Comments on: Water Supply Improvements

By: Tray

Tray — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:32:23 +0000

Another thing for hot Summers would be to place a small “water feature” pump in the drain-off tank and run tubing underneath your cover and install “misting” nozzles. This can drasticall drop the ambient temp in the area served by the “misters”. I mounted a custom made plastic tank on a bicycle and ran a drink tube and 2 misters off of a standard automobile windshield washer pump and 4 “D” cell batteries. The drink tube fed water up to and just over the top of the drink tube and the mist nozzles produced a cooling mist from mid chest to my face. It doesn’t take much pressure to make the misters work really well.

By: DigitalBBQ

DigitalBBQ — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 06:31:50 +0000

One other thing you can do is sink the source coil about 5 inches under the sand (in a moving stream).
I have taken temperature measurements where i live and have found up to a 20 to 25 degree F difference,that coil can be considerably colder when its under cover of trees and in sand in a moving creek even in hot weather.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:07:34 +0000

This is a great idea – the pond acts as a heat sink and will have effectively unlimited cooling capacity for the applications we’re talking about here.

By: DigitalBBQ

DigitalBBQ — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:35:58 +0000

Greetings.

I have been tinkering with something i would use for camping that does what your invention does.
I have noticed that when you use a 12 volt or 120 volt water pump in between two copper coils-one coil in a cold place like the fridge or freezer or the bottom of a deep pond and the other strapped to a fan you can conduct the cold from one coil to the other.
It works pretty well except you can never get the second coil colder than the first no matter how amny coils you string in series as the source coil.
If your source coil( as i call it) is at 65 degrees your target coil (coil on the fan) will be at 65 degrees.
Just get a small pump to pump it in a complete circle from one coil to the other and back again.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:01:53 +0000

Hi Philip – I actually ran the numbers at the time (see Technical Notes), and it’s cheaper. In terms of volume, people watering their lawn would use far more, far quicker. Regardless, at the time I would only run this at night before bed to prevent my girlfriend giving me hell.

By: Philip

Philip — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:45:36 +0000

This looks cool and all, but doesn’t the long-term cost of water make this bad? A lot of commercial air conditioners have a closed cycle, not needing anything other then power to run. If you add the water bill to the air conditioning cost, isn’t your air conditioner very ineffective?