Can I make an A/C out of clay???
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ค. 2023
- In this video I attempt to build an air conditioner out of clay! This is actually a traditional technique used to keep water cool in hot climates, but creative folks today are trying to rework this ancient water-cooling method into passive air cooling systems! The best part about this is they use no electricity, so are a eco-friendly solution to keeping your home cool in summer. Let me know what you think! Would you ever use this in your home?
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Such an interesting video. Thank you for the no shade to those of us who use AC. My AC broke a little over 2 weeks ago and living where I do that is just torture. I'll be glad when we get it fixed hopefully next week. I think before those of us with AC can cut back, we need big companies to cut back on what they are doing so the planet can start cooling down, and then we'd all need the AC less. We used to actually have Fall and Winter where I live. Now we just have Summer and Slightly Less Hot Than Summer. I miss snow so much. I really hope we can start reversing what has been done to the planet. Hope everyone is staying cool as they can for now. ♥
you’re so right! 🙌🙌
don't suffer for the elites... you not using ac is doing absolutely nothing when rich celebrities and elites are still flying on private jets. crank that ac up!
Where is this?
Perfectly said!
Can you share what location is that?
Just a couple points about these coolers: Due to the method of operation being evaporation these coolers increase the humidity in the air, this has the effect of making the room feel hotter than it is, and in situations where there isn't much air flowing into the room and there is a lot of heat going in it can feel even hotter than it would have been without the cooler. Another effect is the lessening effectiveness of the cooler itself as both the temperature decreases and humidity increases, eventually stopping to work completely if and when the dew point reaches ambient temperature, otherwise known as 100% humidity. All of that is not to say that these coolers are bad, just that they are situational, and generally they work better outside.
In my city the temperature this noon was 35C with 66% humidity, which would make the dew point somewhere around 26C. This is the absolute lowest temperature this cooler could achieve here, and with the increase in humidity it would feel quite terrible. And indeed when working under similar circumstances and using an evaporative cooler with a massive fan there was barely a difference, even the flow coming out of it barely felt colder. A desiccant based system would work better, but be a lot more complicated to install and maintain.
However, another city in my country regularly sees temperatures of around 42-43C throughout the summer with heatwaves reaching as high as 49C, except with humidity at around 15-20%, which would make the dew point somewhere around 10-20C(it would be closer to 10 in most circumstances). This makes such coolers extremely effective there.
Love finding these treasure troves of information in the comments!
agreed! I live in a dry place and evaporative coolers are really common. Growing up we had one that was essentially a wet bale of hay with a fan behind it - all cased in plastic.
Someone in my city built a wall of stacked porous ceramic pieces similar to this that acts as a water feature on the western wall of their house that gets a lot of evening sun. In this dry city this makes a huge difference to the heat in the room. It does use a fair bit of water though! In dryer climates this can also be an issue (but not a CO2 issue)
Disagree. I am not an expert, but as she already mention it, is the evaporation process that extract energy (aka heat) from the environment. Indeed your are increasing the humidity of the room, but this is not an open place. This is an old technique proven to work. Maybe with a small fan it will increase the circulation of air between the pipes and then make it to work better.
Yup. If your air is full of water then you don’t evaporate sweat effectively. The only time I got heat stroke was near rice fields. The air was very humid.
Great point. These are the equivalent of "Swamp coolers" often used in the dry Southwest of the US. I lived in Alice Springs Australia and whole house evap cooler are the norm. They work well there until it rains and then it's very unpleasant. The user of potable water is also a problem not unlike carbon emissions. The point? Nothing free and we didn't get where we are by accident. It doesn't mean there isn't a different way forward, but if it was simple, we would have solved it years ago.
If you don't use them as AC you might consider partially bury near a tree or plant and using them as a water reservoir for the plants :)
yes I thought the same!!
Or as nest for mosquito
If you fill it with coarse sand, and then water, you won’t grow mosquitoes
It would work better in a window with cross breeze
Like an olla😊
Growing up in Egypt, we used to have those clay jars where water remained cool, despite high temperature. It was so refreshing drinking such cold water in hot summer days, without refrigeration.
How are they called there? We call the "botijos" in Spain.
@@pablosegundogarcia5308 we call them "Olla".. pretty much like the word "Hola" in Spanish, but the H is silent and there is an emphasis on the L: "Ol..La"
Funny. "Olla" in Spanish means "pot".
Although we pronounce "o-ya" not " ol-la".
Thanks buddy!
As someone with a science background, my suggestion is to put them on an outside wall like what you show in the beginning. As you have it now, the heat goes from inside the clay (the water) to outside the clay (the room). Currently, you just have water coolers in the middle of the room. If you make the room the inside of the clay, heat will move outside of the room.
Put pipe between that absorbs cool easily and have a fan blow air thru it, the clay cools the water and the water cools the air as it gets pushed into room
Also - The experiment does not really say anything without a control. For all we know, the room could have been 20C or 25C without the evaporators.
You are right and wrong at the same time.
If there is a small air ventilation from outside to the inside and again out, and you emit air with more water vapor than what came in, you are cooling the inside.
If you evaporate in the outside surface, your cooling will dissipate to the outside more than to your room cause the wall acts as insulator.
But if you have enough water to evaporate it would work.
Maybe not the best as a cooler (unless you live in a very dry climate where swamp coolers are actually effective), but these would make great little indoor humidifiers for a plant room! Having a fan on them to increase the evaporative effect would also help.
❤best comment! A fan would make this 10x more effective.
Spot on about the ambient humidity. Similarly, they sell those humidifiers as air conditioners here in the humid Midwest and they don't do anything.
I know this goes against your "passive cooling" concept, but you could increase the evaporative effect by training a fan on the pottery. As others have mentioned, this concept works very well in climates with low relative humidity. High humidity doesn't allow the moisture to evaporate and the cooling effectiveness is significantly reduced. This exact same concept can be used to make a water chiller (as you mentioned, the water in the tubes gets quite cold) it makes for a refreshing drink! I found this project really interesting!
