The BEST DIY Off Grid Air Conditioner - SUPER Efficient/Battery Powered #vanlife

hey i'm chris from make everything and today we are making a battery powered portable air conditioner out of this cooler using a radiator and a pond pump that's going to be able to provide you with 10 hours of cool air using just bags of ice and no frozen blocks of ice check it out [Music] alright so before we get started a little bit of background now i'm gonna be doing uh some traveling in my sprinter van and there's gonna be a bunch of sprinter van videos coming to my channel soon i've got a 144 2019 four-wheel drive sprinter that i just finished insulating and putting an exhaust fan in now in the summer it can still be pretty hot outside at night like sometimes close to 80 degrees and since i don't want to let the van idle all night it can be pretty uncomfortable to sleep in that small space so i decided i wanted to look into building an off the grid ac now there's a lot of designs for these online and most people will tell you pretty much every video you find that if you run off of blocks of ice or frozen jugs of ice that you'll get more run time and with bags of ice you can usually only get two to three hours before the ice actually melts now i'm going to be doing a lot of driving and road tripping with this so i'm not going to have access to blocks of ice or be able to freeze my own gallon jug so i decided i needed to figure out a way to efficiently use bagged ice that i could get from any gas station or convenience store and make it work in this system for eight to ten hours of sleeping it took a little bit of figuring out but i'm going to show you what i did check it out so what we've got here is an 18 volt ryobi fan and this thing will run about eight hours on high with a 4 amp hour battery this is about a 50 fan and then we've also got this little ryobi usb and 110 120 volt power pack and this is running a pond pump now this is a coleman extreme cooler was about 50 i got it at walmart and it's a toilet flange over here that allowed me to bolt it right to the top and i can put pvc fittings on there now inside is what's important so this piece right here was about 40 from amazon and this is an oil cooler for a car now water can be pumped in it runs through these tubes and then pumps back out now what's important about this is that this thing is made out of aluminum and it's going to radiate whatever temperature the input liquid is it's going to radiate through this so the big problem with using ice cubes in a system like this if you just have an open cooler is that the air blows in it hits the ice cubes the air gets very cold as it travels over the ice cubes but it also forces the ice cubes to melt really quickly and this is a really well insulated cooler so why lose that insulation property by just blowing air on some ice so the way that i designed this is we've got two tubes they go into this little radiator and then if we lift up this side this is just some inch and a half insulation there's an area for me to put three bags of ice so i can put 48 pounds of ice down in here and then we've got a usb powered pond pump that's sucking cold water up pushing it through the radiator and then dumping it back into the system on the other top on the other side and that's creating a little bit of current so i'm constantly getting the coldest water that i possibly can what's nice about this system too is that if you turn it off and you don't need to use it you're not killing the properties of your cooler by having gaping holes in it this is very well sealed and if we close this up we're not really going to be letting a lot of hot air into there because we've got that insulated barrier so let's get into how i made this and you'll be able to see a little bit of a test of me running it all night in my van all right so here's we're going to start with this is a coleman extreme cooler i don't know i bought it from walmart it was 50 bucks we're gonna be cutting through the lid in two spots we're gonna be using this 18 volt fan this is a hybrid fan so we can also plug it into power and this is a toilet flange that fits inside a four inch pvc we got some four inch pvc pipe and a long elbow this long elbow versus a tighter elbow will just make the airflow a little bit better so first thing we're gonna do is lay this out on top and i'm trying to make it you know as centers as i can i want to stay away from that area and we'll mark out a circle to cut with either a jigsaw or a hole saw right through the lid of this cooler so i'm essentially making this before i know that it's gonna work i mean i've seen a bunch of videos so i'm pretty sure it's gonna work but worst case scenario i uh i cook this cooler but i'm okay with that i'm gonna leave the lid right on there just drill a hole or maybe two holes to start and i'm gonna cut this with a jigsaw i'm gonna use this really long like aggressive blade just because i i know it'll get through both sides of the cooler this thing is kind of thick so i just want to make sure i can punch through [Music] this is nice thick foam it should you know remain somewhat insulated and i'll probably have to just use like maybe some long stainless steel bolts right there the next hole i gotta cut is for the fan now what works nice here is there's kind of these two little like knees and they sit nice in the cup holders which i think is good just to keep this