

You can see a video of the apparatus in a pavilion in the Singapore heat in the video below. Chilled water runs through tubes behind a membrane that passes thermal radiation. Since the tubes are not exposed to the ambient atmosphere, condensation is minimal. But heat radiates from the warmer area to the much colder area of the tubes.

Continue reading “Cold Tube Draws The Heat” →