What's a good, cheap, practical alternative to an air conditioner? I don't like heat

I don't think there is one, maybe you can score some used window AC or a decent portable one?

You can find standart AC for 500 bucks.
Pretty cheap and works like champ.

ACs require an outside unit, I have no way of doing that apart from drilling a giant hole in my wall

window ACs are a single unit man

do you not have a window?

Yes but it's like this

FPBP

Forgot pic

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Swampcooler OP, make a swampcooler.

this was on the tv earlier

looks like a car airbox

most electrical devices produce more heat than they do cold air when making the latter, that's why air conditioners need to be in the wall or a window. They don't take air from outside, but they need to shoot the resulting hot air outside.

This is why there is basically no way to have just a machine in the middle of the room that makes the room cold.

Imo just get a fan and use something like a damp rag or towel or a little spray bottle to humidify your skin, simulating sweat, which will cool you off combined with the fan.

That and get a jug of water in your fridge so you can chug big glasses to feel cool for like half an hour.

>humidifies
>because a hot day needs more humidity

Lose weight, wear lighter clothes

>most electrical devices produce more heat than they do cold air
All of them do, and there isn't a single exception that can possibly exist. They expend energy to pump heat like water, moving heat away from one area and pushing it somewhere else. Using energy means that heat is generated in the process, so the heat pushed away is always greater than the coolness made.

That's not a scientifically accurate explanation but it'll do.

I have a rental apartment and no suitable windows for a window unit.

So I bought a portable AC unit and although it's far from perfect it's a lot better than nothing.
It's especially nice to turn it on for an hour or so before sleeping.

>Is pic related any good?

Unless it can break the laws of thermodynamics, it doesn't do shit.
The only alternative to AC that works is a fuckhuge bucket of ice, because without the ability to radiate heat outside with a coil that is hotter than ambient, you need something large, dense and significantly colder than ambient temperature to absorb the excess heat and actually lower the ambient temperature. There is no way around it.

So you're telling me a bucket full of ice would do the job?

Is this what you're telling me

I wonder how big the bucket would have to be.
I'm guessing not that big because ice/water is a lot denser than air.

Yes, preferably with a fan to speed up the exchange. But obviously the freezer you'll be using has to be outside of the room you want to cool down, otherwise the room will be already hotter because the heat you'll be removing from the water to turn it into ice will just be exchanged with the air, and all you'll be doing by letting the ice melt again will be returning the room to the temperature prior to freezing the water (except a bit hotter still, because the freezer is not very efficient and also the electrical energy consumed in the process turned into even more waste heat in the compressor and the leads.)

OK, let's do some calculations:

According to Wikipedia air has a density of 1.2 kg/m3
Let's say my room is 20m2 x 3m = 60m3
And I want to lower the temperature from 30C to 20C (a delta of 10C)
And let's say my ice is -10C (a delta of 30C)

Am I correct in thinking I'd need 1.2 x 60 * 10/30 = 24 kg of ice ?
A considerable amount but I think I could carry that from the supermarket.
I think I do need quite a lot of additional ice per hour to keep my room at 20C with me and my PC in it though.

>This is why there is basically no way to have just a machine in the middle of the room that makes the room cold.
Not "basically"; it's impossible.

Heat is just energy. The only thing you can do with energy is move it somewhere else, which is what refrigerators and AC units do. That's why window AC units exist, and why portable ACs have tubes that connect to a window - you gotta dump the heat somewhere.

>evaporative air conditioning
enjoy your swamp, OP

>I am going to carry more than 50 pounds of ice home from the grocery store every day to cool down my room
I feel like this is bait, but this being Jow Forums... I'm not so sure.

In 5 days you'd have spent more on ice than it would have cost to just buy a god damn portable AC and hook up the tubes to a window.

Not saying I will.
I do have AC.

I'm just curious if it's at all realistically possible or not.

That math is completely wrong because you've failed to account for the specific heat of different materials and the latent heat of fusion/vaporization of water. You've also not accounted for heat sources at all. The mass of ice you'd need to keep the room cool over a period of, say, 8 hours would be huge and messy. Additionally, you'd increase the humidity in the room so much that you'd start growing mold.

Absolutely terrible idea and entertaining it is exceptionally stupid.