thing from rattling around i'll probably probably wind up throwing some sort of strap over this you know when i'm when i have it in the car but this hole i want to just make sure i get it nice and tight around that lip now if i cut this on the line this thing actually should kind of sink into it which i think would be good so hopefully i don't make the hole too big again i'm gonna drill a couple holes with this and then just run around with the jigsaw [Music] it's pretty good so now just as a demo i'll put a battery on this and turn the fan on you'll be able to see the air that comes out of here so you can see i've got air flow and that's on low if i go to high it really starts moving out of there so if i were to put this on there and even just this elbow the airflow will actually direct and it'll come right out of the tube so it's got some good velocity now one of the things i think that's important is just making sure that i don't have any gaps over here i think if i close these gaps up i can't see i think if i close these gaps up i'll get even better flow because i can feel a little bit of air being pushed out just around the edges it's not being sucked in like it is over there it's being pushed out so but we'll address that as we go for more efficiency in this kind of system now there are other kind of designs like this um online and what a lot of guys do is they do this they throw a block of ice in there and they're done the air passes over the block of ice it cools down runs up and out but i'm gonna be traveling with this and i don't know that i'm gonna be able to get blocks of ice wherever i'm going and that's a big concern so if i can't get blocks of ice i know i can always get bags of ice so what i decided to do was i purchased this it's a transmission oil cooler it's like a small radiator and what we're going to do is we're going to set this up inside the cooler and we're going to put a little battery-powered pump on it and then when we fill this with ice and we fill it with water the air is going to go down it's going to hit the water and cool down on its own then it's going to travel underneath and it's going to have to pass back up through this radiator before it passes out now this is going to expand the surface area of the water because it's going to cool down all these little fins so this is going to definitely positively affect the performance of this whole thing and once we're all done and we test it i'll take this out and you'll be able to see the difference so let's get this set up with some aluminum angle so that it can stay up in the top of the bucket i just took some aluminum angle some zip screws i made this little stand and then this is a usb powered pond pump and a little uh usb power bank and if i turn it on it brings power to the pump and then the pump is gonna pump water it's got a little suction cups on the bottom it's pumping water through these pipes which then the water radiates into the little fins and then it re-circulates back so i got a pump with an open end on it and the reason i got that was because i want this system to be able to draw cold water in from the bottom of the tank as opposed to making this like a closed loop system where this would go back into the pump because then it wouldn't pick up any more cold water so believe it or not this is just like water out of the tap and it's not very cold but it's actually already you know just running through this thing this fan um these fins are already actually pretty cool so i have a feeling this is all gonna work out fine so the way this is positioned it's gonna sit above the ice it's gonna go in the cooler uh towards the output side and then we're gonna put the pump in there gonna put ice about halfway up put a couple of uh bottles of water in there maybe like a gallon of water just so that there is some water um and then they should be able to suck it up the air should come down up and under and come back out the top so let's just throw this in the cooler and then i can pick up some ice and try it out once we set up the pvc all right so essentially this goes on there it's turned on air rushes out of there you fill this with water and ice and then i can plug in the pump and it would start pumping water and circulate it around and cool the air that comes out of this so now the next thing to do is to get some ice and some water and give this a try so it's about 75 degrees fahrenheit with nothing running the temperature is going down a little bit just because the air is moving we're down to 73 72 and a half degrees [Music] okay so i tried this out and it worked pretty well but one of the things with these and and they recommend this and everyone that's made these type of uh you know fan powered cooler things they always recommend using blocks of ice or actually freezing gallons of water because ice cubes melt really quickly but i'm planning on using this while i'm out on the road and i can't reliably go out and buy blocks of ice you know i have to be able to just go out go to a truck stop and buy bags of ice so the way that i had this set up we had the fan running in the cool air was running through this little radiator cold water was being pumped through this radiator by the little pond pump there was ice in the bottom and then there was the outlet there so the problem is the ice melts pretty quickly we tried this out on an on uh overnight in the van and it was like about 