DIY Air Conditioner Built From Weird Donor Appliance

There are some parts of the world where living without air conditioning borders on unthinkable. But in more moderate climates, it isn’t all that unusual. [Josh’s] apartment doesn’t have central air conditioning — the kind that connects to a forced-air heating/cooling system. It does, though, have a water circuit for air conditioning, so he decided to hack a few experimental air conditioners.

He’s not starting completely from scratch. The two attempts he made at building his AC came from donor parts. The successful one started out as a hot water heater. The very first attempt didn’t quite work as well, using a refrigerator compressor and an evaporator from a baseboard heater. The flow control through the heat exchanger turns out to be very tricky, so [Josh] claims he mostly got ice right at the inlet and minimal cooling through the evaporator.

The more successful one works better but still has a problem with the evaporator freezing that he’s trying to solve. He’s looking for suggestions on how to make it work better. As much as we like a good hack, our advice is to move to a different apartment building.

We’ve seen other homemade coolers, but they are more like swamp coolers. If you just need to cool your desk, you might just get some ice in a metal can.