What an amazing video. I can totally imagine that I would work in dryer climates. Right now I live in Brazil and the humidity is so high, that this will only give more mold but I can totally see it working in more dry climates. Really cool video. Well done!
@@travelingonestepatatime Yep, in areas with high humdity, you get no cooling and it doesn't increase humdity either. You're pretty much stuck with actually submerging yourself in a cool water or drinking cold beverages to remove the heat.
Just placing them in an open window would help circulate the air around them, and more surface area would improve cooling. A greater number of smaller diameter tubes, maybe texture the tubes as well.
I would've definitely tried this when I was in Arizona!
Here's how I would redesign it:
- Smaller tubes for more surface area. Use a small pipe to help them keep their shape.
- Arranged with a small gap between each tube into a panel (think radiator)
- Make the base hollow so that filling one tube flows into the rest of them
- Add another connecting piece across the tops for support
- Make a small hole at the top for filling the tubes. Closed with a clay lid or a leftover wine cork
- Sized to fit on a shaded window's sill for air circulation
- Place multiple panels with the tube positions staggered
@@TheresaDoneIt I live in the pnw now. It wouldn't make sense to build one here in a coastal rainforest
@@NickCombsi think you’re missing the point…
@@HouseofthePotter the point was retarded
Fins for added surface
Those seem fairly difficult to pull off with clay, but I guess if you make the pieces separately there should be a way to assemble them in a clever way? I dunno, seems pretty complicated though.
I'm an American, and I thought it was odd that you thought 67F was hot, because in my area we usually prefer temperatures between 70F and 72F. But I converted 23C to Fahrenheit and it apparently comes out to ~73.5F, which feels much hotter and is personally out of my personal comfort zone.
Very neat video, very fascinating. Just wanted to be an American and point out the Fahrenheit thing lol
Yeah, my ideal temperature is closer to 75F/24C.
what I wouldn't give for it to be 67°F anywhere in or around my house rn 😅
It was 106 today with over 50% humidity...
It's 1 am right now... 94 at 49%
Heat index has been 118F and 116F the last few days ... have the AC set to 77 F.
As a Texan, i was dumbfounded to hear 67F described as hot because for me that is sweater weather and temps we get in winter xD
You cannot expect a cooling effect the way you envisioned. A/C is essentially a heat pump -- you move energy from one place to another. In your setup you are moving energy from the water to the room via evaporation. This does NOT remove any heat from the room.
What you have made are some awesome water coolers.
This was also my first thought. However, the phase transition from water to vapor does take a lot of energy, so as long as the evaporated water doesn't recondense, this setup should reduce the overall heat in the room somewhat - at the expense of increasing humidity. In other words, some of the heat energy is transformed into latent energy.
Still, it would probably be more effective if the water vapor could be transferred outside somehow, like building this into a wall and wetting only the outside surface.
star max ur wrong
it’s still a heat pump
the condenser just is the entire planet
as the water goes to vapor in the room, it cools itself and it’s surroundings
as the vapor goes to water outside in the atmosphere, it warms itself and it’s surroundings
there’s that heat u pumped out of the room..
@@knutfranke6846 The reason "swamp coolers" don't work in real, moist air swamps, is because there is no place to transfer the heat collected by the water during evaporation. The dryer the air, the better they work.
And, yes, humans perceive a cooling effect when the water vaporizes -- up to a point. Have you ever lived in really moist climates where even sweating doesn't work?
But, I stand by my statement that, unless you can move the water vapor out of the room you have not changed the total energy content in the room.
@@lezzbmm Yes, it is a heat pump: out of the water into the "air" of the room. Once the water evaporates from the outer surface of the clay structure (pot or tubes) what control does the clay structure have over it? Please help me understand how the clay system controls the water vapor to make certain it exits an enclosed room without transferring heat to the room???
The main thing that determines how well this technique works is humidity. If the environment is dry, these work *really* well. If the environment is humid, they will do almost nothing. Other folks mentioned a fan - that would help move that cooler air around and make it more efficient. But if the region is humid, they unfortunately won't do a lot
right! So maybe combining this with a dehumidifier. I wonder how much electricity a dehumidifier uses compared to an AC 🤔
@@PotterytothePeople less but you'd have to really check. Air conditioners *are* dehumidifiers inherently as part of their behavior, but they do a bit more. It's a trade-off.
The thing we really need to do to be sustainable is change how we build houses so we can let them not get so hot in the first place - like the Passivhaus concept
@@PotterytothePeopleAir conditioners, dehumidifiers, refrigerators, and heat pumps are all the same inside, but connected differently. An air conditioner takes heat from inside and dumps it outside, while a dehumidifier dumps the heat inside. It makes the air less humid but warmer. A heat pump water heater takes heat and humidity out of the air and puts it into hot water. If you are heating water and dehumidifying anyway, it is quite efficient.
Evaporation coolers work best where it's dry and water is scarce, and worst where it's humid and water is plentiful. An air conditioner (refrigerator,...) also cools by evaporation, but contains all the evaporated coolant. By compressing it, it causes condensation and release of heat, in a different place.
@@PotterytothePeople A dehumidifier usually just cools down a surface for water to condense on, and is seldom as efficient as an AC unit. So for the same amount of cooling an AC would be better. That said, it is possible to make desiccant based cooling systems that would provide cooling without raising humidity, the channel tech ingredients made one, but in order to dry the desiccant heat needs to be reintroduced, so you'd probably want at least part of the system outside.
@@PotterytothePeople I would think the dehumidifier would be counter productive to your goal and increase the use of energy.
I think this is great. You've basically made a beautiful "swamp cooler". This will work well in a very dry climate. It looks very lovely too.