75 degrees out that night about 75 in the van when we started and the ice lasted for about five hours three bags of ice 16 pound bags so it was almost 50 pounds of ice and then i poured in all about a half a gallon of cold water just so that there would be something for the pump to suck up now like i said five hours was pretty good and if i had more ice to feed in there probably could have made it through the whole night but i feel like there's got to be a better way so what i'm going to try now is what i want to do is i want to take the radiator and i want to make this the single source of cooling so i want to make it so that the radiator is tight to the in air and then i'm going to take some insulating foam and i want to insulate where all the ice is underneath so that'll hopefully keep that ice in the cooler for longer and then the little pond pump will be pulling ice cold water out of that insulated chamber bringing it up into this and then it'll be almost like a plenum here you know where the insulation stops and the air will have to rush down it won't have anywhere to go and it'll turn back around and come out the outlet so we're going to do some modifications to what we did here but try to still use this aluminum angle that i used to secure the radiator and hopefully that helps so i'd like the radiator to be tight to the top so that the only air that the fan pushes is this cool air from the radiator but i don't want to attach the radiator directly to the lid because then i'm going to have to deal with the lines all the time so when i close this the the top of the lid is only a couple of inches above this so what my plan is to actually just block up the radiator from the top of this little plenum that we're building with maybe some bricks of foam and so that it sits up here and then my lines can permanently be set down in there the other thing i've been thinking about was i want to make the plenum have two pieces so that i can easily fill this with ice so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the aluminum pieces that we had used before and i'm going to just screw them into the side walls of the cooler with a little bit of silicone so that this stays water tight and this will be just a place for the foam to sit on and i can cut a seam down the middle and pull a piece out we'll put some pieces on the side as well so i've just got a little piece of scrap wood here that's nine inches long and a couple of these pieces of material already have multiple holes in them so i'm just going to use those if you didn't have these pieces already pre-made hopefully you're doing this right the first time instead of redoing it you could just drill a couple of holes with a drill bit it's just aluminum so it's nice and soft and i'm going to be using half inch screws because i don't want to puncture through the outside of this we're going to put these in and then we're going to go back and we're going to add silicone and put the screws back in a second time before we silicone these screws we're just going to make sure that everything works so we'll go back when we're all done putting all the bars in then we'll glue everything so i've got this piece of insulating foam it's like inch and a half thick and this is actually a cut off from a full sheet but they sell this in a bunch of different sizes you can get this at like home depot um i don't actually know what the r value is but i can do a layer of this and see how it goes and maybe you need to add a second layer or some extra pieces but i think one layer this will be fine it's about as thick as the foam is over here it's not as dense but i think it's still going to provide a good amount of r value and i think it's going to actually be really really helpful i'm looking for something to use as a template this is the uh this is the packaging that the radiator came in it actually fits in there pretty well so i'm gonna put this on top of the foam and i use this as a guide to cut out and get close and then fit that foam so it's a really tight fit so here's what we got mocked up got the radiator and we're sitting on this foam now i don't know if i should maybe have the the silver side down or the silver side up i don't know if it's really going to make a difference but either way i cut the foam in half so that i can get one half of it out and i'm going to run the hose lines down so they're always down there and i can fill it with ice from this side and then the way that i blocked this up i'm going to use some hot glue to secure everything but this will essentially be sitting in there and then i can close the lid nice and tight then i'll have my fan it's going to sit on there like this same way i had it before and the air is just going to rush in and rush back out i get a pretty good volume of air coming out of this and it's just very directed right it's a plenum of air it's going to go down and come right back up pretty good air flow now if this thing is ice cold you know this thing can get down to say 40 degrees because the ice water there's no reason why the air coming out of here shouldn't be close to that temperature and then because this is all insulated below insulation the ice should actually stay cool longer now obviously i'm going to be pumping the water this water in here is going to get warmed up because of the outside air and it's going to pump back down so i am going to be reintroducing warmer water to