Feel free to post an improved calculation or fuck off.

find a way to route water from the tap through some copper tubing, in a coil of some sort. Run air over it. Have a temperature sensor that checks when the copper tubing gets above a certain temperature, a relay opens a valve, lets new water flow through until temperature drops down to a certain temperature, repeat. Water from the tap comes up from the ground, making it cooler. If you have a flat rate water bill like in an apartment, this would work really well.

Do you think I come to this forum to teach anons that clearly don't have the appropriate background simple physics? I don't even know I'd that user has enough understanding of math for me to teach him. Feel free to do your own research you lazy brainlet. I've given you enough keywords for you to figure it out on your own.

I bought an window unit called Arctic King for about $30 dollars on clearance from walmart. It's not the best, but it saved my birds on an extremely hot day when my AC failed.

Fan pointed at you evaporates more of your sweat and actively cools you.

buy a peltier, a few waterblocks, some hose, a small pump and two cheap radiators off of aliexpress and build yourself one.

Peltier's are extremely inefficient. Might as well buy a small A/C unit for the price of all of that.

Peltier isn't anywhere near as efficient as the phase change cooling used in AC units.

>moist air

enjoy your mold and mildew

dumb euroshitter

What if I just plop this on myself

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user, if you post a video of you walking around town with that strapped to your forehead with battery power, I will PayPal you $50

I built something similar years ago. No heatsink though, just a fan. I wore it while mowing the lawn on hit days. I still have it.

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why does he wear the fan?

Evaporation takes a shitton of energy (heat) from the air, in extremely dry climate slow evaporation happening at room temperature does make the air colder and more humid. Don't even need electricity for that, although putting a fan above a bucket of water makes the process go faster.

Yup its called a swamp cooler.

it would be extremely painful otherwise

shit meant to quote

this works best in desert areas like the desert southwest, where you want humidity. the downside of course is water ain't cheap over there.

it's really not suited for places like eastern half of the US where it's already humid to the max. I'm also not sure it'd be very effective since the air is already saturated and you won't benefit as much from the evaporative cooling.

pic kind of related. that's the dew point (which depends on a combo of humidity and temperature)

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That thing is basically just a miniature swamp cooler, which is only going to work well in dry places . Even if it does work, you're going to need good air circulation in your apartment or else the air will be saturated and it will stop cooling you down.

>Get a bunch of towels
>Wet them
>Hang them up on a clothes horse
>Set up a fan to blow through them

>Humidifies
OHNONONONO. You want the exact opposite of this. It's amazing they make this a selling point lmao.

If the humidity is low enough for a swamp cooler to work in the first place, it doesn't matter if it gets raised a bit.

Also see They're meant for places where it's basically a desert, so some humidity isn't a negative or could even be a positive.

Isn't it always the dryer the air the cooler it feels?
I definitely feel hotter then I hang my clothes to dry inside my house on hot days.

And if it's so dry, won't simply spraying some water on your skin (which will evaporate) work a lot better at keeping you cool?

It the humidity is already 100% swamp coolers aren't effective at all. Unless your climate is really dry and you can take 0 humidity air from outside, bring it to 40% (pretty comfy spot and gives good delta t) then remove humid warm air from inside, you'll just keep increasing indoor humidity until it's at 100%. At ~80% humidity you'll start to get really sticky and uncomfortable, and your sweat won't work very well so you'll just drip.

>dat 77 dew point
basically walking in water

>20 F
feels good

Swamp coolers only work if you live in a really dry area.

The water you're adding to the air is quite a bit cooler than the air. In dry climates, there's so little water in the air that humidity isn't a problem.

I can do it! Give me a week

Refrigeration units with freon

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A ceiling fan or two. The only way anything portable is going to work, is if it condenses something and blows the waste heat outside, and you may as well go for a window unit from cl instead of the stupid ones with ducting that you'll never seal properly and a condensation tray that will surely never get emptied.

Ah, got it. Yeah, totally possible to cool a room with just ice, just an enormous pain in the ass and impractical.

Humidity is a good thing in the southwest, the air gets so dry here that your lips get chapped in the middle of summer

actually european windows have their benefit. they're extremely well-sealed, so there's very little loss of heat (or cold)
the downside is you have to open your window daily or you'll die of suffocation. also humidity does pile up.

when I came to states I was blown away by the air leaks. wood constructions are notorious for this, and no amount of sealant around the windows is going to completely block it.

also, utilitarian shutters ftw. no one will break your windows at night to just walk in, and you don't need a gun.

