I tried the " Cool your house with cold well water thing " and it worked

[willib]

The other day, i was testing the feasibility of cooling the house with well water .

This was the setup.

I had an automotive radiator ( '04 ford Taurus ) ontop of the sink, with a garden hose clamped on the spigot .

The other end of the hose was inserted into the Radiator , and pushed the water up through the radiator and out the top at the opposite end where it drained into a bucket which i used to water plants .

It was hot and humid that day , and 80 degrees F inside, but when i turned on the water the temp of the air in front of the radiator went down to a quite cool and much drier 75 degrees F.

This was just to try it out mind you , there is a lot more that i will do when i hook it up for good. First off i need more surface area , than just one radiator, I need to have a dedicated , insulated line going to the heat exchangers

It was suggested in another thread that one could use baseboard radiant  Cu pipes , with the Al fins , and i shall try to find some used..

All in all it was worth pursuing and it was something fun to do on a hot day..

[12AX7]

Hello!

I've been thinking of trying the same thing.  Wondering what your well temp is?   Did you compare the inlet to the outlet temp?
In other words,  could you have the same cooling with a lower water flow?

You use a fan to blow air through the radiator? 
With our local humidity being the the upper 70s to low 90s the biggest problem I see is dealing with the condensate.
Collecting the condensate from base board heaters could be tricky!

We have a shallow well with a 3/4 hp pump.   I've been thinking of filling a 55 gal drum and running a loop from the barrel to the coil and back to the drum,  when the drum reaches X temp a pump would kick in and pump the water out onto the lawn or our river (don't tell the EPA or the DNR!)  Then pump fresh well water to fill the barrel and start the cycle over again.

Now its sounding a bit complex,  but with a couple of sensors/floats a extra pump (besides the well pump) the radiator/A coil the hose and the barrel it should be cheap enough to construct.   Not sure about the cost vrs the return.
I'd mount the coil in the furnace and use the furnaces blower.

or...   I'll just continue to use the Whole house AC..   and pay through the nose!

ax7
Mark

[jimovonz]

Willib:

...and much drier... 

Where was the moisture going? Was there condensation on the radiator?

[kurt]

i do not think its gonna pay of if you have to pay to pump the water i have seen air conditioner units with water cooled condensers and they use allot of water and there you got the compressor doing the entire phase change cycle on the refrigerant adding greatly to the btu's of cooling you could get by just running cool water through a radiator

[willib]

Hi Mark the well temp is 59 degrees F , lots of condensate on the spigot.

Yes i forgot to mention that i  put a fan with some cardboard cowling/ductwork up against the radiator.

Outlet temp was 75 degrees IIRC .

I'm not sure of the temp of the water just before it entered the radiator though. Because of the garden hose between the spigot and the radiator.

I also have a shallow well pump.

 i will be watering the lawn and plants with the outflow.

That seems a better way to use the excess.

The water flow rate was not that much during the test although i did vary it a bit.

Jim , yes there was moisture on the radiator , i suppose that there was little droplets of water coming out with the 'dry' air from the fan and radiator.

[willib]

Kurt the idea is to let the pump run , let it turn off , and not come back on for a while,
Where on the other hand your compressor is running most of the time.

[dnix71]

My father's brother sunk 7 dry wells in Alabama and sent looped pipe filled with water down to chill his home. The plumbing is a closed loop. Each well has about 1 ton a/c equivalent. Instead of pumping freon through the chiller, he pumps cooled water. The "hot" side is the seven dry well. He lives on a hill so even drilling 200' he didn't hit water.

It takes much less energy to pump water than it does to compress freon. Cold ground water works even better, but if you pump it up one well, you need to put it down a second well so as not to waste the water.

When I was in college at UF they had a steam plant that made chiiled water also. The chilled water was used to cool buildings. They metered the flow and the temperature rise for billing purposes. It never gave any trouble that I know of except when the air compressor in the basement quit one day. The thermostats routed compressed air to a valve on each unit hung over the door. The valve let water flow from the supply line into the room coil, otherwise the chilled supply water just bypassed that set of coils. I don't remember where the condensate went, but that never gave trouble, either.