I used to make single tubes (with bottoms) and a hole up top for a hook as humidifiers to be hung on water or oil filled radiators (not electrical ones). Great for windowsills with plants, dry winter air etc. Never seen this idea but it will at least humidify the air. You can color the clay with maison stains and still be porous. Make them look like bamboo with a little design adjustment. Interested to hear the verdict on function!
In addition to the fan, which is going to help a lot, a grooved surface would nearly double the surface area for a lot better cooling. Probably look nifty too. I would also consider using a low fire glaze on the inside and outside of the bottom inch or so. If your evaporation keeps up with the seepage, you might get way with no drips. At worst, it will stop you losing water to wicking from the towel or surface it is sitting on. Finally, lids to keep the mosquitoes from breeding in there, avoid drowned mice, etc
Great ideas!
I wonder if adding spines to the grooves would work as well - a ceramic cactus cooler :D
Personally I think the mouse trap would be a hidden feature.
surface area is one of the major factors so grooves are a good idea. Those panels from the article she displayed weren't just ornamental they were twisty and curvy like that for increased surface area. If you could have a grooved surface in a braid patterned panel made of hollow tubes that would be ideal for surface area and filling with water.
Wouldn't requiring a fan somewhat undermine the point of passive (ie. zero power-usage) air conditioning?
One degree cooler IS actually a lot cooler. 23c to 21.5c is gonna make you feel much much cooler. I come from India, and we try keeping temperatures inside our homes around 21. I think this really works
That’s definitely true! I also suspect it worked better than I thought too because it got really hot that day but the room stayed cool! 😄 Thanks for watching :)
@@PotterytothePeople I was going to mention this - the room didn't get any hotter! Also I would place it in the hottest part of the room to maximise evaporation - by a window or in the sun, and add a fan behind it or place it next to an open window. My colleague at work used to pin a wet towel over her open window sitting in a tub of water! It worked a treat.
Also, you maybe just learned a bit more about managing the temperature in the studio by closing the door and window - it's a win all around i think!
23C is 73.4F and 21.5C is 70.7F that is almost a 3 degree F drop which makes sense since F = 1.8C +32. Quite impressive actually! This is a pretty neat passive swamp cooler.
And the hotter it gets, the better it works because it will evaporate faster.
Also, combining this with a fan behind it might be an amazing idea
No it won't feel cooler at all, as it is raising the humidity also, making you feel hotter. The increase in humidity will more than negate a 1 degree difference. Also, this will not work in areas where it is hot AND 70% or higher humidity, it'll barely function. For example here, where I live, it was just 91F and 85% humidity, this would not work.
Since you live in Germany, I suggest you talk to your neighbors about lüften. My family tends to open up windows at night, close them up in the morning and then bring the rollos down wherever the sun is shining from, so the heat doesn’t come in as quickly. Then as soon as it gets hotter indoors we make wind by tying all the doors up and opening specific windows. If you are using humidity cooling (which you are) you need to cycle the air more, as it will make it stuffy.
I think it’s amazing and cooling the room 1,5C is much, considering that the room would only have gotten hotter because of mid-day temperatures rising. The fact that it didn’t go higher, but even lowered is just awesome, also given the fact that the structure isn’t that big. It works! I love it 😻
Why do you need to use Air conditioning in a room that is 22C??? are you insane?
@@bonaface She's making a cheese cave, obviously 😀
I feel like this would be more effective at hotter temperatures. Not much water is evaporating at 67 degrees Fahrenheit.
Look up evaporative cooler or swamp cooler. We use those in the SW USA. your idea is great. You need a fan to push the cool air around. Try putting a fan to blow across the wet tubes and crack a window to let the air circulate.
omg genius!
I agree with Carol and the fan idea, I think that will make a humongous difference! stay cool! 90F here today :(
I am also in SW US, we are the weirdos that prefer using our evaporative cooler instead of the air conditioner. We are regularly seeing daily temperatures of 110. It’s not *cold* in our house, but it’s summer, I don’t expect to be cold this time of year. (I was shocked it was 67 in your home during summer, that is the temperature of my home in winter 🤣). Anyway, for summer, we do have fans that help us sleep at night. Also, as for the idea to bury these and allow roots of plants to drink up the water-this system is called the “Olla” and developed by indigenous peoples native to dry desert climates like mine.
If you position the fan just right you’ve also made a wind instrument…
Love watching the process and living vicariously. I don’t have a kiln but I do have a number of small terracotta plant pots (and some broken ones). I wonder if stacking them together would work…
You should try putting them in front of a fan or an open window, the air movement will help the water evaporate faster and mix the cold air around the clay with the air in the rest of the room
I think if you put a fan behind them you would get or at least feel a better amount of cooling. I think they would work on the same theory as the "swamp coolers" my brother uses in CA. It uses a water cooled EVAP coil. Anyway they make for a really cool sculptural piece. 😊
I grew in northern Haiti, a small island in the caribbean and I remember we didnt have electricity 24/7 and my grand parents would literally get a big clay jar and fill it with water and just place in a corner. Water would be cold when you drink it. So I think this concept could definitely work. Just get big enough jars or tubes made of clay in place them in the 4 corners of the room and you have fresh water as well as cooling system in the room :-)
Even if your experiment didn’t work out how you had hoped, it was fun to watch and I appreciate your continuous ingenuity. It always inspires me throw caution to the wind and experiment with the clay to develop better ideas & ways to work when it comes to our art pieces. Bravo! 👏🏻 👏🏻👏🏻
Thank you!! Yes the experimenting is absolutely the most fun part 😄😄
I just started watching the video but I can tell you Yes, this will work. This also works with bamboo. You need to drill holes in the top 3-4 inches (some have made designs with drilling the holes.) It works better if you have a small fan placed tilted up with the tubes circling it set on the lowest setting. Green bamboo is best. We did this as a science project.
