Cooling A Room

[Pavan Dave]

In my house, my room is the only one that does not get its share of cool air when the AC is turned on. After having a professional look at it, he said something about the position of my window towards the sun as well as the fact that my room is the last on the line to get the cool air.

My father said that he is up for me figuring out some way to cool my room. Without buying an external AC unit [that hangs out of my window] I was wondering if anybody has any ideas or knows anything about this type of stuff so that I can mod my room? Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated because I have no idea where to start for my research except off of others' (who have some knowledge possibly about this field) knowledge.

EDIT: I have a ceiling fan, and some other fans in my room keeping me cool right now but all that does is circulate the warm air inside my room.

Thanks for your help,
Pavan Dave.

(PS. If you think it gets hot where you're from, please visit Houston in the summer and I don't think I'll have to say a word, )

[John Gutmann]

My room is the same way it would get like 95 degrees in the summer, with the AC on. I basically just lived with it. How hot does yours get? Mine basically felt like a car that was sitting in the sun. I would get the afternoon sun through a biigggg window.

-John

[Zyik]

My house has no AC, we cool the house by opening all the windows and running fans at night. I don't know how cool it gets in Texas, but you might want to try that.

[Cynette]

Start with the window! Cover it with a sun protecting layer, either directly on the window or as a shade that will reflect the heat back. Many shades can still let light in while reducing the heat!
http://www.srmi.biz/Tips.Low_Cost_Cooling.New_window_shading_options.h tm
This web site has some other good ideas as well!

[tseres]

it sounds like you have a/c, but your room is the last in line, therefore you get little or no cold air. my solution is this:
you can get fans that you install in the air ducts that literally suck the cold air into your room. almost certain you can get them at Home Depot or sotres like that. it's basically a duct segment with a fan in it.

[whytheheckme]

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

[Pavan Dave]

Originally Posted by John Gutmann

My room is the same way it would get like 95 degrees in the summer, with the AC on. I basically just lived with it. How hot does yours get? Mine basically felt like a car that was sitting in the sun. I would get the afternoon sun through a biigggg window.

-John

My room is small, a few inches bigger than 10' x 10', and on average feels about five to ten degrees hotter, if not more, than the rest of the house. So I went up to my father and made a deal with him: if I could find a way to cool my room, which is both efficient and economical, he would get me the parts and let me go from there.

Thanks for the help guys.

[Bongle]

An engineering solution from one of my fellow students at Waterloo is to have a large container of cooler-than-air water at a high level. Get some copper pipe, run it from the water container in a spiral in front of a fan, then have it empty into a lower container (or out your window).

As the water runs in front of the fan, it will absorb heat energy from the air. The pump is powered by the height difference between the container and outside. Efficiency can be increased by adding more surface area to your copper pipe to facilitate heat exchange.

http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~gmilburn/ac/geoff_ac.html

Edit: Beaten.

[whytheheckme]

Another solution that I left out (practically free compared to an air conditioner) was to create the fan idea that I described above, but instead of using a bucket of cold water, was to run a hose outside and bury coils of it under ground (which is constantly 50ish degrees). Use this as your cooling source. This is a very cheap, almost no power usage solution. You may need a bigger pump than an aquarium, however.

Jacob

[tseres]

Originally Posted by whytheheckme

Another solution that I left out (practically free compared to an air conditioner) was to create the fan idea that I described above, but instead of using a bucket of cold water, was to run a hose outside and bury coils of it under ground (which is constantly 50ish degrees). Use this as your cooling source. This is a very cheap, almost no power usage solution. You may need a bigger pump than an aquarium, however.

Jacob

isn't that calles a geo-thermal exchanger or something like that? or, use the outside garden hose with cold water....

[Jake Hansen]

Partially close the vents that are in the rooms that do get adequate AC. That way, the remaining air is forced to go to your room. It works quite well.

[Qbranch]

Well if you wanted to go all-out-robotics-style on this, you could try building a thermocouple peltier effect cooling array out of these. The first few on the page are the same as ones used in those nifty take-with-you-in-your-car thermocouple based cooler/warmers. Just remember that these MOVE heat, they don't just get cold, so you'll need a cooling fan and a place to blow the heat (probably just hang a hose out your window if you have to, or put it into your attic, something like that.

Building an enclosure for this out of plywood and insulating the inside to keep the heat from reentering the room, then using some surplus kit fans from the FRC kit should work for moving the hot air out of the box down your hose. A large PC power supply should do the trick for supplying 12VDC to your thermocouple array(s). Wow now i wish this was my project!

-q

p.s. each one of the first junctions shown on the page is equivalent to about a 275btu/h air conditioner, so 22 of these babies gets you up a little past a 6000 BTU/h energy transfer rate, about the average for mid size window air conditioners. its a little pricey... but man is that cool! (no pun intended )

[AJ R]

Living in Texas, there proably isnt a basement. So the unit would proably be in the attic or garage. Because air takes the path of least resistiance, it will be flowing to the grilles closest to the unit. There should be a damper at the takeoff of the plenum. You can slightly close off the airflow to the rooms closest to the unit. I wouldn't close it more than 50%. This will help in two ways. It will increase airflow to your room while increasing the runtime of the unit. If this dosent work, Fantech makes a quality in-line fan that will boost the air to your room.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Pavan

In my house, my room is the only one that does not get its share of cool air when the AC is turned on. After having a professional look at it, he said something about the position of my window towards the sun as well as the fact that my room is the last on the line to get the cool air.

It sounds like you have two directions at which you can attack the problem. First, do something about the heat entering your room through the window. One of the best solutions is to use a deciduous tree to shade it, so the leaves are only blocking the heat in the summer. There are also metallized plastic films that you can put on the outside of the glass. Be wary of using shades on the inside of the window, as they'll mostly end up trapping the heat and radiating it to the inside anyway.

Second, you want to get some air moving. A ceiling fan will help dramatically, as will "booster" fans in the ductwork. If you can force the air inside your room to mix with the air in the rest of the house, you'll be able to keep the temperatures more consistent.

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Jake Hansen

Partially close the vents that are in the rooms that do get adequate AC. That way, the remaining air is forced to go to your room. It works quite well.

this is what I would do first, too. Also make sure there is an exhaust path for the warm air to leave your room and return to the a/c unit.