[12AX7]

Hello!

The one thing I'm not worried about is....  running out of water, or wasting it.

With the amount of water in the air (this summer) we could water all the plants in the yard (weeds too).

I'd not want to dump water back down my well, not after it's been cycled through hoses, plastic barrels, pumps and a copper coil.
Heck,  if I could use the water that's been running into my sump I'd be all set!

ax7
Mark

[fabricator]

Once you have all your loops full of water with all the air bled out (No small feat) all you need is a circulator  pump to keep the water moving, this would be an order of magnitude cheaper that running an AC condenser, my condenser pulls 11.8 amps when it's running, which seems almost continuous this summer.
Between the condenser and the blower on the furnace that's almost 17 amps probably eight hours a day.
If you were to run your blower at a slow speed continuously on such a system I believe it would work very well.

[damian]

You are approaching a DIY ground loop.  I have a friend with a very fancy house with a full on ground source (geo-exchange) heat pump system.  In summer they don't run the compressors at all, they just circulate water through the floor of the house and into a geo-exchange field that cools the water back down to 55-60 f.  Well based geo exchange systems use several wells a few hundred feet deep with closed loops of tubing in them.  The bigger the house the more wells.  Rather than dumping the water back down the well (illegal here) it might be worth considering just pushing a long loop of tubing down the well and using it as a heat exchanger.  It would work and would not contaminate the well or allow air into your system, etc.  The cooling capacity will just depend on how much heat exchange area you can create in the well (and a bunch of other factors).

Damian

[Basil]

I know it will work. Here is a discussion about it awhile back.
http://fieldlines.com/board/index.php/topic,130711.msg852131.html#msg852131

I took an old window unit and ran water through it ( the cooling coil ) on a 90 deg day.
The air coming out was around 74 / 75 deg's. Not sure now.
Run that all day and it will cool a house some.
I did it with a 50 ft garden hose not insulated. I'm sure there was a lot of cooling lost.
All I had to do was get the flow right to cool the whole coil. It did not take much water to do it either.
It Works.

[fabricator]

I don't see why you would want to dump any water at all, just continuously circulate the same water through the loop, it will not get all that warm passing through your heat exchanger, so when it goes back into the ground it will cool back down, my system would be 2" poly pipe in a trench 12 feet deep which is partially in to the water table here, the trench would be 100 feet long with something like 8-10 back and forth runs of the 2" poly.

[fabricator]

In areas where there is low humidity you can use a swamp cooler, you simply trickle water down through media and the evaporation will cool air pulled through the media, back in the day swamp coolers were widely used.

[ghurd]

Why not use a closed system, at least as far as the well is concerned?

Maybe a big coil of 3/8" SS tubing down in the well?  
Maybe 3/4 lines in the casing, 1" in the long runs?
Basically an upside down and inside out solar drain-back system. Use the water, casing and earth as the heat sink.
Low head, low volume, low power pump.
It would not be as astoundingly cold, but it would be less wasteful, use less power, and not risk contamination.

Before the laughter begins,
Consider the BTUs exchanged in the test setup.
Consider the power the well pump uses to supply the well water (not an issue if the water is needed for outdoor use).
Compare the power the well pump uses to exchange those BTUs with a small and efficient window A/C unit.
My little (only, and very little) high SEER window A/C unit must use less than 8A at 110V.

Yes.  The well temp will increase, and that will save money on the hot water heating.  
G-

[fabricator]

I think we both said basically the same thing Glen.

