Homemade Air Conditioner

Today, the Husband and I built a homemade air conditioner.  It is kind of awesome.

Here's what we used:

1 Pond pump
1 coil of plastic tubing
1 coil of copper tubing
1 package of zip ties
2 ring clamps
1 box fan
1 styrofoam cooler

(we ended up not needing the tube cutter, so we returned it.)

We connected the pond pump to the plastic tubing with the included connector.  Easy!

Then, we secured the copper tubing to the front of the box fan with zip ties.

Once we had used up the whole coil, we trimmed the zip ties so they wouldn't stick out, like they are in this picture.  This step isn't strictly necessary, but Moby kept chewing on them.

Then, we cut the plastic tubing in two pieces, one connected to the pump and one not connected to anything.  We used a ring clamp to connect the top end of the copper tubing on the box fan to the plastic tube that was connected to the pond pump.  Then, we connected the other piece of plastic tubing to the bottom end of the copper tubing.

Finally, we put the pond pump and the free end of the plastic tubing in the cooler, filled the cooler with water and ice, and turned on the pump.  The pump pumped cold water through the tubing on the front of the fan and back into the cooler, creating a circuit.  Then, we turned on the fan.  Voila!  DIY air conditioner.