Solar Air Conditioner

- AC
- Solar

Tech Ingredients is a really great youtube channel. I watch all of their clips, you always learn something from them.

Great stuff! But I wonder what the thermal efficiency of this is versus a 1.8kw solar array and a small air conditioner..

Both would run off solar power, but a solar power system would not require adding water or desiccant.

A straight up swamp cooler might work well if water is cheap and the air is dry. They're also generally cheap, readily available, but also fairly easy to make. You can also use non-potable water (e.g., a well to a shallow contaminated aquifer).

Every pound of water evaporated is about ~1000 BTUs:
Then you just need an air blower and a water pump. If the water is hard the evaporation surface will need to be replaced annually, but those aren't expensive. How cool they can get depends on how dry the air is:

If you get one that doesn't blow moisture into the interior, it can also be used as a pre-cooler to reduce AC costs (but with moisture inside it won't work as you lose energy - the AC spends a lot of it's energy condensing the water rather than cooling the room).

I watched that Tech Ingredients video a few days ago. In spite of his best efforts I think he was getting into problems with the science where the conditions kept changing so in the end you really couldn't make any definitive conclusions about how well it was working

One A/C technology I am interested in is geothermal. You can have a decent A/C in any environment by not even having to dig down very deeply so long as you have a water loop and a heat exchanger down hole. Not for mobile situations, obviously!

Strat-O

Swamp coolers do not work well in Florida. Too much humidity!
For sleeping, this works pretty well: https://mattress-cooler.com/

Let me know when you find the youtube video for solar powering one 4-ton and two, two-ton units simultaneously, 25/8, 375 days a year in Florida. Til then I be stuck paying market for those kWhrs!

BoloMKXXVIII said:

Swamp coolers do not work well in Florida. Too much humidity!
For sleeping, this works pretty well: https://mattress-cooler.com/

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That's a interesting thing.

How much energy does it use?

MadMax03 said:

Let me know when you find the youtube video for solar powering one 4-ton and two, two-ton units simultaneously, 25/8, 375 days a year in Florida. Til then I be stuck paying market for those kWhrs!

Click to expand...

I could do it.
It would cost you 35K to improve the efficiency of the conditioners, then a decent 30k to setup the solar and batteries...

My guess though is I could reduce the need for 8 tons of cooling with improvements to the ductwork and home design...

StevAR said:

That's a interesting thing.

How much energy does it use?

Click to expand...

1 amp @ 12v

Good videos nipsip. A portable solution for air cooling is something I'm going to seriously look at.

At a 2019 camp-out the inside of my 4m bell tent reached 40C (104F) at the apex (hot enough that any insects flying into the hot zone fell out of the air dead) and whilst I had my suitcase solar running a Peltier cooler at ground level, the ambient temperature at height of summer still had my battery at 30C.

I only see sun like once or twice a year and it was too damn hot for me so these concepts, especially the non-ice ones, might just do the job - though I note the comment from svetz about relative humidity.

(The weather did break eventually, last day after one week, with the largest storm I had ever heard in over 20 years of using the same site, the gusts really tested the corkscrew ground anchors. It would seem that climate change is making evening camping an extreme sport.)