How to Make a Portable Air Conditioner at Home

Hi readers, In this instructables i will show you how to make this easy yet very effective air conditioner.

Now as I said in the above statement you may ask, what is special in this air conditioner?

To begin with, this is a portable air conditioner that gives you the freedom to use it in your comfort place, Maybe you feel a little hot when playing a game or watching a movie just place this in front of your desk and you can enjoy the cool air in no time.

Secondly, it uses ice to cool the air around you which makes this have the ability to cool the air very instantly.

Thirdly like the other air conditioners, it does not use freons(refrigerants used in air conditioners) which is said to be a contributor to ozone layer depletion.

How does this Portable air conditioner work?

CPU fan is a well-known device that is used to keep our CPU cool by removing the heat from the processor.

We are using this fan in our project to supply/pump air into the container.

Via CPU fan air enters the container filled with ice and the end result is cooling the air.

As we have provided a dedicated slot for air exit on the container from the other end air exits carrying the cold air.

The cost factor involved in building this

Before giving you the price to build this let us know some basic information about air conditioners.

We already know that air conditioners that are available in the market cost you 100s of dollars and also come with a big setup which makes it not easy to carry wherever you go!

Now there are even smaller versions of air coolers but even those consume lots of power.

Here I'm using this info just to give you an idea of how cheaply the air conditioners can be built at home.

Our air conditioner can be built for under 20$ provided you have some tools already available at your home.

Advanatages

• The air conditioner that we are building is powered by rechargeable lithium ion batteries that give you long last lasting hours of backup.
• You receive cold air instantly after you switch on the power button!
• Good for quickly beating the heat in long hours of work.
• Sitting in front of this for long period might turn you into an iceman!! Just kidding.

Disadvantages

Every creation has its own limitation.

• Here the limitation is you have to get your own ice.
• cooling time to cool an entire room may take some time.
• Ice melts after some time, you may need to replace it a while after.

With these being said let us see how to make this air conditioner.

Most materials that are required to build this can be found at home. Here is the complete list of materials for this project

• Plastic container of size 19*12*5 cms (L*B*H),L=length, B= Breadth, H=Height
• PVC tubes (Your own choice of shape)
• CPU Cooling Fan of 80mm, I recycled from my old CPU(i will be using terms such as PC fan and DC fan all are the same )
• Soldering Iron with some soldering lead
• Simple on/off Switch
• Lithium-Ion batteries x 2
• Battery holder for 18650 batteries
• Compass for marking
• Hot glue
• Cutter
• Ice

We will add a CPU fan to the container/Box.

To do this we have to first mark the area where the PC fan will be installed, Open the lid of the container, and keep the CPU fan on top of the Lid, Now from the bottom part of Lid you can trace the shape/dimensions of the CPU fan

I used a compass made from metal to mark, you can also use markers if you don't have a compass.

Once you outline the shape, Cut the extras using a cutter, if your plastic is kind of brittle and does not cut properly you can try heating the cutter a bit and continue to cut.

End of this process you will have a slot as you can see from the last image on this step.

As we did in the previous step we need to follow the same steps here to make space for the airflow.

Mark the PVC tube dimensions on the lid of the plastic container, Since we are using 2 PVC tubes make 2 slots.

After the marking is complete cut the marked areas with a cutter.

Here one thing you need to make a note of is not apply great force while cutting, We already have holes in the box lid part that contributes to the overall strength of the lid, Forcing too much may lead to cracks on the lid.

Don't be soo size specific, small under/over cut when compared to marked areas would do as we will be sealing this in utter steps to prevent any air leakage.

After we have made the slots ready it will take only a few simple steps to get these components together.

Note: Do not heat the hot glue gun too much, Using too much high-temperature glue might disfigure the container/plastic box as we know plastic melts when provided with too much heat.

We will start by adding a few drops of hot glue to the edges of the PC fan Body, Add glue to all 4 corners and place it on top of the slot

Now to make this air sealed add hot glue to all the sides of the PC Fan Body.

After this is done we will repeat the same steps for the PVC tubes also, Even here you have to make the space between PVC tubes and the container air sealed.

Follow this very simple circuit diagram to power the CPU fan.

Let me explain the circuit diagram very quickly.

1. DC fan/CPU fan has 2 terminals, red and black
2. red is a positive power supply from the dc source and black is for negative power supply.
3. The positive terminal/ Red wire of the PC fan is directly connected to the positive side of the battery supply
4. Now we will add a switch between the negative terminal of the CPU fan and the battery holder

To place the battery holder refer to the images above and use some hot glue to keep everything in place

Did You know?

Wire connections can be insulated using hot glue. Yes, you can see it as i have done in this project, refer last image of this step.

Our project is almost complete, the only thing left now is to test out this project.

Most of them already know how to use this some might still be wondering how.

• Insert the batteries into the battery holder
• Switch on the power button, DC fan will start spinning
• Check the airflow by placing the bare hand in front of PVC tubes, you feel the air flowing
• Now off the switch and add some ice to the container
• Close the lid and switch on power button
• You can feel the cold air instantly, to show the air flow i have added red color ribbons in front of PVC tubes

Beat the heat with this cold air, Just place it in front of you and enjoy the cold air, you must definitely try this project in your spare time, If you come across any doubts in any phase/step let me know in the comments.

If you want to watch the working kindly watch this video, If your browser does not support the video embedded in this step, Just copy and paste this link on the URL tab on your browser https://youtu.be/kqIw_pjPFQc

Thank you for showing interest in my instructable.