Yet Another Low Powered Ice Cube Air Conditioner

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Intro: Yet Another Low Powered Ice Cube Air Conditioner

By no means is this an original idea.  I just took ideas from other Instructables and did my own. 

Spring is here and my office gets hot.  Years ago I had read into this concept on Instructables where a bin with ice is placed with fans above it to move the cool air.  Instead of trying to cool down my whole place and getting an expensive bill, I want to just make my office manageable. 

I also just realized that I had all the parts laying around.  Everything was discarded by other people.  So hooray for recycling or upcycling or whatever we want to call it.

Items used:
-Fans from a usb powered laptop cooling pad, Targus brand.
-Plastic case from a Japanese seaweed snack.  The plastic case was discarded by a local Japanese grocer.

STEP 1: Cutting the Holes.

The usb wire on the laptop cooling pad had broke so naturally someone threw it away.  First steps was to disassemble the pad and remove the fans.  This was pretty easy as there was just a stretchy fabric to cut off and a few screws to remove.

Placing the fans on the lid of the snack bin I drew holes to cut out with an exacto knife.

STEP 2: Wiring the Fans

Since the wire had been broken, I used some speaker wire to give the power cable length, otherwise the cable would have been less than a foot long.

One fan is facing down while the other is facing up.  This creates the air flow within the bin. 

I then hot glued the fans and the wires down and it was done.  From original thought to finished product it took me an hour and a half.

With ice placed in the bin air flows out nice and cool.  It does an okay job for a small personal space.

Instead of using a USB port now I plugged it into my solar charger, which works great.

2 Comments

How did you wire it? its not clear. you said you took speaker wire and attached it to both fans and a plug of some sort? are both fans attached to one or 2 plugs?
Ah, sorry, the fans were already wired together from it's original setup. It had a usb wire coming out and I spliced that then used the speaker wire to reconnect the usb jack on the other side. I ended up cutting out the speaker wire and mounted the usb jack on the box itself and used a long usb extension cable to power it.

To answer your question though, both are plugged into one wire setup. They're just split. I guess I should draw up something, eh?