Pretty Cheap House Cooling?

[ebacherville]

hmmm using well water may be a idea , just return the water to the well.. any one heard of doing this at all?

[ebacherville]

little googling gave me this...
Cheap: How to Get Free Air Conditioning From Your Water System

[taco]

that is interesting....
what part of wv u from?

[MazdaMatt]

diverting water before it goes to the hot water tank, toilet, etc is a good idea. Basically any place that does not require COLD water could have its supply diverted to a rad first. The kitchen tap is the only place that I can think of that i'd use COLD water from without turning on the hot tap a little.

[ajax_6531]

How about a weave of large diameter tubing spread throughout your yard underground? As the water flows, the greater surface area of contact between the tubing and the outside would be more efficient in heat transfer. You can use whatever you want without the worry of freezing as long as it's buried below the frost line. Be sure to insulate anything above the frost line and in the air.

[BrianAbington]

Originally Posted by Coyote X

But I did manage to find a potentially endless supply of 55 gallon barrels for free

If that is the case...get them all...use what you need to experiment on your system...then take the rest of the endless supply to a metal recycler...and make some extra money.

In omaha scrap metal is selling for about 190 a ton.

[iHero]

I'd be worried about the tank leaking -- how about a boatload of tubing in layers in a long skinny trench?

How can you incorporate a cheap windmill and solar reflector into this?

[Coyote X]

We don't get wind here I think the record for the town is 50mph wind. Normally the wind is maybe 1-2mph at best and before a storm we might get 5-10mph wind.

I don't really have a plan for when a barrel gets old enough to leak but I figure I can get an easy 5-10 years out of them if I make sure they are coated well with undercoating or something else similar.

But before I can do any of it I have to get caught up on all the other random work that needs done around here. Really I probably won't get started trying this out till spring.

[Jmca]

I was looking at your thread and now I am picking up a rad (Im going to use the well system Idea and don't want to contaminate it). I'm thinking that I will hook the rad to my cold water hose from my washer, with a y garden hose, and then have the rad in front of my furnace and just have the blower hose going. It will probably take some time to get it cool in here but once it does it shouldn't be a problem

[jtbo]

Just be careful with condensing when you build these systems.

My tap water is well below +10C, pipes run in bathroom and at summer those pipes are often rather wet when I run water, air temperature is higher and can contain more humidity than surface of pipes where temperature is lot less, so water condenses to that cold surface from the indoor air.

This might sound a little, but when pipes constantly are cool it can amount a lot water during 24hours and water is not good at wrong places in the house. Some insulation that is not letting humidity enter to insulation and pipe surface, would solve that and naturally improve efficiency of the system.

Old radiators have had coolant in them probably, here we use Glyckol/water mix of 50/50, your area may wary, but I would be cautious of running water through radiator, some closed loop heat exhanger made from simple bucket and copper spiral might be already better to stay safe side.

Just some random thoughts that came up while reading this stuff.

Table fan, carbdboard + duct tape might be also nice way to get air moving trough radiator with low cost and ok efficiency, also put fan to such air from radiator for lower noise and greater efficiency, that is what I learned when playing with PC water cooling, there I had car heater matrix that I used to cool cooling liquid for pc, system is really similar to this, only that it used metal block to cool cpu and gpu, with house cooling scale is just bigger and block is replaced with cool water source, it does not matter if it is heat or cold that is radiated, only with cold one need to be careful with humidity and condencing, which also comes to play with computer cooling when you go extreme.

Anyway, guys doing water cooling systems by themselves know quite a bit about air and water flow and some even know how to deal with condensing issues too, one just need to scale that up a bit.

4-5C increase in house temperatures when I use my current air cooled pc, boy have I thought about setting up water cooling and to went that heat outside to keep house temps down, at winter of course another radiator to warm the house, cooling is not necessary here, temps are still below +20C daytime, even there was three days with temps bit higher, even up to +24C one day, but less than 10 days this summer when temperature has been above +20C.

Anyway, copper coil to fireplace and transferring heat with such setup to upstairs is something I have been thinking, again lot of similar things applies as with cooling, radiator with fan is so much better transferring heat compared to those normal no fan models that are used in houses.