Homemade car air conditioner. Recommendations for the manufacture of car air conditioning with your own hands. Car mini air conditioner: is there any sense in it
Without air conditioning is harmful and dangerous to health. This can lead to thermal shock, which creates an unsafe situation for both the driver and bystanders. Besides, even if it doesn't come to that, hardly anyone likes to sweat while sitting in a hot car. Of course, this problem is not so important for those who drive without traffic jams on smooth roads. But what to do if the windows cannot be opened or you have to stand in a traffic jam for a long time. And you need to do the air conditioner, how exactly, we will consider below.
The conditioner described below is rather primitive. The fact is that he works on ice, so it lasts for about an hour of work. But this problem can be solved by installing Peltier elements. For example, such elements, thanks to electric current, can cool water, and the air conditioner will work until the battery is discharged. One way or another, this homemade product will be a great option for improvements and reflections.
Materials and tools for car air conditioner:
- plastic container (refrigerator bag);
- a small 12V water pump (possible from the aquarium);
- heater radiator from the car;
- wires, pipes for connecting the pump;
- two fans;
- dremel;
- silicone;
- piano loops;
- plug for connection to the cigarette lighter and more.
Making air conditioner
Step one. Pump installation
First of all, you need to fix the pump, it is fixed at the bottom of the container. For such purposes, a pump from an aquarium or from a glass washer tank is suitable. After installing the wires from the pump must be pulled out.
Step two. Installing fans
The author used 12V computer coolers as fans. Fans are installed in the cover. Since the lid in such containers is double, you need to cut a square from the inside to fit two coolers. On the other hand, two holes are cut out for coolers, in such situations it is convenient to work with a dremel. Fans are oriented to exhaust the air from their container. Coolers are fastened with screws, which are usually included in the kit.
Step three. Radiator installation
The author installs the radiator from the stove with inside covers, its nozzles should look down. Silicone is suitable for attaching the radiator, you can also use hot glue or epoxy.
Step four. The final stage of assembly
To make the lid easy to open and change the ice, the author fastens it with a piano loop. Now you can connect the radiator to the pump, for this one hose is enough, that is, the pump outlet is connected to the radiator inlet. In this case, the system will work, however, the murmur of water will be heard. To avoid this, you can put a hose on the outgoing pipe. Well, now it remains only to connect all the components to the on-board network.
If the operation of the coolers and the pump requires less voltage than 12V, you can try to power everything through a mobile phone charger. The author connects the device through the cigarette lighter.
To start the air conditioner, you need to pour ice into the container, and then pour water. After power is applied, ice water will be pumped through the radiator. At the same time, the coolers will blow cold air out of the container into the passenger compartment. Since such an air conditioner is not particularly effective, it will be necessary to bury all windows and doors in the car well. At least some hours of coolness with such an air conditioner are provided. During this time, you can wait out the traffic jam or drive through a problematic section of the road with the windows closed.
By the same principle, you can make a more powerful air conditioner for the home, powered by 220V. By the way, ordinary tap water can be used as a coolant by passing it through the radiator. In this case, the pump is not needed.
Many buyers are not willing to shell out a substantial enough amount of money to buy a car with air conditioning. Often they reason in a practical way, believing that the driver and passenger in the summer can be blown by a stream of fresh air from open windows. But it is worth noting that summer driving is not always dynamic, therefore, both on the highway and in city traffic jams, air conditioning in a car becomes simply a vital element, since it is likely that passengers can get
Why do many decide to install with their own hands? Because this procedure in a specialized salon is often quite expensive, requiring significant efforts on the part of professionals who do everything necessary to prepare the site and debug the entire interior cooling system in accordance with the placement of the rest of the vehicle's components. This is due to the fact that installing an air conditioner in a car that is already fully assembled is a rather complicated and troublesome task compared to installation at the car assembly stage. However, this often does not stop vehicle owners. That is why you should imagine something in the car with your own hands?
To begin with, it is worth dividing all foreign cars into two types according to where they were assembled. First of all, Japanese cars are distinguished, as well as vehicles of European brands and other cars produced with the assistance of European concerns or according to a similar principle.
Installing an air conditioner in a car with your own hands, if the car belongs to the first category, as professionals estimate, is quite simple. This is due to the fact that the evaporator in these cars is located near or at the knees of the front passenger, which allows for easy access to it. It is more difficult to install an air conditioner in a car with your own hands when it comes to vehicle second category. This usually takes several days of work, since in them the evaporator is usually located deep in the engine compartment. If the work is carried out by a professional, then his work can be facilitated by the fact that there are wires in the car that are designed for the air conditioner. The same can be said about the presence of a specially designated place for the device.