I think the reason the design you originally saw worked is because it's a full wall of terra-cotta with a high amount of surface area due to the patterning. In the day when humidity is high, it's porous enough to absorb the high humidity of the hot day (hotter air can hold more moisture) when it's dry, and when the day cools down at night it can leak the excess water. Likewise on a very dry day, any latent moisture in the wall can evaporate to give the impression of coolness similar to a swamp cooler (an evaporative AC, basically) by lightly increasing the moisture. If you need to add more moisture, you can lay out bowls of water, or if this is fashioned just so, fill a reservoir with water so that it can leech into the wall and evaporate more throughout the day. Your idea is combining the reservoir with the terra-cotta, but yes, you need a lot more to have a significant effect. A dozen small columns isn't enough. You would need a hundred, if not more. In a small dry room with a lot of heat these would lower the temperature quite a bit until the ambient air reached its saturation point. By then though, the humidity levels might make the room feel stifling.
The reason we moved away from evaporative cooling like this to condenser heat exchangers is because it ensures that the heat is expelled outside of the space you're in. There are passive ways to use that heat exchange method, but it's really expensive and unmanageably large and bulky to do on a house scale. Cooling a CPU, for example, is possible with a radiator the size of the computer case it's mounted to. That's enough to keep the CPU well below it's 100C limit, but ramping that heat spreader to room scale the cooling effect would be no where near as effective and the radiator would be the size of the side of your house. You're better off going with better insulation to reject heat transfer altogether.
Why cant these terra cotta evaporators be out side and have a heat sink to syphon the heat energy from inside? That something thats been bothering me about these like leave the evaporated water with all the heat outside by using the heat inside to help with the change of state, or using water under a vacuum in a closed loop to boil at like 20c(or what ever temperature is achievable in the condenser) and let it condense out side in a terra cotta cooler. It seems like it would self cycle the water under a vacuum too. Basically what we do with refrigerant just with out adding a bunch of pressure to make the heat shedding easier. Is this complete bunk? Im sure im missing something and it can't work that way I get it I'm an auto mechanic I know Im coming from limited knowledge. Ive wanted to ask someone that has like physics degree if its a really dumb idea.
@@Jesayouthis is actually basically what a AC is and does. Water is a refrigerant after all but because of waters higher boiling point you HAVE(unless you want the energy/heat it takes to boil water constantly without the assistance of vacuum to make it less energy intensive) to use a vacuum pump just the same as the refrigerants we use today and it would cost a ton of energy because the vacuum it takes with water is pretty high(not very but a lot compared to modern refrigerants which only need a ten or twenty psi less than the atmosphere pressure).
The reason why AC is mostly linked with climate problems is not usually to do with the methods itself it's with the shitty disposal and use of bad refrigerants which we are still dealing with the consequences of today. Not to mention that the energy that they consume is quite a bit, now if we instead of having ACs being constantly at war with the outside temperature(why it actually takes so much energy, if you have ever had a chest freezer it works the exact same but one obviously is way less energy for something that can get sub 0 temperatures it is all due to the escape of the cold into outside elements and it isn't just due to size it is actively fighting against the outside elements because our houses are not fully insulated). This is why a better insulated house will hold in cold much better and why central AC is way better than a Window AC unit.
Sorry for the rant it was something I looked into in a hyperfixation on refrigerators and why chest freezers are less energy than upright fridges that are in style. ADHD engineering at it's finest lol.
@@pf6137 I was definitely not thinking of course the expanding of the water boiling would increase pressure that would require more vacuum to keep the boiling point low I was a little intoxicated when I came up with the idea
It's also known as a "swamp cooler" because it increases the humidity and absolutely doesn't work in hot and humid weather.
This was really interesting, but it made me laugh when mentioned the temperature. I’m a southern Californian and it’s typically around 40C in the summer time, and 20C is cool for us. We would never use the AC in those temperatures.
Same here, 20c is pretty much the dream temperature wherever you live in the USA, haha
The concept is great…placement and airflow could make a big difference. I look at your project as a jumping off point for some fun functional art. Thanks so much! 😊😊😊
Climatisation
I'm from Florida and 20C is still much too hot for me. That's why I'm _from_ Florida, not _in_ Florida.
you use Celsius in California? what happened to Fahrenheit?
A few things that might help. 1. Increasing surface area by introducing ripples into the clay. Squish it a bit one way and squish it again another way slightly above it until you get something undulating? 2. Setting it near your window, with the top covered with a cloth or something. The wicked water can get the extra boost to evaporate using the sunlight. The cloth is to keep sunlight away from the internal water to prevent algae growth. 3. Instead of adjacent flowering pattern, have a linear wall with some gap between each tower. Against a window, it would provide more shade against the warm sun. If you want more sun, just shift the towers farther apart. More shade, shift them closer together.
A really cool video. It was entertaining to see you explore the idea.
My mother was a potter. Do what she did: she stuffed pipes and pipe-like stems on her pots - with cardboard tubes from wrapping paper. In a more modern version, you could try pool noodles, at least until the clay reaches leather stage.The ancient Persians (who invented this technique originally) placed the pots at the base of ventilation wells - wind catchers. The wind catchers (still in use today) created a steady breeze. You would have MUCH better success by simply putting on a fan. and circulating the cool air around the room! Love this highly inventive and interesting content.
Run a fan onto your cooling tubes. This will increase the rate of evaporation and spread the resulting cool air around the room. This is basically a deconstructed swamp cooler :)
I think you need to test the effectiveness of this system in a room temperature hotter than 67 which is pretty cool already.
During my childhood, our town had this massive greenhouse that my family and I would often visit. One of the unique features was a wall on the end that resembled a honeycomb. Water flowed over it, creating a cooling effect throughout the space.
Hi, as an engineer I think I may add some upgrades.
Put enamel on the outside of the bottom of the tubes and enameled pottery dish - lower leakage a bit.
Add fan - enhance evaporation and thus cooling effect.
