« Previous Going To Narnia, BRB UPDATE: CONTEST TIME! | Wire Rack Grill Next »
» 103 Kludgers Kludging
-
Jury Riggers Unite!
tommasz on Sharing This Light of Min… Pi-tastic on My Kludgy Sprinkler JBD on Historical Thursday: London St… jaymze on Let’s Hear It For Andy Bert on Van and Apprentice Van DS on Sharing This Light of Min… ad fogg on The Legend of Hammewrench xMidnightDreamsx on Let’s Hear It For Andy Meatslinger on Pink Tooth Keyboard domerdaver on The Legend of Hammewrench -
I think that this will actually cost WAY more than a “normal” air conditioner.
Ya know, there’s a reason air conditioners are put in windows – to dump the heat outside. I just can’t see this working.
Wow. That’s a HUGE fail.
For anyone looking at this image and thinking “Wow, that’s a clever idea,” let me remind you how a refrigerator works: A fluid known as a refrigerant is pumped through the fridge in pipes that are first exposed to the inside of the fridge and then exposed to the outside of the fridge. When exposed to the inside of the fridge, the fluid is allowed to expand, which causes it to absorb heat from the air inside the fridge. When exposed to the outside of the fridge, the fluid is compressed, causing it to release the heat that was pulled from inside the fridge. The inside of the fridge gets colder while the outside of the fridge gets hotter.
Think about that… At the same time this guy is blowing cool air from the icebox, he’s releasing hot air from around the pipes behind the fridge. The result is that the room actually gets HOTTER than it was before, because the compressor and fans are working harder than they would have before. Heat is energy and energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only change form (or get pumped around a bit like he’s doing).
Worst case scenario: he burns out the fridge motor and is out several hundred bucks… but at least that way he’s cooler than he’s gonna be with this “Air Conditioner.”
@Brad
You’re absolutely right. But it is some well-made duct work. It reminds me of something I did once:
My apartment had windows that open sideways. Not good for window air conditioners. I set up a window unit on some crates in front of the window, made some carboard box ductwork to get the hot air from the condenser out the window!
I have to admit I’ve been tempted to try what these guys have done sometimes, though…
Must have been a product of major desperation. Heat can make people’s judgments fail it would seem.
More wrong with this:
#1. The duct from the freezer to the fan is way to small to allow much air movement.
#2. This isn’t a deal killer, but the fan would be able to be soooo much more effective if it were pushing instead of pulling. (If the fan were inside the freezer.)
#3. #1 and #2 don’t even matter because there’s no air intake into the freezer… All this guy’s doing is moving the air near the fan around a lot, and heating his kitchen…
@ Garnet
Yea that must be the case.
BTW how many of you noticed the guy in the background.
Is he wearing pants!? Must have been a product of major desperation. Heat can make people’s judgments fail it would seem.
@Brad
Yes but the heat from the fridge is in the kitchen where it was anyways. The cold of the fridge went from being locked in to being blowing in this guy’s face. It is a win (of sorts) if you are not a thermodynamicist but just a guy who needs more cold in one place and doesn’t care about the whole system.
I think it will need a bit more power than a real aircondition, but only a bit.
Apart from everything Brad said (pointing out the entry level physics fail,) I don’t see a vent for air enter the freezer unit.
Also, @ Daniel: No, just no. The electricity bill alone will make this an epic fail, even if the fridge’s compression unit remains intact.
Sorry, but what’s with the completely unnecessary Jew joke here?
Two words: utilities included.
@ Daniel: That would be true if the compressor was perfectly efficient at heat transport; however, it’s not — it generates more waste heat than it removes from the compartment, hence increasing the total heat in the building.
Plus the whole destroying a major appliance thing (that compressor is meant to keep the already-cool compartment cool, not to run constantly to cool an ever-warming house).
The people commenting here are actually pretty smart. I was surprised at how many people realized how much of an epic fail this is.
Personally I would prefer if you all wouldn’t masturbate your egos here.
I see nothing wrong with this, as long as the refrigerator is unplugged. The freezer could have been a solid chunk of ice. Older units do not have automatic defrosting.
