Never use a USED SEWER HOSE for a Teardrop Camper Air Conditioner install

[Music] hey y'all just out here taking a little walk enjoying the nice summertime foliage uh speaking of summertime i hope you all have been having a great summer here in east tennessee oh my goodness it's been miserably hot it's been unseasonably hot uh for several weeks now it's been around the 90 95 degrees and near 100 humidity even the skinny people are sweating it's been pretty rough so hey that brings me to the top of today's video after three years of camping in the camp easy teardrop we're finally going to install an air conditioner yes you heard right after three years of camping we're finally going to put an air conditioner in the teardrop you probably wondered what'll be done the last three years well two things one we have it camped when it's been crazy hot outside and two we have a max air max fan in the roof that it pulls a lot of air through and really cools it down inside and for most occasions it's been plenty enough but the time has finally come to step up to an air conditioner for those really hot days and that's what we're going to do for this air conditioner install i managed to find something called a climate right now climate right is believe it or not it's a dog house air conditioner and heater it's basically a mini hvac unit that sits outside of the doghouse or maybe some kind of electrical cabinet i've been looking around for one of these on all the different avenues like facebook marketplace and whatnot and believe it or not this one popped up on ebay it's brand new but it had never been used so i was able to latch a hold of this one now this is a 2500 btu unit so it's about half the btus of a window air conditioner and i was really tickled to be able to lay hands on this thing so hey if you've been following the channel you know that i actually showed a little b-roll this air conditioner in the last video this video is more about the actual install itself now talking about the install i've already punched a couple holes in the camper with the hole saw that's what we're going to pick up all i did was chuck this in the drill drill a couple holes in there i think this is a three and a quarter inch from harbor freight it was built better than i expected and did a pretty good job the bad thing is where i put one of the holes it's going to cause me a lot more work down the road you'll find out what i'm talking about in a minute so i've got a little level up here i've already leveled the camper to make sure it's level now i'm leveling this little sewer outlet thing and listen if you don't have one of these drill hole starters i'm telling you you're cheating yourself you got to get one and you'll see why here in a minute yeah and they're all right in the middle so i'm going to take and just do it about three times to make it a little deeper it's just a spring in there there we go i'm going to use a chisel pointer brad point drill bit and i'm just going to stick it in that little dimple and just start drilling in and you say that the grille is not trying to walk left or right because it's been guided by that little hole there that little nipple [Music] the outside one of these i'm just going to put butyl tape around the perimeter butyl tape is really really good stuff for when it gets warm though it gets kind of drippy so you need to be careful with it yeah that's much better so the reason i'm using screws like this instead of like sheet metal screws or something is that i'm going to put one of these caps on the inside too i'm afraid if there's ever a night when we're not using our air conditioner and all we had was a hole in here or like a louver somebody could just pop the cap off and look in and see us or you know throw something in there but if i've got a cap on the other side they're not going to be able to pull that cap off from the outside and the reason i'm using these screws is that it's going to pull both of those caps together and sandwich them together and these caps are pretty hard to put on so i want some robust screws to hold this thing still the screws may not be perfectly aligned i may have to coerce them a little bit from the outside there we go so i'll screw all four of those in and i'm going to use i don't know what these are acorn nuts that way they're kind of decorative and you don't just have sharp screw heads sticking out through the outside i'll show you a close-up of that here in a minute all right so let's put some light on this thing a little light i picked up a harbor freight for 299 check this out but there is the finished product from the outside two volterra uh sewer hose fittings on the outside now this side of the camper is the side that's always facing the utilities at the campground so it's not going to be on the living side so i don't care you know that i got a couple big black things on the side of the camper but the sewer hoses will hook right in here and the plan is to put the cool air going in below your feet and then the warm air since warm air rises i'm going to have the vent for that up here and if it doesn't work as good as i want we'll just swap them around try it that way but that's the plan and i believe it's going to work well all right we're back in the workshop it's time for a confessional um back when i put the porch light on the side of that camper and i ran the wiring down to the switch and then back up to the light i actually took pictures of where all the wiring was that way if i ever needed to punch a hole in the side of the camper i could look at it and tell where the wiring is and not you know drill into it or cut into it tonight i got in a hurry i knew it was you know coming up dark and i wanted to get this thing knocked out i just went and punched a hole inside the camper and sure enough i cut into the wiring and now it's going to take me so much time having to fish new wire through and and redo all that so yeah you get in a hurry you try to cut corners and that's what happens the next step in the project is i bought a 20-foot long sewer hose from walmart it's like 12 bucks and i just cut it in half and now i'm going to take these hose clamps and put connections on each end and that's what we'll clamp onto the sewer fittings on the outside of the camper and the outside of the ac unit [Music] who put a baby ruth candy bar in there [Music] so just a little bit of an update it is cooling off after about 10-15 minutes but not as much as i would think and we got to look and these vents