Stagger the tubes - better airflow and again it increases the cooling effect.
Use thinner walls - increases leakage but may enhance cooling considerably.
Use some kind of bio-neutral dessicant somewhere near (maybe opposite side of the room) - lowers the humidity of the air and thus helps with evaporation (see above).
Use more tubes with smaller diameter - increases area for square meter and also it means higher eveporation again.
Generally this kind of cooling works the best at higher temperatures of the air so this might be more valid option the higher the initial temperature is. Also there is much more possible enhancements, but without proper calculations and drawings it's hard to explain in a plain text.
Hope this helps with improvements and if you ever try it, I'd be glad to see the results.
Mia I’m confused… I live in SE United States where the temp today is 93F (34C) and 70’s F is actually very comfortable! Even with high humidity! Did you get the temp numbers right?
yes lol you are right to be confused! i started the project during the heat wave but it took 2 weeks to finish so it was much more temperate by the time i ran the experiment 😂
I love seeing the creative process with artists in different mediums. The same way you look at a bent tube and go "ah, looks like coral" same exact thing with music and 2D art haha.
If you use a fan to push air around the tubes it will encourage evaporation and therefore additional cooling.
I loved this video and the thoughts and motivations behind it so much! I'm an evaporative cooling hobbyist and I'm sure others have said how you're actually so close to making this a practical thing to use to cool your home especially in Europe! All you need is a fan or some air flow with an exhaust to let some humidity and air push out! Passively moving that air is difficult though so I understand your apprehensive to add an electric fan. Maybe run it on solar from the roof with a small 100w panel? Very excited to check out more of your channel
I'd be interested in seeing another update when the weather is warmer. I wouldn't run the A/C at 67F so testing it at that point doesn't mean anything to me. Plus, it would probably do a lot better in higher temperatures.
As someone who has always been into science but used to be very into creating art, especially with clay, I am so very glad I stumbled upon this video. I have my grandma's kiln in storage and look forward to finding a place I can put it to use so I can explore concepts like this. And, say, terracotta cooling of larger volumes water.
The cylinder is the least possible surface area to volume shape possible that you could use for this concept. It looks like your extruder make a 2 1/2 to 3 inch pipe. If you flatten that down until the inside is around an inch or so across then you would be able to stack many more side by side and make an evaporative radiator. Put a box fan behind it and you have a swamp cooler. They don't work so well here in Louisiana due to the high humidity, but in a dry location they work quite well.
Ok, those of you in dry environments can use these water coolers. Where I’m at, the humidity starts every morning at 100%. Then gets down between 50%-70% during the hottest part of the day. Like right now it’s 100° and 58% humidity. Water coolers in a humid environment only raise the heat index.
Lovely work! don't give up on it. When I was growing up in Sydney, we would put small towers of terracotta pots filled with water on the verandah of the house and it really did drop the temperature. I think the design of the one that you show at the start has a few benefits that you could play with: being external to the house, being a whole wall, and having small small tubes that create a much bigger surface area by twisting kind of like our brain does. In theory screens made like this that could fit into your window or door should work - ideally not in direct sun.
It works in a static situation until the cool water is equal to the outside of the container temperature. The water becomes a heat sink for a bit of time. Keep air moving across the tubes and the room will cool but get more humid until things equalize. The swamp coolers recirculate water and fresh cool water is mixed in as the water evaporates away which takes heat away. Static tubes only make for a temporary heat sink.
Interesting info to add to the convetsation, in South America, torids or terra cotta donuts would be filled with water and placed in an open window as an AC. If you put a fan next to them or had them in an open window, it should work. Great video as always. Love how you think out of the box.
that sounds like a very pretty design too! thanks for sharing!
Can you post a rough visualisation pic of what you want to suggest if you dont mind
Well, they look nice.
If you want to use evaporation to cool down your environment, go for large surface area to volume ratio. Reduce the diameter of the tubes and add air space between them so that air will flow past them. They're basically heat exchangers -- clay versions of air cons and radiators. Fins might work. Get air to circulate from around the tubes to the rest of the area you are trying to cool down -- using convection. Install these on the floor near air intake and vents at or near the ceiling/roof. It's a feature for traditional houses around here at the equator. Close the vents when you want to retain warmth at night.
Recently we also have people misting water on the roof during the day to cool down the roof.
Well, that's what we do at the equator, but you really need to look at where the heat source is at your location. If it's the walls, install the tubes at the wall. If it's the roof... etc etc The tubes will absorb the heat near the source and not heat up the rest of your location.
In New Mexico's dry heat we use swamp coolers which are basically the same concept: a diy version is to just hang a white towel across a sun facing window and feed the cloth a small waterline to keep it quite damp, as the sunlight heats the cloth the water is evaporated to the outside and the temp inside the room drops. If you have a rafter window its ideal, the colder air is displaced by rising heat creating natural air circulation.
I think it worked great. You should have compared the room temperature with the temp outside. I guess after a couple of hours the temperature must have raised outside but in the room it was kept 21.5 which is very pleasant. Also I think this works better with a roof fan or a continuos current flowing in the room (at least two openings) and with low light. Great job, beautifully made.
Very interesting video, thank you for sharing! I think that your experiment worked better than you think it did though; you noted that the room started at 23 degrees C and that that was 67 degrees F. In actuality, 23 C is closer to 73 F which means that your experiment dropped the temp by 3 or 4 degrees, not 1! And every little bit helps!
Yeah, I think she misread the thermometer when looking at F degrees, it made no sense that the C degrees had a bigger drop than the F degrees. So it worked better than she thought. :)
The moisture, that these items provided, is why the room felt cooler when you walked in vs the humid room you just left.
