For the sake of it

! The images in this post are broken because I accidentally deleted them during a server migration. Whoops.

The UK was hit by a pretty intense heatwave recently, in my area it hit upwards of 32 degrees celsius. That may not sound like a lot to those countries blessed with air conditioning, but in the UK where houses are built to retain as much heat as possible, it's a nightmare.

I knew I'd be casting an event on Sunday and I didn't want to melt. I browsed for air conditioners over and over again. I can't get a fixed unit so it would have to be a portable one. Doing some more digging I found that most portable air conditioners in the UK are sold as single hose systems. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it actually is. A single hose portable air conditioner uses that hose as an exhaust, taking the heat from inside and pushing it outside. Great! No! Doing so causes a negative pressure zone in your room, so the hot air from the rest of the house rushes into your room, causing the air conditioner to work harder. dual hose systems have another hose as an intake, keeping the pressure equal in your room, keeping the AC effective.

A dual hose AC unit is like £700 at least. Not just that, these are power hungry systems, I don't want to be spending a fiver a day for a 2 degree drop. The alternative is an evaporative cooler, these are only really effective for low humidity situations. Luckily, the heatwave was due to be just that. So I bought one... right?

No! Don't be silly! I built one.

At it's core, an evaporative cooler is a machine that blows air through or past a pad saturated with water. Water will absorb a lot of heat when it evaporates, so it can be used to cool a room when the air is dry. All you need to do is make sure there's a window cracked so the warm, humid air can escape.

Now I needed to get this turned around pretty quick, so I ordered a few parts off of Amazon. Namely some high static pressure computer fans, some microfibre cloths and an aquarium pump. I then popped to screwfix and bought some ducting, a tub and a vent.

I then spent a morning cutting holes in the box, assembling ducting parts and wiring the fans into a fan controller, which I then wired into a transformer plug. The aquarium pump was used to recirculate water over the microfibre cloths to keep them wet and the ducting used to draw in dry air from outside. It's a janky set up but ultimately I got cool air coming from the vent.

Now, while building I got some jokey comments from my folks and some friends along the lines of "why bother?". And it's a valid question, a commercial unit would probably be more effective. It made me think back to when a few of us were having a disagreement in a voice call about playing Cache when the CS2 release came out. One friend was making the case "why bother?" playing the new map, it probably won't be making an appearance yet in the map pool and when it does it might change. My good friend Ciaran then came in with "Why do anything?". A very profound statement for an argument about Counter-Strike maps, but you know what?

He was right.

Why bother building a shitty evaporative cooler rather than buying one? Because I enjoyed it. Because I learned something. Because I can.