I see a lot of things here about different products, but I was wondering if anyone has created Home grown Solution's and equipment/ tech to solve problems or improve things?
My latest " project" is with home cooling. I'm trying a couple of things.
First is just pumping water from my Pool through a radiator with fans pulling through the cooler air. The pool is ALWAYS much cooler than ambient and with 70K litres as a heat sink, I think it should take a while to heat up given it can cool itself through various means. Even in summer, a warm pool is not a bad thing.
The other thing I am trying is an improvement/ modification on an existing practice.
There has always been a hole in the corner of the middle room of the house. For years I cover it up in winter and open it up in summer and put an axial fan over the top to draw cool air from under the house. It seems to work far better than I would ever credit given there is only so much air capacity before it pulls hot air from outside but, it has worked well enough to surprise a lot of people, myself included.
Recently I put the fan itself right in the the middle of the house and ran a length of used duct I found back along and up through the gap in the floor. This was mainly because the fan is a bit noisy and I wanted to quiet it. What I have also done is add a garden micro sprayer about 30 CM behind the fan spraying into the duct. I'm taking the water from a 1000L IBC that's connected to the downpipe and using a 12V 40 PSI pump to spray the water controlled by a cycle timer.
I don't want the pump running all the time as it will inject too much water so I want to play with it to try and cool the air through evaporation without flooding the tube needlessly. Obviously it will vary with the relevant humidity but if it works as well as I hope, I'll look for something like an arduino setup where the timing of the pump can be controlled by humidity and temp.
In winter I used the same fan and duct to suck warm air from the top of the roof space and blow it back in the house through the manhole which I made a modified ducted cover for. That worked well too and I think next year I'll look for a solar controller like used for pools to control it automatically based on temp diff between the house and the roof space. When the air in the roof is warmer than the house it kicks in and when it's the same or cooler, it switched off.
Be interested to hear what others have come up with themselves.