Evaporative coolers usually work best in arid environments. They work by adding humidity to the air, so it will be ineffective any place that's already somewhat humid. My old apartment in Arizona had a cooler that worked on a similar principle. Basically, a piece of porous mesh was saturated with water, and then air was drawn through the mesh and into a duct system. This worked decently well in the desert, achieving around a 10-20 degree difference depending on the day. This isn't a passive cooling system, since it does use electricity, however, it uses far less than AC for good results.
Also, if you don’t have an extractor, these tubes could be made with slabs and stuffed with lightly balled up newspapers or something similar, to help them hold their shape while drying . I’m a retired teacher - what a fantastic science experiment this could be! And artful too - let kids carve in designs…
I love the marriage of science and design in this project!! While not good for the environment, a cut pool noodle could be used to keep the tubes upright as they firm up
I loved it! So cool to see your channel growing and your videos improving. ❤ Nice to try and change the world, even just by bringing the conversation and well intentioned ideas.
thank you! 🥰🥰
I am so glad I got ac a couple years ago. It’s only the one room but it really helps me to sleep better when it’s crazy hot
Interesting implementation. You look a lot like Simone Giertz and styropyro had a kid. A few points I can think of.
1. Air circulation will help a lot.
2. The lower your ambient humidity, the higher the cooling effect.
3. Look into mitticool. It's an Indian startup which makes refrigerators by clay. Maybe a future project?
4. The maximum cooling possible with such a method can be calculated using a psychrometric chart.
Keep up the good work!
You might be able to slide those clay tubes onto some cardboard tubes to dry them, or maybe try hanging them to dry to prevent wrinkles from forming on the bottoms.
Great idea! I only realized it's a problem after I started 😂 I guess that's why prototyping is so important!
We use a similar concept to offer our rats some cooler spaces in their cage. They don't have tubes filled with water, that screams for a disaster to happen, but we've got a few clay pots in the cage that we wet regularly to create cooler areas so they chance choose to move wherever the temperature feels right for them. Works great for other smaller animals like mice and hamsters too, though my mice never likes the cooled pots and always stayed away from them lmao
If you have the space for it, consider adding a granite tile to their cage. Typically marketed to Chinchilla owners as a "cooling stone," though you can buy them cheaper in a hardware store.
@@xxgn thanks for reminding me, been wanting to do that for ages but keep forgetting to get one when I'm at the hardware store ^^'
It's cool that the process has built in down time so doing the maintenance stuff doesn't feel like wasting time.
This is very similar in principle to a zeer pot. It is one of the oldest inventions to utilize the principles of evaporative cooling to create a conditioned compartment, a refrigerator basically. They only function well in an arid climate though. The examples you showed follow the same principles and were used by civilizations in the Middle East, North Africa, India and parts of the Mediterranean.
Many civilizations use these concepts for cooling before modern refrigeration and air conditioning. In Spain they used a vessel called a “botijo” that would store and evaporatively cool water. In parts of the Mediterranean the word can be associated with cooling.
I think it is awesome that your are bringing attention to an ancient method of air conditioning that requires no electricity and has no negative impacts on the environment. It won’t work in all climates but I’m glad that some people may use this idea if it can work for their location.
That kiln uses the same amount of energy as 30 ac units. Don't lecture ppl about shit u don't understand
Shhhhhh logic and facts aren’t allowed. Just agree with the current agenda lmao
LMAO! you know damn well the algo is gonna make this shit widely viewed because of the BS she said about AC and global whinning. idek why i or how i got here
Swamp coolers can be useful sometimes, but they can never get colder than the wet bulb temperature (i.e., the coldest something can get by being wet and blowing water past it). Sometimes it's hot and humid enough that the wet bulb temperature is too hot for people to be healthy in, and in those conditions a swamp cooler isn't a good enough substitute for an air conditioner.
There's been some exciting progress in coupling a swamp cooler with a desiccant dehumidifier to get rooms both colder and drier. I think that's probably closer to the future of AC in places where people need their AC to actually work as expected.
If you put a slow fan next to these, and circulate the air more, you'll probably get more noticeable results
AC is pretty sustainable if you insulate your house properly, and if you insulate your house properly, it's likely you'll need at least some measure of heat pumping to move the heat in or out so you're the correct temperature.
WAYYY better than, for example, resistive heating. (Like that kiln).
E: Oh you keep the pots _in_ the room you're trying to cool? So it's just a swamp cooler? I thought the idea was to clad the outside of a room with them so they'd not increase the humidity inside the room, but cool the wall through conduction. I feel like there are way better (if less pretty) ways to make a swamp cooler.
The reason the water feels cool is because both its thermal conductivity and thermal capacity are so huge, while its viscosity is low. Dipping your flesh into it immediately donates a huge amount of heat to the water, and that water rushes away due to convection, to be replaced with cooler water and cool you down more.
If you're looking for an incredibly environmentally friendly way to stay cool in the heat, I'm not kidding, literally just get a bucket. A bucket big enough for your feet, filled up to the height of your calves or a bit less, with up to room temperature water, will keep you perfectly cool all over. A lot of blood goes through your legs and ankles, and really close to the surface in your feet. Unless you're in the sahara, the water's not going to get above your body temperature, so will always have the power to cool you. (Again, this is less pretty than clay tubes. Maybe make a clay bucket shaped like feet).
Watching your videos are what got me interested in taking up pottery! Thank you for your videos and echoing what others have said I would love to see your glazing process
A bit about these from a physicist: what these tubes do is cool themselves. The theory behind it is that you can have tubes that will cool themselves, then you can bring them somewhere, and they will cool stuff around them. Sounds good, but they make the room humid. Now, humid air has poor thermal conductivity. This is one of the reasons it feels cool around trees and greenery: they do decrease the overall temperature of the area around them, but they also decrease humidity, *allowing for your body to transfer its heat to the air.* This is also why it feels hot in space: there is nothing in space for your body to transfer its heat to, so it's only chipped away at very very very slowly. Cooling your body down isn't the same as having cool things around your body; what is way more important is that your body has a way to transfer its heat to those cool things. One way in which these could be useful is if you had, for example, some sort of wall engineered in a way so that the vapor can go through one side, leading to the outside, and not on the other side, leading to the inside. At the same time, the inside of the wall should be able to conduct heat and cool down your room. If you look at the picture you provided at the start (0:21), that seems to be what is happening :)
These kinda swamp coolers work best in dry climates like deserts. But this is definitely the coolest version of one ive seen.