[damian]

Not laughing at all.  Of course it would work and with a creek or a well.  I service water wells for a living.  A few things to consider:  It may not raise well water temperature significantly.  Most underground aquifer systems are not static, but have some flow through the production zone underground.  So the heat could be carried away in the flow of groundwater or absorbed into such a large thermal sink that the delta T would be insignificant.  Dumping the water back down the well would be very illegal here, but I'm sure that would vary state to state.  In any case I would never recommend it.  Even a closed loop system may be on the edge of the law since a leak into your well (and all your neighbors' if you have any) that carried unwanted contaminants into the groundwater would be very unpleasant.  All that said, I have a friend who owns a large and very nicely built house with a ground coupled heat pump system for heat and cooling.  In the summer he does not even run the compressors, but simply circulates water through the in floor tubing and geo-exchange field.  This keeps the house cool with the only energy needed being the circulating pumps.  Those systems are pretty expensive to install because of the large amount of trenching and tubing required but it has made me wonder if, for those of us in humbler abodes, there wouldn't be a benefit to just running a loop of poly tube in any trench one were digging on one's property and using it as a heat exchanger.  Water would be far better than soil as regards the size of heat exchanger needed, that is true, but if a well or a creek were used may I just suggest that if your research indicates that such a thing is legal in your locale that the heat exchanger be constructed so as not to leak and that the system not contain anything toxic should such a leak occur.

Damian

[fabricator]

We have a local company, that puts down what they call a sock, it is a perforated poly pipe with a membrane sock over it, they have a huge trencher that will put the sock down nineteen feet, around here that is usually well under the water table, these socks are used for pumping huge amounts of irrigation water, an 8" 300 foot long sock will usually support a 2000gpm irrigation pump, they will put in a 300 footer for around 3K, now If I could get a sock put in with two three hundred foot pieces of 2" poly pipe in it, the poly needs a to be connected on the far end to make a U, 300 feet out and 300 feet back, I would think that much poly pipe lying in the water table would be an excellent heat exchanger.
you also have to take into account that the rate of flow is going to be quite small allowing for a lot of heat exchange time, I believe with the amount of flow and the amount of exchange area the exiting water would return to the ground water ambient by by the time it came back to the air cooling coil.

[Rover]

Open circuit cooling with water is pretty much all that is used on boats, I know I have one , and installed an AC unit where there wasn't one. Theorry is the same ... draw up cold water exchange through it and discard (easier on a boat since your just dumping back into the water it came from) .

I'm a big fan.. no one likes a hot boat (its also the way the engine stays cool ... minus the compressot/freon)

[jlt]

I had a system running for several years. and it worked very well. I used an old swamp cooler that had the bottom rusted out. i put 4 auto a/c condensers where the cooling pads went. I have a gravity water system from a spring that flows about 7 gallons per minute .i use the water to water the lawn. have about 2 acres of it . the trick was to turn it on in the morning before leaving for work. temp in the house would be about 65 when i got home.and air is a lot dryer .   

[don1]

  If I might stick my nose in here,
My question would be, How well can running cold water through your in floor heating tubing work?    Heat rises cold sinks.  The floor will be cold but I can't see the air up around your head being cool.
 Would seem to me you would want tubing up near the ceiling With some kind of drip pan.  A cold ceiling would cool the room as the cooled air sinks. And you need no fans just the circulating pump which uses relatively little current.
 This may even be feasible for some of our off the grid fiends.
    good thoughts guys keep em coming, some one here may just hit on the answer.   don.

[fabricator]

I have always had a crackpot idea that I believe would work, this will only work of course up here in the great white north, lets say you dig a big hole in the ground, big enough to hold 20 or 30 thousand gallons of water, build an outer wall from plywood then super insulate it with six inches or so of pink foam insulation board, support several U shapes of six inch DVW PVC so the ends extend out of the top ground level of the box, then line it with something water tight and fill it up with water.
When winter comes along the water will freeze into a solid block the 6 inch pvc will help cold air circulate in the interior of the block
You will also want a 100 foot coil of 1" or so poly tube suspended in the "tank".
Once it freezes solid you super insulate the top and once the dirt unfreezes cover it up and plug the six inch tubes, I believe a thirty thousand gallon ice cube would be enough to keep a house ice cold all summer.
Back in the day they would cut blocks of ice out of lakes and store them in ice houses insulated with sawdust and they wold sell ice blocks all summer long

[DanG]

Melting a 30,000 gallon block of ice weighing (8.35x30000) 250500 lbs (just melting, A pound of ice requires 143.3 BTU to melt) would sink 4.867KwH continually for a period of three months... or soak up the heat energy from 300 gallons of gasoline. With losses everywhere one may be lucky to harvest 40% of that coolth...

