Do It Yourself

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Can I pick your collective brains about an idea for a home cooling solution that I have thought of? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago by DontNoodles@discuss.tchncs.de to c/diy@beehaw.org

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I'm planning to construct a home sometime in the near future in hot, arid part of the country. Obviously, keeping the home cool is a major concern and I've been considering all available options.

One of the recurrent ideas discussed online is using geothermal cooling. But I think I don't have enough land to implement it. I have a related idea though.

Water supplied during set hours of the day by the municipality is fairly cool even during the summer months and it is a common practice around here to first let it collect in an underground tank and then pump it to the overhead tank as needed.

What if I create a closed loop system of circulating water with two car radiators: one in the underground tank, submerged in cool water and another in the living area of the home with a fan blowing behind it.

Do you think it'll cause perceptible change in room temperature if there is, say, a temperature difference of 10 degrees Celsius between water and ambiance? I intend it to only reduce the load on the air conditioners and/or just delay the use of AC.

What kind of math/physics will be needed to assess if this is a feasibility? I tried looking hard but could not find anyone else discussing this idea, so I'm reaching out to you guys.

Thank you for your time.

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[–] CadeJohnson@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Engineers describe heat transfer with a "heat transfer coefficient", and the rate of heat transfer is this coefficient multiplied by the temperature difference. So you can calculate what the heat transfer coefficient must be by measuring room air temperature initially, water temperature initially, and then running your system for a little while and measuring the room temperature again. The smaller room area you can cool the more accurate this will be. You will need to look up heat capacity and density of air (easy to find), and the temperature change of the air with the volume of the room and the temperature change will together give you an amount of heat you removed from the air to the water. Simple!

[–] DontNoodles@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

While I have a background in science, this is not the specialization i chose and so almost all of it is almost Spanish (won't say Greek, since at least I've heard of the words) to me.

I thank you for summarising the science of it though. It gives me enough keywords to start learning.