There were actual large versions of these that could maintain freezer like temperatures in the desert.
If someone wants to try something like this even for emergencies. Hanging a damp towel in front of a fan can do alot. Especially if your able to circulate fresh slightly drier air from outside.
So I was a potter for 35 years here's a couple of hints for you. On your AC if you separate them so their space between each one of them and put a fan behind it you'll get much cooler temperatures that circulate through the room. Secondly if you do a low fire glaze on a bottom portion of it it won't leak through the bottom. I used to make what I called claycent out of little teeny bottles hung with a strap of leather and I put essential oil in it that evaporated and centered the air. I glazed, low fire the bottom portion so the oil wouldn't drip out. Thirdly if you get a drill motor and put a spatula on it that they use for stirring sheetrock mud and turn your clay into a cream before you spread it on the plaster there won't be any lumps in it at all and it's almost ready to use at that point short of a little bit of kneeding.
Also keep in mind they will pull the moisture back in that goes into the bottom tray once you make it, and if you add a fan behind them that will help further
If you plan on making more of these , I’m not sure what the diameter of the clay tube is but if it would fit you could hot glue a pool noodle to a flat plate or board cut to your desired length and once you extrude your clay tube you could slide it over the pool noodle to hold it upright while drying 🤷🏻♀️ if it’s diameter is bigger then a pool noodle of course
Genius!
They look really cool. We bought some evaporative cooling fans for our deck, they work very well. But that's also because they get loaded with ice and have a fan lol. Those would probably work around plants to increase humidity.
two things : requires a dry atmosphere (think swamp cooler, American southwest) and airflow. If it is humid then very little will happen. It works because although it would need a fan it would not need a compressor. Some of these large structures built in deserts can freeze water. So, dry desert air, a source of water to supply the porous tubes and airflow to remove the heated, evaporated water vaporer to the outside. If done correctly you can make ice cubes!
So its a ceramic swamp cooler. Pretty cool! As long as you live in a low humidity area (southwest US), this would work really well. In the higher humidity areas of the country this will not work nearly as well. For the more humid areas, one might try using desiccants to dehumidify a room as an alternative to electric dehumidifiers. However, when the desiccant is saturated, it will require some sort of energy to dry it out for re-use.
Where I live it gets to 115 degrees easily in the summer. You have a choice of AC (most homes have it) or a swamp cooler (evaporative cooler- water wets pads air gets pulled though and cools the house drier days it’s most effective humid days useless). We definitely do need an alternative and dig inward and use underground cooling like they did in ancient times
This is a fun project. You could have tested the A/C with terracotta flowerpots or wet towels. This principle works very well for wine coolers and water canteens.
More artists and craftspeople need to explore alternatives like this.
This is exactly how swamp coolers work, if you have a fan on it it would probably help with more evaporation and cool more of the room
We still use evaporative coolers in HVAC design. Most of them are large scale for commercial buildings that require a lot of pvc piping and water. They make small portable ones but like you realized, the size of the unit would have to be massive to make the temperature change you want. They best way to stay cool, for free, would be to live in a dirt/mud house, the earth will keep the house around 60 degrees F year around. plus, it is sustainable.
A/C is powered by electricity which is fully sustainable on a green energy grid. There are modern versions of AC which don’t rely on HFC or other GHGs. In northern CA the energy grid is already 80% renewable in hottest major cities where it hits 45C regularly in the summer. There is also highly reflective paint that can cool a house as much as AC and/or take much of the load off of AC. A house with high reflective paint, solar panels, and a heat pump can keep a house at 20C easily even in 45C weather while still generating excess power to return to the grid.
I think the cooler will function well to maintain the coolness of the night. That it cooled its surroundings at all when started midday is amazing!
We use evaporative cooling in New Mexico, US. I think if you used a fan to direct the cooled ambient air, you would likely have better results. The reason perspiration works for humans and other creatures with sweat glands is because the air moving across the skin dries the sweat, thus creating the cooling effect. It’s not necessarily the presence of moisture; rather it’s the presence of moisture in addition to air that has some movement.
We also find that our evaporative coolers are useless if the environmental humidity is above 25-30%.
I've seen them block an entry way for a house as the breeze came in it helped cool the clay and spread it around the home. Also since it was outside the rain would hit them sideways and roll down one another
It's essentially a passive swamp cooler, which functions best in low humidity. But without forced air to increase the rate of evaporation it won't have a lot of cooling power. It's also better if the evaporation can occur outdoors and the cooling transported indoors so that interior humidity isn't increasing. Probably this could be done in clay, but it would be an engineering project. If the tubes were placed outdoors, cooled by ambient breezes, with pipes from the bottom going through a wall into a heat exchanger indoors, and exiting at the top to return to the top of the tubes, the water flow could be passively powered by convection. A small fan blowing through the heat exchanger would probably be necessary, but probably you are already using fans. In humid and very hot areas, this can't substitute for A/C because the cooling is limited, but commercial A/C often uses swamp cooling to improve efficiency of outdoor evaporator units.
Run a fan over it, like a classic swamp cooler. It doesn't work where I live, since we have high humidity, but it's an option for arid environs.
Making tubes into jagged/flower with many petals shape would increase their surface as well as scratching all the surface. Look for 3D-printed clay humidifiers. Hand-made piece would be a bit less effective, but good enough to try.
