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Old 06-02-2008, 05:01 PM   #61 (permalink)
cfg83
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Southern California
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1999 Saturn SW2 - '99 Saturn SW2 Wagon
Team Saturn
90 day: 40.49 mpg (US)
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Arminius -

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arminius View Post
Oh yeah, the least anyone can do to hypermile their air condioner is make sure it's always in the shade.

http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/publicati...SEC-PF-302-96/
Based on this, I went ahead and shaded my South Facing wall AC unit with Coroplast, metal construction brackets, hard disk magnets, and zip ties :



This shows the East facing part of the AC that is exposed. The AC will almost never be on in the morning, so I am not worried about this exposure :



This is the West facing side. It is almost totally covered by an aluminum window shade already, so again, I am not worried about it.



I was lucky because I was able to use hard disk magnets to attach the construction brackets to the AC unit. We have a ton of obsolete hard disks at work (200 MB to 4 GB) from recycled PCs. We needed to wipe the data and/or destroy the hard disk. It's much faster to destroy the disk and extract it's "sweet magnetic nectar" than it is to wipe, so I am breaking them up as needed.

By sheer luck the Seagate hard disk magnets screw holes were an exact match to the construction bracket holes :



The right picture allows you to see the bracket holes.
The left picture shows the magnet attached with screws.

This is not true of all hard disk magnets, but it made life much easier for me.

What is great about the magnets is that I didn't have to drill any holes into the AC unit. If the wind picks up too much, I would think that the coroplast shades would "pop off" and fall to the ground, no biggee. However, I think it's more likely that they would "pop off and back" due to the magnetism.

CarloSW2

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