the icy water down in the bottom but i think that that's going to be a much more efficient system than just blowing warm air and having it hit all that ice so before i go ahead and glue everything up i think we try this i'm going to let it run all day and then if it works i'll just firm up the system and complete it one of the things i'm worried about is that the pump is going to get clogged with little bits of styrofoam because there's no way to really keep this styrofoam in um unless i cover it so i have this hvac tape this is like an aluminum foil tape and i'm just going to wrap all the exposed edges with this and this will just keep any of that styrofoam from getting out and it'll hopefully keep me from clogging the pump with a little bit of styrofoam or anything i don't want to burn the pump out especially if i'm out on the road it'd probably be pretty hard for me to find a usb powered pond pump out in the world now i plug this into the little power pack this is the pump you can actually make sure the pump's working so i've already got water going in should have water coming out in a second now i've got water going out so we've already got water flowing through this thing really going to be important that i actually secure this because otherwise it's going to be hard for me to close this but okay that's closed this is already getting cold so so my hands reading at 80 85 degrees this is reading at 31 degrees 30 degrees this coil is already at 30 degrees so i put the fan on there the air coming out of this has got to pass through that 33 degrees it's got to pass through this 33 degree coil and then it's got to cool down and i've got the fan running on high and that battery will let that fan run on high for eight hours but i just want to see how long the ice lasts in a maximum kind of scenario and it's about uh 76 degrees in the shop right now so it's not super hot it is about how hot the van would be on a normal night once i get the exhaust fan running and all that so right now we're down to 53 53 degrees obviously it's taking a little bit for that air to cool down and it's also that plenum in between the top of the cooler and that insulation has to get down to temperature once it's down to temperature it's going to actually should remain there because the lid of the cooler is insulated and the insulation below it okay so now we're actually in the van so fast forward a couple hours i tried this setup in the shop i let it run after about five hours the air was pushing out at about 70 degrees but i was trying to circulate that air in a really large space so the air going in was about 76 to 78 degrees so i figured it was worthwhile to try it in the van itself so right now i just turned it on it's still getting down to temperature um but it's definitely dropping we're at 66 64. um i just turned the circulating pump on so it takes a little while for the plenum to cool down but i also used a third bag of ice and i dumped a bunch of salt in there which was a suggestion that a bunch of people gave me on instagram and that's supposed to keep the water cooler or whatever so i'm gonna leave the exhaust fan just open but not running so that hopefully the cool air pushes some heat out and i'm gonna leave the windows just cracked and i'm gonna close up the van i'm gonna just let this run all night and i'm gonna check on it in the morning and see where we wind up and see how cool the air is so we'll see all right so it's the next morning it has been pretty much exactly eight hours fan is still running and we are getting sub 60 degree air about 57 degrees so let's see how much ice is actually left in the system and remember this started with three bags of just regular you know ice cubes from convenience store so you can see we've actually still got some ice floating down in there not much but regardless the water is going to stay cold for a long time that cold water pushing through the system would continue to push out cold air uh probably for a couple more hours now it's also just generally kind of cool in the van and it's cool over here especially where the air was blowing on all night so being able to keep three bags of ice cubes cold for eight plus hours with this system i think is a huge success without having to go out and buy blocks of ice all right so just another little update so i let this sit um everything was off and i let it sit in the van in the sun for a couple of hours and this is sort of just to show the efficiency of having that baffled system now normally having to sit in the van for a few hours because there's a gaping hole underneath this fan all that ice would have just melted but since i put that baffle in there with the inch and a half insulation everything stayed really cold and then when i turned the system back on i was able to get temperatures down to like 58 degrees and there's no ice left in the cooler at this point it's just cold water but it's cold enough that it's still able to produce you know obviously a lot cooler than the air it's about 85 degrees out right now so if we look at the radiator we're getting temperatures down 35 degrees 34 33. again now this is several hours after i actually set this thing up it's about 10 a.m the following day and i set this up at 10 p.m last night it was 74 degrees last night and it's about 83 84 degrees outside right now and in the van itself 87 88 degrees and climbing on the headliner and 120 on the