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Swiggity swoop testing testes

better illustration. when you turn the handle, you can feel it seal shut. no drafts.

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>evaporative cooling doesn't work
>the only thing to work would be evaporative cooling

>"first post best post"
>idiot is responding to second post of the thread
what the fuck is up with this dumb meme?

t. failed high school chem
When matter goes from solid to liquid or liquid to gas, it requires some extra energy to change phase (on top of the energy to heat it to that point to begin with). This thermal energy has to come from somewhere, so you get an overall cooling effect.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat for your enjoyment.

Since this thread is up, I have 2 ac units in my apartment and it's not very cool because my place is so large. Ones a 14000btu and the other is a 5000. In ontario we are having a heat wave and it's close to 35 every day this week, and about 27 in the apartment. The humidity is 60 percent. If I use a dehumidifier to take the humidity down to 40% will it make a difference in the air? Or will it just be a waste of money?

How big area are we talking? Reducing to 40% will make you thirsty, aim for 50%

I'd say about 500sqft. But my apartment has really tall ceilings, about 8 ft. And its top floor, with floor to ceiling windows, but the windows have cut outs at the top so the ceiling is 10ft by the windows. And it gets hot as fuck on days like today. Really, for the units I got it's not bad. 27 is 8 degrees cooler than outside, but its still hot as fuck.

IIRC, there are Windows AC units that clamp on with extra gumption just for windows like this. Failing that, I'm sure you can easily make a wood bracket for a regular one.

What direction are the Windows facing

Then wait until 2019 when RoCo the robotic airconditioner comes out. RoCo's a robot that follows you around the house blasting AC at you. It's able to do this because it stores up heat inside big blocks of wax, which have to be recharged by cooling them down outside. It's literally botnet though. You have to wear a transmitter bracelet so the robot knows where you are.

It's cheaper than cooling a whole house

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If you live in an area with high humidity it's totally useless. It's a swamp cooler in a tiny box. You can totally build a way more powerful one with a box fan, cooler, plastic tubing and a fish tank pump that'll be way better.

West

>Overly complicated solution to a simple problem
Maybe I should build that hvac jacket I designed.

>95F+ day
>too much of a cheapskate to run the AC

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it would cool the air yes, but all the surroundings would start heating that air back up now that its at a lower temp so you have to cool not just the air but also the other things in the room like desks, beds walls etc it will work to stand in front of to cool you off but it wont work as an AC replacement.
Its just a swamp cooler, if your local humidity is 50% or less it will work to cool the air down (barely) and if its something like 10% humidity it actually works pretty well, but uses a hell of a lot of water

>What's a good, cheap, practical alternative to an air conditioner?
Windows tints.

Werks for me

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Rough estimate you'd need like 11kw unit if your Windows are just plain uninsulated, cheapest thing would be blinds or drapes

Yea, which is way bigger than anything I can get in a portable or even window form, that I know of. 14000 btu, or 4kw was the biggest.

I have blackout curtains, but like I said, I'm in a top floor unit, and I can see in the hallways there's water damage in the ceilings, so the roof probably needs to be fixed. So there's no way to really stop the sun from beating down on the old building. Which is also poorly insulated.

Well that sucks, keep the doors closed, black out windows, I wouldn't do evaporative cooling if your humidity is already 60%

I live in Florida and saw a whole rack of these aw Walgreens.
They're probably still here. It's fucking 80%+ humidity every day why would anyone want one of these indoors?

Getting a large hole inside your wall is pretty easy

You just make a somewhat round hole with a hammer drill
Then you push in a plastic pipe and put some cement around it

And that already is the hardest part of installing an AC unit with quick connectors

>too much of a cheapskate to run the AC
It costs like $5 a day or so to run a full unit. Window ones only use like 600 watts. That's like $2 a day.

only works if you have dry weather.

I have dry nose/mouth mucous membranes and love high humidity
There's literary nothing wrong with humidity unless your living space is susceptible to mold

Just get a portable AC and buy hose extensions and pipe it out

It costs me 170 USD to run my ac per month and that's without factoring getting bumped to a higher tier due to going over a certain amount of KWs

Evaporative cooler. When I guarded at the beach our hut had no ventilation. We had an ice machine in the office, though. Once or twice a day, bucket of ice, $20 box fan, it'll cool the room to point if it's dry. It WILL NOT work if it's humid.