Sunday, July 15, 2007

Prowler Shop Gets Even Cooler!


During my last few days off of work I was able to spend 2 days camping in the Lassen National Forest with the family, and 3+ days doing the final assembly of an evaporative cooling unit for the shop.
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Since the days are now regularly in the high 90's and low 100's, it's become somewhat of a priority to get some cool air into the shop.
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It's taken a while (note the date of the first pic) since I started welding together the frame for holding up the unit to the side of the building.
But the results were worth the wait. I had a few minor setbacks during the project, but was able to find workable solutions around the issues.
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Here you can see the hole for the air to enter the building. I would have liked to take out the studs, but since I didn't originally expect to mount the cooler here, the structure wouldn't support the weight of the unit if I took them out - at least not without a lot of re-building of the wall.
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So the studs stayed, but with little sheet metal leading edges mounted to the front side of the studs (gotta think areodyamics!). In the end, it doesn't affect the flow much at all.
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Also, to distrubute the weight of the system there is a 3"x3"x12' angle iron on the inside of the building lagged into each stud and the window headers above the windows. There are four 3/8" allthreads that carry the load from the outside into that angle iron on the inside. And the stand on the outside is lagged into the studs at serval places.
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As I test ran the system the first time, the shop cooled to 78F with an outside air temp of 98-99F. So the math and science of this swamp cooler thing really does work! (see previous post).
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So, here it is pretty much complete. I need to tack the small supply line and bleeder lines to the wall and paint them to match the outside. Then it will be complete on the outside.
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On the inside I only have the unit wired temporarily off of an outlet. I still need to run a new circuit off of the circuit panel, but that will wait until after AirVenture.
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