Determined to beat summer once and for all, I decided to take things learned from the fridge and the wax projects (still need to write the latter up lol) and put them together as a wieldy weapon for night when the real heat hits again.
I posted some sneak peeks on the scratch thread, but here's the rest, and a little "where it sits" muse.
About 80ea 500mL bottles, most of which currently contain soda, but will be replaced with condensate from the aircon as I drink/produce them, respectively. The box is an old 4 ft radar antenna shipping container. This works out to just over 10 gallons, and I currently have another 10 up in the "attic", 1 gallon each.
20 gallons was the settling point in terms of about what I figure is needed to do what I intend to do, but it's bulky and certainly doesn't help gas mileage, so it may very well get dialed back from there. All depends I guess on how efficient to the big picture I can make all this.
Foreground is lid showing mockup intake and fan placement.
For scale, the intake is standard dryer vent... Soda bottles are 500mL each, boosting fan is a 100mm computer box fan, counterrotating with an 80mm just above it (boosts maximum suction/pressure).
Here is the inside and outside of the lid detail... Fans are capable of a respectable flow, the resistance of the bottles and intake aren't an issue for them.
Intake outside of box...
Intake inside of box...
Discharge port and fans, outside of box...
Discharge port inside box...
Assembled detail...
And of course, the final product...
I've got a few ideas on what I'm gonna do to give efficiency a boost, namely bidirectional air flow... This has caveats that need to be dealt with... But in terms of dropping air temp (and due to construction limitations, to a lesser degree, raising in winter), before this part of the build was even complete, it had already showed signs of really helping shift the heat load in this thing at night.
I'm looking at doing a canopy type thing with the summer bed to reduce the load the box sees at night, similar to what's going on with the wax in winter (yet another side project that still needs to be officially documented methinks lol)
We'll see how things go haha but I'm determined to tame the hot months somehow once and for all without going over budget on any level... besides, adding PV is going to be interesting... there's nowhere to put it on the roof and not much viable real estate exists anywhere else, so the [upcoming] upgrade is gonna probably take the form of a "portable" rig
Steve