Cooling Fan For Under 10 Bucks

Hello fellow tinkerers, the fan I made here was for a specific purpose (my home theater receiver creates a lot of heat that gets trapped in the cabinet that it's in, so I decided to build a fan system to vent the heat out the back), but this type of fan can be used for many applications. Since I had the metal grille, switch, and case fan laying around my house, I only spent one dollar on the power adapter at Goodwill.

What you will need:

TOOLS:
-Drill and drillbits
-Wire cutters/strippers
-Soldering Iron
-Tin snips
-Metal file
-Dremel tool with cuttoff disk

MATERIALS:
-on/off switch
-12 volt DC adapter
-Metal grille/screen
-Computer case fan
-Solder
-Electrical tape

Step 1: Prep the fan and power adapter

I got my fan out of an old, useless desktop computer, but I'm assuming most people would simply buy a new fan (an 80mm fan like what I used should cost no more than 5 bucks). The fan probably has a plug end to it, so you're going to want to cut that off, leaving as much wire attached to the fan as possible. Strip the wire ends 1/4 of an inch.

Now take your 12 volt adapter and do the same thing, cutting off the small end. You want the plug and as much wire as you can possibly get. Just like the fan wires, strip the ends approximately 1/4 of an inch.

Comments

[jsgraham]

Very nice. This is very similar to what I did to keep my SlingBox cool. If you are not familiar with a SlingBox, it is a streaming video device that connects to your home network and feeds your cable signal to any computer in the household. That same cable signal is also accessible anywhere in the world via the internet.

Anyway, the SlingBox device is about the size of a wireless router, and when in use, it generates quite a bit of heat. A design flaw in the earlier SlingBox devices, IMHO. I've found that the streaming video starts to become broken or even shuts down completely when it get's too hot. It is vented on top and bottom, but the vents aren't enough. So, I mounted a PC case cooling fan on top of the device using automotive double sided body tape. Then I wired a spare 12V DC power adapter to it. I belayed the switch because of the fact that I use it practically all the time, so I just let it run most of the time.

[thepelton]

As for cooling, my earliest home computer was a Commodore 64 with a separate disk drive that had a fan in it that pulled air from below, and pushed it out above. The problem it had was that it would overheat because the legs holding off the shelf surface were only about 1.5mm long, so it easily overheated until I made a support consisting of four one-by-two boards, the first pair going accross the disk drive, the second pair on top, going lengthwise. This gave that poor little diskdrive an inch and a half (3.8cm) of breathing space.

[Culturespy]

 Do you have any photos of it in use cooling your home theater receiver? 

[redneckuprising]

I unfortunately haven't gotten around to mounting it into the cabinet yet, but when I do I will update this instructable with another step showing how I mounted it.

[Reffner]

 This is nice.  I did this a while back when my amp was overheating, and it works well!