DIY Solar Powered Window Air Conditioner: Part 1, Design/Parts/Prototype

Most of the parts in my test version. I learned a lot!

Cooling and water harvesting will become exceedingly important in coming decades, so it’s imperative we use ambient energy to do some of the heavy lifting. Many water harvesting techniques work on the same principles of air conditioners — when you cool humid air, the water condenses on the cold surface. What better way to study this than to create my own little air conditioner! All the parts were available on ebay, and links are provided. Because there’s so much to this project, I’m breaking it into two parts.

Be sure to check out my lastest article in this series (part 6), where I Re-engineer the design to work better.

Fundamentals

While I’d love to build a compressor based system to move heat around, let’s look around for other ways this might be done, and be done with a small solar panel, instead of running it on wall current.

Solar power source ($50)

Spoilers: This panel doesn’t output nearly enough power… but we’re gonna keep going anyway.

12v 150Watts, probably really about half of what it should be

For starters, I was able to find a small (flexible) solar panel that reportedly is…