The Making of the Solar Cooler

Submitted by AngieHinrichs on August 1, 2006 - 9:42am.

One of camp DnA's projects for this year is the Solar Cooler -- a personal evaporative air cooler that we built from mostly scavenged or reused parts. We took a lot of pictures while building it and I just uploaded them into a new album (/gallery/projects/SolarCooler/) with captions that explain the parts and process in enough detail for the ubergeeks among us to improve upon what we did, should they so desire. :)

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( categories: projects )

What kind of pump and fan

Submitted by jillelaine on August 3, 2006 - 1:46pm.

What kind of pump and fan did you use and what is there power draw?

Thanks,
Tony

Some more detail than included in the album captions... the fan is a COMAIR ROTRON 031086, 1.8A at 12V, max airflow 205 cubic feet/minute (comparable to a small swampy unit). Here is the link to where I bought it on ebay, but it looks like that particular vendor isn't listing them anymore. (He does at the moment list a lot-of-three slightly smaller 12V fans that each consume 1.3A, which could make for a fancier low/medium/high cooler...)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7500174010&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWN%3AIT&rd=1

And here's the link to the pump we bought from Skycraft Surplus, no product ID but it says 500GPH open flow, 4ft rise, 2A at 12V:

http://www.skycraftsurplus.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1028

That was the lowest-current cheap 12V pump that I came across in a few web searches, and it's plenty adequate for this even when run intermittently.

I have not measured the actual current draw yet, just quoting from specs.

Cheers,

Angie