@hunterje
‘K, I’m going to say screw your poor grasp of science and your stupid theorizing because I’ve done this before and it works.
Maybe it’s blowing the other way and he’s simply defrosting his freezer.
The fan blowing the cool air into the living room would cool them while the kitchen got hotter. A return duct would have made this epic win.
Result of this will be: 1. A huge power bill and 2. a wrecked refrgerator.
@Brad
I don’t know what thermodynamics you learned but liquids are incompressible.
@Craig
No, The freezer wouldn’t be very efficient at cooling that volume of air. Pretty soon they’ll have a fan blowing infinitesimally cooler air into the living room and a somewhat heated kitchen.
And eventually, the results stated by QuickFix.
No doubt this will ruin the fridge and result in a biblical electric bill and a super hot kitchen. It still results in a cooler living room, which is what our enterprising engineer meant to achieve. Don’t let long term analysis get in the way of immediate satisfaction. Specially in the subsidized economy of a guy that won’t have to pay either the electric bill or the fridge repair.
You people are all quite stupid. Based upon a picture you think the guy is an idiot. How do you know it’s not just a tongue in cheek joke? Just because you made it through a 101 physics course now you want to spout shit like you are physicists. Ah the ignorance of youth and their lack of being able to recognize humor.
Yikes! The unit in a fridge is meant to cool a room the size of *A FRIDGE*. It would have been more efficient to freeze a bunch of ice trays, then indulge in a bunch of iced beverages. That way you get your security deposit back…
@Daniel
Incorrect.
Attached to the oven, it doubles as a heating system in the winter.
Daniel may be incorrect scientifically but you have to give a little credit to any one who uses the word “thermodynamicist” in a sentence.
@Badgirl
That’s the spirit!
That’s awesome.
Agreed, it would totally never work for more than a minute or so, but still…I’m just impressed by the awesomeness of the duct-taping and cutting of the boxes. Just awesome.
The fan’s just going to spin uselessly anyway; note the size of the fan vs the cross-sectional area of the “duct”, as well as the lack of an intake duct to the freezer. It can hardly move any air at all except by leakage.
@dono1
“Maybe it’s blowing the other way and he’s simply defrosting his freezer.”
LOL! Yeah, he got sick of the hairdryer and icepick method, so he’s taking a short break to play his X-Box a while as it thaws itself!
@Badgirl
OK, I thought of several responses to this ranging from “The law of conservation hardly requires more then entry-level physics” to “I would if it wasn’t a violation of common sense as well.” but when all’s said and done I have to grudgingly admit that you are right.
Well played, Daniel, well played.
@Czernobog
Conservation of energy, that is.
It’s funny coz it’s relevant.
@K.Eberhardt Exactly. Thank you for understanding physics, namely heat and mechanics.
I suspect there is more heat exchange through simple convection between kitchen and living room than the fridge/freezer compressor can achieve on its own, so Daniel’s model won’t work practically. In other words, the fridge isn’t strong enough to make it “really hot” in the kitchen.
Also, a quick search reveals that a small fridge moves about 100 BTU/hr (this one maybe even 200). My window a/c unit has 8,000 BTU/hr, and that one just cools a single room. So even if the fridge was placed in the door, with the backside facing the outside, with everything nicely insulated, it wouldn’t work.
However, I’d say this will work for a few minutes until the ice has melted. But you might as well turn off the freezer during that time.
Worthy of notice is the fact that all the duct work was done with the box of the fan, which raises the possibility that the fan was purchased just for this purpose.
@dude
I am a certified HVAC technician, and I can tell you that this will not work. What was that about ignorance?
@smith
Refrigerant evaporates…root word VAPOR…before it reaches the compressor. It condenses into a liquid inside the condenser, after the compressor has pumped the vapor there.
Look up Rube Goldberg.
@Daniel
Well, after all it does say “Box Fan” (and he’s using it on an ice box).
@Daniel
That’s ridiculous. The heat might have been there, but now there’s more, because a fridge creates more heat then cold.
Besides, whatever way you look at it, that fridge will now try to attain a freezing temperature (and will fail); the compressor will be working 24/7. A fridge is NOT made to work 24/7.
