Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/arts-crafts-build-your-2.html
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Fascinating, but I’m ready for a nap now.
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Neat, however moving unfiltered air through water like that will lead to beasties growing. Not an insurmountable obstacle but you would have to strip it down and clean it every so often. I do wonder how this would stack up compared to an absorption system (beyond being way more complicated)
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Again, @SeamusBellamy, this has nothing to do with “arts and crafts”.
Science, technology, DIY, ‘makerism’, whatever. But not “arts and crafts”.
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edit: somewhat more seriously, the wet-thing-around-your-neck has always been a favorite of mine.
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This guy’s projects are cool. Long time subscriber.
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Agreed his audio videos are some of the most compelling bits of the youtubes.
All I can say is bless the people with good ideas who don’t immediately think “how can I exploit this for personal profit?”.
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Ironically, swamp coolers do not work if you actually live in a swamp.
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What he is inventing here has been done for years. I have a liquid lithium chloride dehumidifier in a building I service.The company was a flash in the pan about 5 years ago, and quickly went out of business. Why? Because it wasn’t really more efficient than a standard regenerative desiccant wheel based dehumidifier. The added maintenance ate up any savings.
I assume that magical Germany company he keeps mentioning is Munters, as they have mostly cornered the market on dehumidifiers for places like museums and such. They work well, but work on a desiccant wheel. That drawing he had was straight from a Munters system. i do not know of any company presently producing liquid desiccant systems.
Now not to get too deep with his science, he continually talks about phase change and what he is describing is latent heat. The problem is all the measurements he shows are by thermometers, so therefore he is only measuring sensible heat. It is quite possible to have 50 degree air that has the same total heat as 70 degree air depending on it’s moisture content. A wet bulb reading of the incoming air and the leaving air would tell us much more.
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Yes, if you are in a humid location, forget it.
I had a high school biology teacher who was in N. Africa in The War (that would be #2), who showed us how he and his buddies rigged up an evaporative cooling device with a straw wall, dripped water on it and had a fan behind it. That was in the Libyan desert, however.
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Roger That!
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I saw this video YEARS ago in a campus theater, and it was much longer. When I saw it, it was called The Mosquito Coast and it was being shown as a cautionary tale for engineering students.
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It seems to me that he’s deliberately obfuscating the efficiency of the system by using a Bunsen burner as a heat source rather than using an electrical heater. My guess is that the efficiency gain would be negligible if he accounted for the energy to heat the coils, so he’s using an external energy source and not accounting for it in his efficiency calculations.
I’ll give the guy credit for his engineering skills and he does a good job explaining how the whole system works but I have to hold him accountable for that seeming, um, oversight. It’s cool (pun not intended) that he got that system to work but this is a textbook example of something being over-engineered!
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Yes, this is an absurd option for anyone who can access a standard condenser AC and the electricity to run it. Unless you are dirt poor or an absolute cheapskate, this wouldn’t be more than a hobby project for you. But there are an awful lot of people in the world who ARE dirt poor, who are living in regions that will soon become dangerously hot for long stretches of the year. The comments he makes towards the end about scaling up the design and using non-potable water in some sections, that’s not just fun facts, it’s practical advice for using this as a survival technology. An effective system that can be run off a small solar panel and a propane tank is worth taking seriously. I hope it gets spread around enough that people experiment and improve on it and that it gets to the people who need it most.
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Came here for this, left satisfied.
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They really should be called desert coolers.
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He specifically address this and points out that his heat source is for the sake of proving the concept, but could easily be provided by direct solar heat or outdoor heat exchange.
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One of the few instances of Harrison Ford in an acting role.
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