Installing the air conditioner in the car from the cigarette lighter is quite simple. Usually everything you need to know is described in the manual for the car itself and for the device that you are going to install. First you need to assemble the air conditioner on the garage floor to know how it will look. Installation should begin with the installation of the compressor and clutch. The air conditioning radiator is often mounted in front of the engine radiator. The evaporator must be located either in the cabin or under the hood. produced in a specialized service.
It is worth saying that if you are not completely sure about own forces, then it is worth contacting specialists who are able to perform this task quite qualified.
To make a homemade portable car air conditioner, you will need:
Plastic tank with lid. (Plastic basket or something else preferably with a hinged lid, but not required);
- Automotive stove radiator;
- Hoses of the cooling system;
- computer cooler - 2 pieces;
- bilge pump (can be bought on ebay for less than $10;
- cigarette lighter plug and wires;
- Bolts, nuts, screws.
Manufacturing
We mark the holes on the lid of the plastic tank for coolers, and cut out 2 holes with a knife.
Using self-tapping screws, screws or special fasteners, fix 2 coolers on the plastic cover.
Mount the stove radiator to the plastic cover, it is very easy to do, just drill a few holes along the edges and fix the radiator with bolts.
The radiator can be closed with a plastic cover cut out of plastic.
Mount the bilge pump at the bottom of the plastic tank, and connect with a hose to 1 outlet on the stove radiator.
If the plastic tank does not have a hinged lid, it does not matter. make it folding with the help of a piano loop.
In order for water to circulate through the radiator of the stove from leaking out of the plastic container, a piece of rubber was fixed to the lid with self-tapping screws.
Wire connection.
In parallel, use glue to connect the wires from the coolers and the pump to the wires of the cigarette lighter plug.
Homemade portable air conditioner assembly.
The principle of operation of a home-made portable car air conditioner is described in the photo below.
Several liters of cold water are poured into the container and a bag of ice is lowered. Cold water is pumped into the stove radiator with the help of a bilge pump, cools it and goes down into the tank by gravity.
2 coolers use the coolness of the stove radiator to cool the air.
Using a homemade portable car air conditioner in the car. Operates from a cigarette lighter.
Using a homemade car portable air conditioner indoors. Runs on battery or power supply.
I was absent from Moscow for about 5 weeks. Returning through the intense heat that began back in Pskov, and the smoke in the Tver region, the capital met with a surprise - a great demand for air conditioners and fans.
In many stores, these items were not available at all, and if something was, then the cost was already 3-4 times higher. The queue for the installation of a split system stretched for 2-3 weeks.
An absurd mess? No, not at all! After a little thought, on the day of my arrival, it was assembled in my apartment. However, I had to not only “brain out”, but also required some financial expenses.
I will try to express my thoughts in this article in an accessible way.
So, the problem statement:
Given: Enough money, sensible hands, there is a desire to purchase a split system or a fan, but there is neither one nor the other.
Question: What to do? The answer is obvious! Let's do the air conditioning.
We are trying to assemble an air conditioner with our own hands
There is no fan - therefore, it needs to be done. We are going to a place where it would be difficult, at first glance, to find them, but this is the right step. Quite right - to the nearest auto shop (auto parts store), and better for domestic models. We unscrew the spout or filter of your faucet in advance to select tubes for it.
- Radiator. Any will do, but more than the Oka. Better without automation, otherwise it will need to be turned off. I purchased a cooling radiator 21082-1301012, the cost is about 1295 rubles.
- A car radiator fan with a rated voltage of 12 volts is suitable for GAZ, VAZ, AZLK, IZH, ZAZ or ZIL cars (power 110 W). Price 1187 rubles;
- Fan frame (fan shroud) - 250 rubles;
- Fasteners for the fan (the cost is a few rubles);
- It is necessary to purchase reinforced rubber tubes, which it would be desirable to cut off in right size. This will probably only be possible at a large car dealership. Their length is selected based on the distance from the location of the air conditioner to the water mixer. In my case, the following lengths were selected: the tube to the radiator inlet and outlet (the largest diameter) is about 1 meter, from the water tap to the radiator pipe - 3 meters (smaller diameter).