PV=nRT
@Czernobog – That’s the spirit!
he should try my invention; run water from the cold water tap through a junked car radiator into the drain and blow the fan through the radiatior. not so good if you pay for your water, though. (i know it’s not too environmentally conscious, but neither is a regular AC).
@Nipuna I was wondering about the half-naked guy too! Don’t most people put on pants when they’re having their photo taken?
It could work if you just wanted to cool the air in a certain spot, like just keeping it pointed at your recliner or whatever.
No, no, no. See, you’ve all outsmarted yourselves and gotten it wrong. All of your complaints cancel. Watch.
1. As many have pointed out, there is no return duct into the freezer.
2. The duct is small.
3. Combining #1 and #2, the fan will slowly suck out all of the cold air from the freezer and blow it on them, thus cooling them down. If the duct was larger, it’d be over with very quickly, so the small duct is a feature, not a bug.
4. Once the freezer is empty of air, it becomes a vacuum.
5. The heat generated by the refrigerator is mostly given off convectively into the air.
6. Vacuums have no air to move heat convectively.
7. Radiated heat can travel in a vacuum, but only in a straight line.
8. They are around the corner from the fridge.
9. Combining #4 to #8, after the air runs out the fan will be blowing a vacuum over the people in the other room and hence the hot conductive air will not reach them. Since they are around a corner, the radiated heat has no direct line of sight to them. Result: cool.
There, now that’s some right good thermolydamits there.
@Shelby: Maybe the whole contraption’s just to cool the XBox?
@kalafudra: What Jew joke?! Oh, you mean the name – you must not be familiar with Rube Goldberg. Has nothing to do with the ethnicity of his name, and everything to do with what the man did: make incredibly (intentionally) complex contraptions to accomplish simple tasks.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
————————-
Unnecessary jew joke? Took me a while to figure out what you were talking about. It’s NOT a jew joke. Google “Rube Goldberg.” He was a cartoonist famous for his depictions of unnecessarily complicated machines to perform simple tasks. Remember the game “Mouse Trap?” that’s an example of a Rube Goldberg machine.
my son actually did something like that with 12 pack dr pepper boxes and an ac window unit
Heavens! Kalafudra makes me feel so old. I thought everybody knew who Rube Goldberg was! Do you remember the automobile ad (I *am* old; I can’t remember the make of car!) where a ball-bearing rolls along and knocks over a can of oil, and that makes a lever go up, and so forth, until finally the motor turns over? THAT is Rube Goldberg!
Add to all of this the fact that whatever miniscule amount of cold air the fan manages to suck out of the freezer, is going to be blown right by the back of the fridge, where the condenser coils are located. And those condenser coils are working overtime trying to get rid of the excess heat being generated by this contraption…cancellation.
is tais a photobomb? cause that guy on the right almost has his cock hanging loose D;
HAHA !!! That’s very smart !!!
Imma do that if i dont’ get no A|C
@GuiGui
I hope some of you do understand the basics of how a refrigerator works, as in, unless you are venting the air that cools the condenser coils down to somewhere outside you are just cooling and heating the room in equal amounts and in doing such… you are not cooling a room down AT ALL. in fact the condenser running will wind up making more heat than cold (thanks friction!)
@JH
Haha I think it would take a lot more than that to do the trick, maybe if he set it up in a big walk in meat freezer, but the result of that may just then turn out to be nothing but defrosted meat!
You’re double wrong, first of all Brad did not said “liquids” but “fluid”, it is not the same, gas is fluid too you know?! And second liquids ARE compressible, but not as much as gas.
Had to be said.
For the price of the fan and refridgerator, hy coulda bought a good ac unit!
Ahhhh, Luvly! …. there must be quite a vacuum in the freezer box by now!?? … Nice Work tho Fella!
The best part about this jury-rig is the use of the box the fan came in. Somebody at Lasko offer this person a job in Engineering and Marketing!
Probably works better than those cheap chinese portable units.
