Keep A Cool Head

Thermal control is ever so important. While spring was uncharacteristically wet this year, with plenty of cloud cover as a side-effect, summer came in like a sledgehammer. The lab would run nearly 100F without computers running, let alone with them on.

Air conditioning was the only solution. While I had the chance last weekend, sheerly out of desperation, to run the swamp cooler blowing into the shop, lowering the temperature into the mid 80s, that was wasteful and, once the sun started shining onto the floor, woefully ineffective.

Well, solutions are rather easy to come by when you're a packrat like me. I had saved a window air conditioning unit I bought back in 2006 after coming back from California and while it served duty in the living room, as an attempt to see if the swamp cooler's massive airflow wasn't necessary, it turned out to be horribly underpowered for that application.

What to do... we needed 10,000BTUs of cooling capacity to be able to control the temperature of the living room/kitchen airspace, but doing that would require a dedicated electrical circuit I wasn't willing to install. The swamp cooler had to go back in, freeing the AC unit up again.

Fortunately, there's a checks and balances thing with cooling like that and the portable AC unit we bought brand new for our daughter's room was both overpowered and taking up much-needed floorspace. The window unit was the solution and that freed up the portable unit, which had the necessary capacity and only required a 4" exhaust hose.

Inside Fragwell Lab, there's a corner that sees absolutely zero use. I have part of a plastic shelving unit there with two concrete form plywood squares (thanks, Dad!) sitting on top as a stable platform. While my rather large laser printer takes up a chunk of space, the rest is obscured by my large desk and loudspeaker for that side. But with a load-bearing capacity of 300lbs, it was the perfect place for a certain rollaway air conditioner.

One trip to Lowe's later, I had a kit for clothes dryer installation procured and was ready for the job. With my Lithium drill and oldschool AC jigsaw ready, I cut the hole and mounted the louvered faceplate with some leftover screws. It went very smoothly, with the hole cut the perfect size and the snap-together aluminum pipe cut down and punched for the condensation spray nozzle holder.

I had read instructions online saying that a dryer vent is a bad idea because the flapper that seals the elements and bugs out puts too much backpressure on the exhaust stream. Simple logic involving levers told me this was only a serious problem for the cheap units with a single flapper. I saw one with eight, but it required a thick wall I didn't have. The one I got has three louvers and it's perfect. Tests show that the louvers close most of the way during the first three seconds after power shutoff, only staying open a little bit while the blower spools down. They don't flap in the wind, either. They're blown open rather sternly by the exhaust, even on low speed.

At the moment, the lab is sitting at 76.2F. Ten degrees lower than the swamp cooler effect is a huge bonus and that's certainly not the lowest it will go. I'm confident this cooler would easily allow 60F.

At one point in time I wanted a split-system for climate control like a Mitsubishi Mr. Slim. Then I saw the prices and nearly died. No way was that going to happen. While they are very quiet and have dual modes with heat provided during winter, the price premium would not be overlooked. Heat would have to be provided a different way.

Heat is taken care of. This winter will not require a huge number of computers running 24/7. I found a decent ceramic-core heater for $10 used and it has plenty of heat output with switchable 450 and 900W modes. I'll wire my own thermostat and leave it at that. With 900W of pure heat on-demand, I won't be stuck taking two days for heat to build back up after opening the door of the lab to get in and out.

Now I'm thinking about winter. I seriously need drywall, a new subfloor, carpet and a proper electrical system. I do believe I'll have to run that new electrical connection. I get nervous when the air conditioner is on and I have to print shipping tags on the laser printer. Looks like I'll be going with a 220V 30A feed. While I had thought I would need 50A, that's not the case and would be really expensive. Digging trenches is no fun, but not being able to work for four months out of the year is worse. It's time for conduit, copper and magic.

But first, Permethrin. Damned Grasshoppers.