- A set of clamps (4 pieces), matched to the diameters of the tubes;
- Inexpensive sealant - 50 rubles;
- Insulating tape - 10 rubles;
- Connector for connecting to a voltage fan - 15 rubles;
- Power supply with DC output, with a voltage of 12 volts. In my case, I used a 230 W power supply from a computer;
- You can purchase a heating electric pump from a Gazelle car, with a set of pipes and clamps. This is to conserve running water. The cost is about 1100 rubles;
My choice fell on such a radiator: Power supply (this is exactly what I had at my disposal): 
For the entire subsequent assembly, I spent about 6 hours of personal time. It also required some additional materials and tools for the manufacture of the radiator retainer: wooden slats, a small sheet of plywood (thickness 15 mm), a wood saw, a set of fasteners, an electric drill and wood drills, a short rope and adhesive tape. It's almost all in my household.
You will need electrical tape to adjust the bending radii of the tubes, as their diameters are different.
The radiator will be placed vertically, the mounting hole for the temperature sensor is plugged. To change the direction of rotation of the fan, change the polarity of the power supply (plus to minus and vice versa).
The assembled device takes coolness from the plumbing system, excess water can be drained into the sewer. The power itself is not high, so other rooms should be closed, and in particular the kitchen. It is a constant heat generator in the apartment, which is worth considering.
I managed to lower the temperature in the room, about 3-4 degrees.
because of air locks the radiator worked at 50% of its area, this problem has not yet been solved.
If a computer power supply is involved, then some nuances should be taken into account, all yellow wires are +12 volts, black ("ground") - minus. The fan wires can be pre-stripped, inserted into the power connector for the hard drive, and fixed with electrical tape. But in my case, for some reason, the performance appeared from the power supply of the red wires (5 volts), probably due to the non-standard unit.
As a result, I got such a funny air conditioner (a towel under the radiator that absorbs condensate): 
The noise from it is not as big as one might think.
The main disadvantages of the system are the loss of fan power due to rotation inversion, it is impossible to turn the structure 180 degrees, and, of course, constant condensate (a towel or a basin comes in handy here).
Can the performance of the system be improved?
It is necessary to assemble a normal case, invert the fan with the correct polarity, turn the flow in the right direction, get rid of air pockets in the radiator and solder the wires securely.
Dear reader, my wish to you: do not stay at home in such heat, but go somewhere to the sea :)
Various feedback on system upgrades and criticism with humor are accepted with pleasure. If my feat is repeated, send pictures to my mail or write in the comments.
P.S. In the radiator, the water supply should be from below, and the "return" from above. A valve is required to release air pockets. Efficient performance at maximum water supply, this lowers the temperature by 5 degrees (on the supply 30.1 on the "return" 24.9 degrees Celsius).
When using an electric pump for the Gazelle, a more powerful power supply will be required.
I glued the side slots in the fan frame (the window sealing tape came up), which increased the efficiency of the cold air flow. 
Probably, once the air conditioner in the car will become the most perfect norm, regardless of the cost and configuration. However, there are still millions of cars “running” on our roads that do not have this useful option, and new ones, also lacking air conditioning, are still being produced. And, therefore, every summer, the heads of car drivers without air conditioning, hot from the sun, visit nervous thoughts about ways to cool the “gas chamber” of a sun-heated cabin using alternative and “asymmetric” methods.
The first thing that the sufferer finds on the Internet for the queries “cool the interior of the car without air conditioning”, “escape from the heat without air conditioning”, etc. is a suggestion to use PET bottles with ice. This idea has been wandering from site to site for years and offhand even looks workable.
Confidence is added by numerous descriptions of garage designs of automotive surrogate "air conditioners" made on the knee and using the same frozen water in soda or beer bottles as a "coolant". They are a variety of boxes and boxes, covered with foil on the inside to prevent cold loss, and with installed fans to blow air through the ice. In principle, this is a logical direction of development aimed at increasing the efficiency of technology, although the main thing is lost behind engineering - attractive simplicity. In any design, you need to take into account the factor of human laziness - no matter how effective the development is, sooner or later it will be thrown onto a dusty shelf, even by the developer himself, if it requires a complex sequence of actions or difficult preparatory work ... Freeze, and then take a couple of bottles with you before the trip - anyone can do it, but fencing boxes with fans is already, according to the majority, too much ...
One way or another, the idea hovers among the masses, but there are very few of those who have tested the technology in practice. Therefore, our task is to destroy or confirm the myth with a thermometer in hand. To check, having received conclusions in dry numbers, and not in subjective sensations, the simplest basic option - can “one and a half” with ice, placed on the dashboard under a stream of air from a fan, make staying in a car without an “air conditioner” at least somewhat more comfortable? And thus understand whether it is expedient in principle to apply further creativity, hands and strength in this direction?