I’m pleased to announce that I completely thought “Rube Goldberg” myself when I saw this kludge, and thus “got” the reference. (I also don’t assume that everyone with a German last name is necessarily Jewish, “kalafudra,” or that citing a name implies a joke at the expense of others who might share that name…)
Anyway, I was also reminded of a “Simpsons” episode in which Homer built a tent around an open refrigerator door so the whole family could beat the heat. Of course the compressor couldn’t handle it and the whole thing stopped working. “Marge, does the oven have a ‘cold’ setting?”
And here I thought the flow of air was going the other way, to defrost the freezer, because I thought this was a plausible alternative to my hair dryer and putty knife defrosting equipment.
@OHF
I wouldn’t hire anyone for an engineering job that doesn’t understand thermodynamics principles.
make it more efficient by exhausting the heat from the back of the fridge outside the house
First of all, it has to be said that this obviously won’t work to cool the room down over time. Fridges move heat; they do not destroy it. The ‘cold output’ of the inside of the fridge will always be balanced by the heat output at the back. The energy used to power the heat pump will also be converted into heat, ensuring that the system as a whole *generates* heat.
With all of this being said, however, this device could still make a good AC. The heat produced is released from the coils in the back of the fridge, where it will mostly rise to the ceiling. All of the cold air is being directed into the room where the person is. The hose becomes warmer overall, but one room actually does cool down. Thus, this AC device is effective, but limited to producing highly localised cooling. The design could be further improved if the heat could be dumped further from the area to be cooled – preferably outside the house. This would make the unit equivalent to a normal AC device.
Maybe the freezer is broken and he is doing what he can to save his frozen foods while waiting for a new unit. Also I never realized how many geniuses trolled the websites full of pictures meant to be funny to spout technical facts about how this or that wouldn’t work. It’s a joke…say haha and move on to the next one. If I wanted to know why it works or doesn’t Ill go to howstuffworks.com
@Paddy, @Mark Reed:
Thanks for the pointer! Yes, I didn’t know about Rube Goldberg, but that clears things up.
Robyn -
Hair dryer and putty knife? Why create extra work for yourself?
Just boil a pot of water on the stove, turn off the freezer, put the whole pot with lid in the freezer, close the door, go watch a movie, and the freezer will be defrosted.
Using a putty knife can, depending on how your freezer is built, gouge a hole in the coolant channels.
This may actually warm your house up more than it cools. The constant running of a compressor motor could actually raise the temperature. I would be interested in knowing the results.
1. they likely live in a dorm or college where no ‘real’ A/C is allowed
2. they likely dont have to pay for electricity or fridge repair
3. you dont know what is behind the cardboard inside the freezer
The best way to make this work would be to fill the freezer with bags of water and let them freeze overnight or during the day while at class. then, in the afternoon when you get home, use the pictured contraption to release that stored up cold energy as ‘AC’ into the living room. A sheet hanging between the living room and kitchen would improve the process. However, I had a similar sized dorm with a 12,000 BTU window AC and it barely kept just the living room cold. I’m afraid their solution won’t drop the temperature by more than a degree or two, best case. Still, it is basically free.
What about draping soaked blankets over a fan in the window to evaporatively cool the room?
@Jason
Really????? You do not know who Rube Goldberg is???? Damn liberal.
you can’t be too young to know what rube goldberg means!!
try GOOGLE
That’s genius. I had my air conditioner break down last week when it was 105 degrees outside. I took an old milk carton, froze it, then put it in front of a fan. It worked well…. if I stood two inches away.
Point of the story: Don’t live in LA during the summer.
It’s funny, but on a serious note, that would actually create a net INCREASE in overall temperature.
All this is missing is a way to remove the heat the fridge is making.
If they’d turned the fridge so that its back faced the doorway, and kludged more cardboard in to seal it (blocking the doorway, yes) they’d divide the apartment into two areas, slowly heating one and cooling the other.
A dish rack with some wet teatowels on it in front of the fan would be a good evaporative (and fridgeless) option.
That’s a cool idea. However, the fridge uses energy and releases more heat than it does cold air into the room. Also, the BTU rating on the compressor in that fridge is very weak. An little window shaker A/C compressor’s BTU rating is usually around 5,000-10,000, where as a fridge compressor’s rating is somewhere usually around a couple of hundred.
