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Re: Cooling A Room
I live in CT, so I have nothing to talk about.
But, here is what I do:
I have a cubicle inside my room. (I need to keep the servers inside COOL.... I run the robotics website off of one, my personal site off of another, plus some file servers, my gaming machine, my CD-SPY machine, my two work machines, my IM machine...just to name a few). The cubicle is sealed, including the top (it is under my loft). I have a window unit (not designed for my windows... my windows does not open vertically... it opens horizontally, so I made a cardboard cutout for it... I'm not too worried about my room getting hot). I made (out of cardboard) an adapter that is duct taped onto the front of the unit that adapts to a 7" round aluminum flexible duct. I calculated the size of the duct based on the area of the output vents on the air conditioner. The flexible duct runs across my room (at about hip height, just tall enough so you can't possibly step over it, but just low enough that you cant go under it... how convenient) to my cubicle. I cut a hole in the side of the cubicle and duct taped it in. Inside I have a piece of printer paper (my final physics exam cheat sheet) with a piece of duct tape on one side. I can tape the paper to any side of the round duct to deflect cool air onto me regardless of where I am sitting inside. I have a thermometer (indoor/outdoor) inside so that I can see the temperature difference. I also have an electric meter inline so I can tell how much juice I am sucking.
Now this sol'n requires a window unit. My grandmother has an A/C unit that is upright, and is on wheels, so that it can be moved from room to room. The unit is about 3.5 feet tall (hip height maybe). It has a tube (looks like a dryer vent) coming out of the back with a little plate adapter to go into your window. This is so that you don't need to lift the unit into the window, and you don't have an ugly unit sticking out (just a small white plate with the vent).
Now for the 5 dollar solution (probably more like 20)... Take your regular oscillating fan, make a coil of copper tubing around the back, attach the tubing to a aquarium pump, and into a garbage can of ice water. Pump the freezing water through the coil so that the fan sucks the air over the cold coil and cools it. You need to keep changing the water (adding ice), but if you have an automatic ice maker, this isn't a big deal (yeah right.)
That's my input.
Jacob
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