The experiment will look like this. We take two identical cars of the same color, put them side by side in the sun for several hours. After warming up the salons with sunlight in one car, we simply turn on the cabin fan to blow it with outside air, and in the other, we start recirculation and let the air flow onto the glass, blowing several liters of ice frozen in PET bottles lying on the dashboard. After 15 minutes, we look at the result - how much will it be possible to lower the temperature? So let's go!
The temperature in the car interior after three hours spent in the sun is 38 degrees Celsius:
We put ice bottles in one machine, turn on the fans in both, note the time - 15 minutes ...
The result is depressing ... In a car in which the fan worked to purge the cabin with outside air, the temperature dropped to 33 degrees, and in a car in which recirculation was turned on and the air was chasing in a circle, blowing ice bottles - only up to 35.5 degrees ... Banal blowing even without open windows turned out to be more effective than blowing ice in a confined space!
The bottle-cooling myth persists, and although the outcome was predictable, it was still worth checking. At the same time, it is still worth noting that six liters of ice are capable of more, but not in this form!
For any device that works on heat transfer, whether it is an air conditioner or a heater, the most important characteristic is the area of \u200b\u200bthe working surface. For bottles on the dashboard, it is extremely small, plus blowing them is organized inefficiently. If we put the same six liters of ice in a flat ribbed container, similar to a car radiator, placed it in the car and started blowing air through it, the effect would be much more noticeable. But the accompanying difficulties make such an event meaningless a little more than completely ...
Other dead-end ideas of "alternative air conditioners"
What other ideas are visited by car owners without air conditioning with enviable regularity with the onset of summer? You can, of course, install a non-standard universal air conditioner - it, in principle, will not differ in any way from the standard one - except that the controls on the panel will stand out a little in the overall style of the interior. But the cost of installing a "kondeya" on a budget passenger car with components and turnkey work today is approximately 60,000 rubles. Expensive in general...
Therefore, such a decision is quickly discarded and "creative kroilovo" begins. And here, of course, in second place after frozen PET bottles comes the idea of using a mobile or window air conditioner in the car, the cost of which starts from more or less affordable 10,000 rubles even now, in the hot season.
It seems to many that if you put a monoblock household air conditioner on backseat, power through the 12-220 volt inverter and stick the hot air hose out the window, then you can enjoy the coolness! However, none of these dreamers has yet achieved real success... Why is the idea not viable?
The fact is that even the weakest window air conditioner consumes about one and a half kilowatts of power in the cooling mode from the 220 volt network. The inverter efficiency of 12/220 is clearly not 100%, but for ease of demonstration on the fingers, we will take it as one hundred. Accordingly, from the on-board network of 14 volts, such an air conditioner will consume 1,500 watts / 14 volts = 107 amperes through the inverter. The current is crazy, the wiring will be a finger thick + for many generators, even the maximum current output limit is less. We are not talking about the fact that the inverter should be designed for long-term operation with a power of at least a couple of kilowatts - such inverters, as a rule, belong to expensive and specific professional equipment, are extremely rare on sale and cost crazy money ...
The third place idea is the use of Peltier elements. A semiconductor wafer, when current is applied to it, heats up on one side and cools on the other. Buying items is easy, they are not so expensive. Automobile portable refrigerator-boxes work well on such plates, and it seems to many that an air conditioner can be created on the same principle - inexpensive, silent, without a compressor, refrigerant, pipes and evaporators.
Alas, you won’t be able to find a single really working “auto-conde” design on Peltier modules, although there are a lot of projects on various automotive blogs and forums, many even with intermediate reports on the stages of work, demonstrating the fair efforts of DIY enthusiasts. Why? Yes, for the same reason that ice bottles do not work either ... Too small a surface of "cold transfer" of the cold side and the difficulty of organizing effective heat removal from the hot side. To ensure at the very least cooling of the passenger compartment, from the Peltier modules to passenger car should have a roof...
***
So, whatever one may say, there is no alternative to the traditional car compressor air conditioner yet and is not expected in the near future. After all, even in hybrids and electric vehicles that are at the forefront of progress, it has a classic design that has not changed fundamentally since the first air-conditioned cars - Packards and Caddylacs of the early 40s of the twentieth century.
Does your car have air conditioning?
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