You can make thin sheets of clay with width of the height of your kiln and length a bit less than than your kiln's diameter, then fold the clay in half placing a sheet of 2-5 mm plastic (or something smooth) in between, then scratch all the surface in parallel lines and let them dry, removing plastic halfway through. After you make lots of these petals, you can glue them together with clay in flower shape and fire this piece.
you can also make clay dehumidifiers. would be a great combo of getting cool water into the air and taking hot water out of the air.
also these ones are lacking in surface area even with them being pours. maybe making some with smaller tubes and maybe make them look like all kinds of different coral plants that would be cool to see. you can make a coral corner and just have a ton of them there and maybe some that are colored and stuff lol.
That's basically a swamp cooler. While it can be affective, it has some draws backs, which is why we use modern ac units.
Look at the cooler that you were inspired by. It was a perforated and crenulated set of tiles on a wall, with hallow spaces for water to sit inside the tiles. You need more surface area in you system. The giant tubes are not going to work. I would suggest that you try again and make shallow boxes that act as the water reservoir that then have lots of small pegs that extend out to act as the wicks for evaporation as this will maximize the surface area. Point the pegs slightly down and with a slight knob on the end to gather water into them. You should be shooting for the size of a small finger to a pencil in size and as many on a tile as you can fit while still attaching them. All of this can be built using scratch and slip bonding using with slabs and pre formed parts. To decrease cracking chances, form the fingers the same day as the slabs and dry them under a loose plastic sheet to match their moisture level before attaching them.
You then want to make sure they are placed higher up in the room, at least at shoulder height, so that they are cooling the hotter air and can start a convection flow as they are cooling the air. This will work way better than your tubes.
In the days before everyone had home refrigeration it was common to store a bottle of milk and butter dish in a covered terracotta pot that had water in the bottom. On really hot days a damp cloth cover was added.
This is called a swamp cooler! They can sometimes work, but mostly make room feel even hotter due to increased humidity. This makes an amazing humidifier though, especially for heated homes and people who have plants
Great work, I like that you kept the organic design it just came out as. Since this relies on evaporative cooling a fan could help, but maybe a completely passive system could be placing this higher from the floor (hot air goes up, cools down and descends to the floor). I'm thinking of hanging sponge tube corals ;)
The cool air would stay relatively near the pottery but facing a fan towards the piece would distribute the cooled air for better effect.
In Iran, there are yakchal (early fridge) and a type of structure called a windcatcher for this purpose. The windcatcher actually doesn't need wind to work, and has been used since ancient times throughout the Middle East.
This is also called a swamp cooler. It can be made with stones, clay, fabrics, screens, thin wood panels, etc. The more humid the regional climate, the less effective the swamp cooler will be. The more arid the local climate, the more effective. Also, This will transfer moisture from the cooler to the air inside the house, thus raising the humidity of the house and making the cooler less effective and also making humidity troubles, such as mold. A swamp cooler in conjunction with a fan and a dehumidifier can generate extremely cold air...but then it is becoming more similar to an air conditioner in its energy use. Putting the cooling tubes in a breezy place would increase their effectiveness, if you don't have electric fans or dehumidifiers. So it would be a good tool to cool a shaded patio or breezeway.
Works even better with a fan or natural wind flowing through the passive cooling elements. And they are best located in the warmer sunlit part of the room like next to the window. It can also serve the dual purpose of being a flower vase or a water storage pot like what the ancients have done to cool both the water and the kitchen space
Nice. I feel like you'd need a shit ton more of the tubes for it to have a significant effect on a room
I’m actually curious how much difference running a fan at low speed would make it feel. But in order to get a quicker and more noticeable effect you’d really need something like a large cask or pot that they plant trees in.
Thank you youtube for recommending this Queen 🙌
I love your energy and editing and everything else 😭😭❤❤
New sub!! Can't wait to binge all your videos!!
In Brazil is very common in houses have a "Filtro de barro", a pottery filter for water. It is very efficient to cooler the water and makes it drinkable.
I think the idea of these types of cooling devices is that they need to be thermally coupled with the space you are cooling or something with higher thermal mass. An example would be a giant stone wall. This way you can draw heat from the coupled thing, move the heat to the air via evaporation, and then you can then remove the air and heat from the space. Otherwise all you are doing is moving the heat from the pottery to the air. You still need to move the heat out of the space of you risk actually making the space feel warmer both because there is more heat in the air but now it's also humid so you can't sweat and cool down.
Your design might be effective enough to make a difference to a room of coupled with a small fan blowing across them and into the room. That way, it would circulate the cool the air and keep dryer air moving over the clay surfaces, enhancing evaporation. Also, when Air blows across our skin, we feel cooler. Together with a little fan, you could have a real winner. I’m wondering whether the cooling would be enhanced if there were measures spacing between each column. That’s where experimentation would come in. Great experiment!
In India they use the top of 2 liter bottles as air conditioners. They cut off the top 3 inches of the bottle and attach the funnel in a hole on a piece of plywood. They then put the plywood ina. Window with the wide opening facing out. The funnel catches the air and it is compressed slightly as it travels through the narrow portion. As the air expands back out it cools. The heat, I think is absorbed into the neck of the bottle and into the wood.
For that to work efficiently as an A/C, the pipes are supposed to be placed in a way that air (from outside the room) is exchanged through the wet pipes. the object you did here is more likely to help keeping the water inside the pipes cool, by "sacrificing" a small amount to evaporation.
i watched a documentary showing how ppl in the UK centuries ago would throw water on their unglazed terracotta floors, and how it would keep the rooms cool (to make cheese in this instance). i expect it would take something at that level to keep an entire house cool in this sort of heat. my grandfather grew up in the desert in the US, and they used to hang burlap over the porch and windows and run water down it to keep their house cool. before the early thousands, when ACs became the predominant method of cooling out here, we used to use evaporative coolers, which use a similar concept of a fan blowing through a fibrous material that is soaked in water, cooling the house. works well if your humidity isn't too high.