Newbie wants to run 24,000 BTU AC

[peakbagger]

I think we need to come up with a home brew ice plant so the PV freezes the water into ice and then cooling come from ice melting

[J.P.M.]

I think we need to come up with a home brew ice plant so the PV freezes the water into ice and then cooling come from ice melting

Depending on the application and load, that might not be as impractical as it might sound.

[peakbagger]

Assuming we work with the latent heat of fusion and ignore sensible heat, its 144 btus per pound of ice so that is 153 pounds of ice to cover one hour of operation of the AC. The volume of the ice is about 57 cubic pounds per cubic foot or 2.68 cubic feet of ice per hour.

Every time I looked at ICE storage for inlet air cooling on gas turbines, the numbers just would not pencil out. Even on facilities unless the capital cost was offset with grants, they didnt pencil out.

There was an individual I believe in upper New York State that built an ice chest in the basement surrounded on five sides with water with a very well insulated front door. He installed a coil in the tank run to an outdoor coil filled with refrigerant making sure all the lines were sloped properly.. In the early winter, the freon vapor would rise to the outdoor coil, cool down and condense into liquid and run back down to the basement tank which would gradually freeze solid. The ice storage was sized to last the entire summer. It was in the early days of the internet and I have lost track of the link, it was on a Bild it Solar type site.

[J.P.M.]

Assuming we work with the latent heat of fusion and ignore sensible heat, its 144 btus per pound of ice so that is 153 pounds of ice to cover one hour of operation of the AC. The volume of the ice is about 57 cubic pounds per cubic foot or 2.68 cubic feet of ice per hour.

Every time I looked at ICE storage for inlet air cooling on gas turbines, the numbers just would not pencil out. Even on facilities unless the capital cost was offset with grants, they didnt pencil out.

There was an individual I believe in upper New York State that built an ice chest in the basement surrounded on five sides with water with a very well insulated front door. He installed a coil in the tank run to an outdoor coil filled with refrigerant making sure all the lines were sloped properly.. In the early winter, the freon vapor would rise to the outdoor coil, cool down and condense into liquid and run back down to the basement tank which would gradually freeze solid. The ice storage was sized to last the entire summer. It was in the early days of the internet and I have lost track of the link, it was on a Bild it Solar type site.

I too recall something like that in Mother Earth News from the late '60's - early '70's or so but the past is getting fuzzier as time goes by.

I piddled around with seasonal storage (but mostly for HVAC heating wet dreams for cold climate applications) and came to the conclusion that it was more hassle, and as a practical matter less likely to work as well as very difficult to accomplish in a cost effective way than other ways of skinning the alternate energy cat.

If I was looking to cool a space now and wanted to exercise my eccentricity, after I reduced the heat transfer at the boundaries of the conditioned space as much as might be cost effectively possible, and if I had a freezer and a swamp cooler, I'd dump the ice from the freezer into the swamp cooler and let it sublime to vapor and maybe some left over latent heat of evaporation for the remaining melt. Although that melt evaporation probable wouldn't work very effectively in what are probably high dew point Carribean conditions, that will most likely be offset by the idea that the sublimation process of H2O takes place below 0 deg. C under the described conditions.