that i 3d printed a while back or letting the air out of them so i just taped those off and i want to see you know how the temperature comes down now all right so checking the temperature is already starting to come down so i think taping the vents up is the ticket um not long ago probably a week or so ago somebody on one of the diy sites asked for the 3d print file for this and i sent it over and after a few days they sent the file back and said hey i made some changes to it where the inside part will now close so i think i'll print that inside part so i can close it off when i'm using the air conditioner so where did i get the idea of using two rv sewer hoses to put cold air in and bring warm air out well i got that from a guy named ed ladd edwin ladd at a diy teardrop campers community meetup a couple years ago it was pretty cool so i was actually on the way leaving this campsite and i looked down and i saw he has a central air unit sitting on the ground beside this camper and it's a window unit from a house and i've heard people say that you can't use it that way but he is i want to know about this thing okay it's a regular it was mounted in the camper okay and i got the camper and uh it short cycled the the compressor would run maybe two minutes at a time okay and uh wasn't dehumidifying because the the compressor wasn't long enough so i i had seen posts where people had put shrouds on them and stuff and i've done a little research and i built me a plenum shroud for the front of it and fastened my hoses on the side where the air can spread across the coils and all the controls are inside is it working good working great it's done this weekend it's done it's kept at 70 degrees inside it's uh you can tell by the water on the ground it's a it's getting rid of some moisture and all that so far it's worked great course i repurposed all the pop-up stuff and my this frame came from a pop-up [Music] just take i took the plastic grill off of the windy unit and had to build uh some brackets and stuff to hold the little filter but this is the where the air normally would come out it goes into the supply hose and then this area here is the return side so now the original controls he just said that was on the air conditioner he took that off he moved it inside the camper and there's seven wires going to that and he just got a seven wire trailer harness and remotely hooked up the control panel on the inside of the camper that's pretty clever that's pretty clever no this is awesome you've man i'll tell you what i'm going to leave here so much happier and i think i'm going to be able to make a regular window unit work now thank you very much oh you're quite welcome it's well i got to look you know i was going to buy a climate right well you can't buy them now yeah i heard that what i've heard it's going to be five years before they'd be available yeah so i already had this windy unit well hey if this window unit lays down you go to walmart and you buy another one for a hundred bucks yeah you're back in there that's right that may take a little different combination of wiring so is that not pretty clever or what edwin lat is a class act i've learned a lot from him i've kept multiple occasions um hopefully you'll run across him at a campground yourself one day and if you do you're going to learn a lot i think there may be a flaw in my design though uh these sewer hoses are black and they've got to be soaking in heat and keeping the cold air from being as cold as it could be so i may need to look and see if there's some kind of maybe silver wrap i can put around this or just a different color a lighter color hose you know as a matter of fact let's just shoot it with a thermometer and see how it is so the cold air going in the top look at that 85 degrees so i'm trying to push cold air oh look at that 87 i'm trying to push cold air through an 87 degree hose the exhaust coming back to the unit 91 92 93 90 gosh 98 degrees yeah i'm definitely gonna have to get some lighter colored hoses or find a way to wrap these in some kind of foil to reflect the sun i think that'll make a huge difference before i spend all the money to test that theory let me unplug everything and pull the truck around to where this thing is in the shade okay i just backed the teardrop up such that it is still in the full sun so there's not going to be any difference there but now the unit will be in the shade so let's plug it back in and see if that makes a difference so there we are we've got chickens under the teardrop the teardrop is in the sun but the hoses are in the shade let's see what kind of difference that makes all right so let's check it now that it's been in the shade for about five minutes this is the exhaust and it says 79 degrees and this is the air going into the camper and look at that 69 degrees so that's a huge difference so either i need to try to find a way to keep the hoses in the shade or i need to use a lighter color is this going to be big enough for the teardrop i don't know i mean i've seen people have 5000 btus air conditioners and say it was a little overkill so i thought you know i'll get this one but i don't know time will tell right now i almost think it may not be enough but we'll see when i first installed the hoses i put the cold air coming out the bottom vent and then the warm air um going back to the unit in the top vent and i did that because i know heat rises but actually when i switch the hoses around and now i have the cold air coming out the top it seems to be working better and looking at my thermometer it looks like it's currently 69 degrees inside [Music] and 43 humidity so those are good living conditions there so that's the install the 2500 btu climate ride air conditioner i really hope this thing's going to work out and do what we need it to do but hey worse comes to worse i've already got the sewer hose fittings on the side i'll just do a diy conversion of a window unit like ed and i'll make a video about that so hey all's not lost if you like today's episode give us a thumbs up subscribe if you want to come back and till next time take care we'll see on the road [Music] you

Channel: Camp and Camera

Views: 11,100

Keywords: Teardrop camper, teardrop trailer, diy teardrop, teardrop build, rv, travel trailer, camping, Squaredrop, micro camper, tiny camper, diy camper, air conditioner, climateright, air conditioner install, teardrop air conditioner, sewer hose

Id: AbvCCM24JGA

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2022