glass windows definitely a better system to have this baffle than to just have an open cooler blowing on ice all right so now that my proof of concept worked we were able to keep that temperature i just want to secure these couple of extra pieces the stuff that we had you know holding up uh holding up the radiator itself because having those jumble around was pretty annoying so i wanted to secure them with some hot glue and we'll cut them so they fit a little bit better so the last thing i want to do before i kind of call this done is these screw holes that i put to hold up the angle iron i just want to throw a little bit of sealant on them because i don't want any water to get inside the shell of this and potentially get like kind of moldy and mildew because it won't be able to get out of there and when i'm driving when this thing doesn't have ice in it it's going to have water sloshing around so i'm just going to take these screws out one at a time throw a little bit of sealant this is just like some random stuff i had a tube of this is a waterproof window and door trim sealant i don't know it's not silicone it probably should be but i think this will work and i'm just going to throw a little bit on each of the holes put the screws back in and this will be done all right so that about concludes this project now i was able to get eight hours of runtime out of this and continue to maintain cold air and then i actually wound up like you saw turning off the fan and letting it sit in the car for a few hours and that water stayed cold because of that baffle system um this is by far the most efficient ice cube system that i've been able to build myself and i think it's pretty easy to accomplish for just a regular person there are a couple other systems like this that involve drilling holes in the side of the cooler and buying these expensive marine fans and stuff one of the things i wanted to maintain here was i wanted to keep this vessel sealed and and enclosed because if this thing fills with ice water and it's in the back of my car and i take a hard bump i don't want you know water leaking out of the side of this or if something does fail i don't want to have to worry about this thing is water tight while i'm out and my van is sitting in a parking lot i want to be able to you know know that this thing isn't going to leak on me that was why i sealed those little holes too just as an extra layer of protection so this completely preserves the integrity of the actual cooler and allows it to be a vessel even if you wanted to cool food down in it you could throw some down there and because of the baffles it's gonna actually stay cold i'm really really happy with the way this design turned out now this is gonna be going at the foot of my raised bed platform so i've got a little extension of four inch pvc that's going to go in there and it's going to allow this to actually blow up over the bed and which is good cool air falls so this will actually help circulate the air a little bit better a lot of people just put a 90 right here and a lot of that cool air is just going to stay low to the ground so anyway i'm going to put links to all the stuff i used for this project down in the description i encourage you to try it out if you have any questions please leave them down in the comments below i posted a lot about this on my instagram which you can follow here at make everything shop and one of the major comments that i got was to add that salt and adding the salt actually helps get the water down to a temperature below 32 degrees and it stays cooler longer so i'm definitely going to be using salt when i do this out on the road salt's very cheap i can buy a big box and just dump some in this used three bags of ice to get that you know eight to ten hours of run time and for me that was about five dollars a bag which is a little expensive but out on the road you can get it for much cheaper those are 16 pound bags you got to make a little bit of an investment into some of this stuff but obviously you could modify this and you could use a 12 volt battery powered fan you could use a solar fan but i really like the idea of being just on batteries here so that i don't have to worry about any cords nothing can get caught up and uh yeah overall i'm really happy with how this came out i'm excited to use it on an upcoming trip and i'm also going to be doing a bunch more videos like i said about the van showing the bed platform that i made showing the insulation and the ceiling fan and a bunch of other springer stuff so if you want to see more stuff like that definitely leave me a comment subscribe to my channel and thumbs up this video if you enjoyed it again i'm chrissette for make everything and i hope to see you on the next video thanks

Channel: Make Everything

Views: 265,410

Rating: 4.8833604 out of 5

Keywords: make, diy air conditioner, diy swamp cooler, fan powered AC, cooler AC, frankencooler, how to make an air conditioner, how made AC, off grid AC, van life, van life ac unit, how to van life, sprinter van, 2019 sprinter, how to make, sprinter camper van, sprinter 4x4, coleman extreme cooler, ryobi fan, ryobi air conditioner, van life AC, how to sleep in your van, how to sleep in your car, tent AC, maker, do it yourself air conditioner, ice cube air conditioner, DIY AC

Id: XJJtZlrUA4U

Length: 36min 38sec (2198 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020