So even if the fridge didn’t release more heat than cold air (not possible since it is using energy=heat), the amount of BTU that it would take to cool the room 1 degree is way more than the fridge can produce. It would take days, given no more heat was released into the room via other sources IE poor insulation, computers, hot coils under the fridge, etc.
I get the concept. If the person who made this wanted this to work better, they could duct the heat somewhere else. You can be figure out mathematically what it would take in BTU to cool a certain volume of air 1 degree and divide that volume into the size of the room. But then you have to factor in the input of heat into the room in BTU and subtract that from your progress. Puts you in the negative still.
@steve
I was going to say the same thing until I read his comment. As soon as I saw this pic my 1st thought was “that wouldn’t work” and my second thought was “heh” … ease up hoss.
@kalafudra
lol at ignorance
@Lady Anne
That’s honda accord commercial.
MacGyver did it.
Rube Goldberge was my hero. Lookup what he did. If only we could get energy sources from his machines.
@Lady Anne
That would be a Honda commercial. I’m pretty sure it was for the Accord.
That’s one cool device — but won’t the fridge breaks down because all the work it has to do as an A/C?
Um, all this does is burn out your freezer. Also, the heat has to go somewhere and that’s from the back of the freezer so it also makes the kitchen hotter. Did this kid even graduate from elementary school?
lol, i agree, this is meant to be funny, i think the ppl in the pic will realise soon enough that it wont really work, not for any appreciable time anyways. not to mention, that the cardboard would most likely get soaked from the condensation, and get all nasty with mildew n other unpleasant things.
@Lady Anne
T’was Honda – http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4187430023476942057#
What’s funny about this is all the technical and serious comments. It’s a joke, just laugh and move on
You mean he made an AC out of an AC?! Genius! @jo babineaux
It would work better if the back end was outside…
This is just plain sad. It’s dumb. It will ruin the frig, run up the electricity bill, cause the room temp to go up, not down. and advertise tot the world your complete lack of a clue.
People don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics. It’s ok.@yoursolace
This is completely useless because the person hasn’t attached an exhaust to the back of the fridge/freezer to take the excess heat outside. It’s simple physics: The work used to cool the air inside the freezer(now being pumped into the room) produces a greater amount of heat out of the back of the fridge/freezer, so the temperature inside the room will actually increase not decrease.
Hurry! Its hot in here! Plug in the fridge! Gotta cool my bunyuns..
@Paddy
The only saving grace for him and the physics is that the fridge is in the next room.
As Tallyho, Texasliberal, mike, andothers have said, The net result is the fans and compressor are actually adding a good deal of heat to the situation.
In all reality it is actually adding heat due to the inefficiency of actuating any type of energy into another form.
K, I’m gonna prove you wrong now. You apparently have no grasp of science, even that of middle school general science classes.
I’ll assume that you recieved evidence of being “cooler”. I’ll also have to assume that you did not take a temperature reading of the entire thermodynamic system. If you were to take the output of a freezer (cold air) and channeled it to another part in the same thermodynamic system, then you would have a temperature gradient in the system. the area that cold air is being channeled to would be cooler and the area around the condensor would be warmer. However, the overall temperature of the system as a whole did not change.
The system becomes warmer when electrical energy is inefficiently added to the system from an outside source (all energy actuation is inefficient). Some electrical energy is used for completing the condensor’s cycle, however, some is spent on friction, overcoming gravity, and as part of the inefficient actuation of energy from one form (electrical) to another (mechanical).
that defies the laws of physics
Now why didn’t I ever think of THAT?!?!?! LOL LMBO!!!
Wow Thor214. That’s the very definition of the aforementioned ego-stroking.
I like the idea that there’s huge chunk of ice in the fridge and the fridge is unplugged. Might as well throw 90% of the comments on this thread out the window because of an incorrect assumption.
The Honda commercial is called Honda Cog. You might notice some similarities to Der Lauf der Dinge.
This guy invented the electric car wheels that recharge the battery while you are driving! Actually all he needs to do is to duct-tape the box the fridge came in TO THE BACK of the fridge, then grab some dryer venting and duct tape that to the hood of the range. Just to be sure, better upgrade the range hood fan to a 1000 W motor too!