They are all the rage on social media, with countless versions, each more promising than the last, but not all that glitters is gold. The heat is here to stay, and it’s time to take steps to keep cool at home, such as applying tips and tricks to cool down your home, achieving the ideal temperature without using too much electricity and avoiding sky-high electricity bills.
Some of these tricks usually work well, although others seem more complicated and of dubious usefulness, such as creating our own homemade air conditioner with household materials in true MacGyver style. Does it work?
An air conditioner with a box, a tube, duct tape and a fan
On social media and platforms such as YouTube, there are many videos explaining how to make this type of air conditioner ourselves with household materials and at almost no cost.
This is the case, for example, in this video, where they use a standing fan and a polystyrene box, this other one, where a plastic bucket is used, and this video, where a lunch box is recycled and has a more ‘professional’ appearance.
In all of them, the idea is basically the same: we have a container with a certain amount of insulation where we put a cold material and from which we take one or more tubes to extract the air using a fan.
This cold material can be cool water or directly ice cubes or frozen bottles that we must have previously put in the refrigerator until they become a block.
Does it work? Yes, it does, because the air from the fans will be able to extract the cold from inside the box and distribute it better than if we simply left the ice on a container on the table. However, the invention has several drawbacks.
For example, the cooling capacity is very low, depending on the speed of the fan, which must be set to low so that the surrounding air has time to cool down, and it will be short-lived in terms of time and space.
In general, although many videos claim that it is possible to lower the temperature of a medium-sized room, the reality is that in a room larger than 10 m2, the drop will be minimal. We also have the issue of poor energy efficiency, as this system for reusing the cold is not very efficient.
We need to be constantly refilling the compartment with ice or frozen bottles that we must first cool in the freezer, using electricity in the process and making the appliance work harder in the hottest months, so it is not really “free”.
That said, as a craft experiment to do with the kids on boring, hot summer afternoons, it could be interesting.
