He must have spent at least 5 minutes watching youtube videos on how to make one* of these! If we grant a 5% profit margin, and $50 in parts, that’s $235. Say it takes them 15 minutes to build it. Who among us doesn’t value our time at $940/hr?
*since they are unlikely to sell more than one if any, they don’t get to spread this time-cost over many units.
It’ll be in the BoingBoing store next week.
I don’t have a better design after 30 seconds of thinking, but I have to imagine this isn’t the best out there?
Think I’d rather just put the bag of ice around my shoulders.
Sweet jeebus, that’s the funniest thing I’ve read in forever.
I’m trying to imagine any way that could ended well?
I would do dumb, desperate stuff too if the AC was broke and it was 120 out.
I am sure they imagined all the things that could go wrong, but it was worth the risk if it had a chance at making a small difference.
I stand corrected, that story was not at all funny.
You have a good afternoon.
It is funny in a sense that being a brilliant person sometimes blinds you to the obvious answer: Book a hotel until the heatwave is done.
Came here for this. How much less than a bonafide swamp cooler or window unit is this monstrosity?
Heh, plug an electrical power strip into itself, and we solve the energy crisis!
Nope. A swamp cooler is driven by evaporation, not by melting ice. In fact, ice would be terrible in a swamp cooler, until it melts at least ^^’ .
This wins t’internet for today.
So this is how you MAGA!?
I made something similar to that when I was living in a tiny apartment with a huge window facing the sun and a shitty, underpowered air conditioner (which was “furnished” so I couldn’t replace it). The trick is to get the right mix of ice and water and not to bump into it and spill everything all over the floor no matter how drunk you are.
Quite so. They both depend on phase change, but one is solid → liquid, while the other is liquid → vapor.
(Though I would add that the blown-ice cooler would probably be more effective in very humid climates, since ice with room-temp air blown over it will still melt and absorb heat via phase-change, while evaporative coolers (swamp coolers) just stop evaporating in high humidity. Still, it’d take a lot of ice to do much good.)
Well, if the ceiling and mounting and ceilingboard and all fan parts toughed it out, a gentle breeze would whisk off water in a consistent cool aerosol, with a gentle extra downdraft, until the ruffling of empty bags begged a changeout in 25 minutes. Once you stop doing a bucket brigade of tossed ice bags but still have ice in bins, fans by BAE Systems, and ladders it looks okay. That said, is it terribly common to have a commercial ice system stockpiling ice but wrecked aircon? (Water ice? Well -there’s- your problem.)
Otherwise people would get dampened, clobbered and maybe asphyxiated by the ice bags, cut by any lampage glass, and cleaning the floor would get easier if it was a washable floor (and not a crime scene) in the first place. (Starting as a crime scene in Vegas means it happens you never were asked to stay to ideally love it? Is that the line?)
I don’t know what this means, but it means everything to me.
I don’t know - our marketing guys say their data suggests just over 74 million potentional customers in the US alone.
The $300 price tag is just so he can sell it at 80% off next week on Stack Social for $60… 