[klsmurf]

I don't think your PVC would make it unharmed, let alone your plywood box. Depending how deep the box is, it would take a very cold winter to make that big of an "ice cube".

[MattM]

The ice cube can be much smaller in Montana.  They get random freezing cycles through June and it starts back up again in September.  It would give you ample time to cool off your water tank with sub-freezing temperatures.  Of course it would take considerable energy to actively capture this free 'cold' to your water tank as it only last for hours at a time outside the traditional winter periods.  No way you could truly do it passively.

[fabricator]

Melting a 30,000 gallon block of ice weighing (8.35x30000) 250500 lbs (just melting, A pound of ice requires 143.3 BTU to melt) would sink 4.867KwH continually for a period of three months... or soak up the heat energy from 300 gallons of gasoline. With losses everywhere one may be lucky to harvest 40% of that coolth...

Coolth? LOL.

[MattM]

Maybe in the summer you could also divert the heat from your A/C return line to your 30,000 gallons.

[fabricator]

Or you could run your water through a ground loop then the ice cube.

[GaryGary]

Hi,
Here is another thought on a simple, cheap cooling technique:
http://www.builditsolar.com/Experimental/RadCoolSolShedTest/SolShedTest1.htm

The cooler uses a combination of radiation to the night sky coupled with some evaporation to cool water during the evening.
The coolth is stored in a few hundred gallon water tank during the evening, and then used the next day for cooling the house.
In my case most of the components were there already for a solar heating system, so the extra cost to add the cooling feature was very small.

The summer was so cool here I only really got to test it for our one "heat wave" (which lasted all of one day).  It seemed to work well, and looks to have a COP of 21 (roughly 75 SEER).

I'd be interested in any thoughts anyone has on it.

Gary

[willib]

Hey gary thats a neat idea.
Yesterday at work i was putting in plastic slats in the chainlink fence, and there were three channels down the length of the slat, when i saw that i said hmmmm i wonder if they sell this stuff in black ??

today i googled it and found some at Sears i think.

They were pretty thin walled too , wonder if they would make a nice solar hot water heater??

[GaryGary]

Hey gary thats a neat idea.
Yesterday at work i was putting in plastic slats in the chainlink fence, and there were three channels down the length of the slat, when i saw that i said hmmmm i wonder if they sell this stuff in black ??

today i googled it and found some at Sears i think.

They were pretty thin walled too , wonder if they would make a nice solar hot water heater??

Hi,
Interesting idea.

Sounds like it might potentially make a good pool heater.
Do you have a link for the slats?

I guess for potable water you would have to be careful about whether its safe to drink after going through the slats, but a heat exchanger might be used to take care of that.  It would probably have to be unglazed, so mainly a summer thing for most areas?

Gary

[willib]

This is the link Gary

http://www.sears.com:80/shc/s/p_10153_12605_07139279000P?prdNo=34&blockNo=34&blockType=G34

These are 8 feet long and the lot of them covers 10 feet  wide.

80 square feet for $93 , not sure if thats good??

this is the link to the other sizes and colors

http://www.sears.com:80/shc/s/s_10153_12605_Lawn+%26+Garden_Outdoor+Tools+%26+Supplies_Miscellaneous+Supplies?viewItems=72&sbv=Max-Slat&sbf=Brand

[GaryGary]

This is the link Gary

http://www.sears.com:80/shc/s/p_10153_12605_07139279000P?prdNo=34&blockNo=34&blockType=G34

These are 8 feet long and the lot of them covers 10 feet  wide.

80 square feet for $93 , not sure if thats good??

this is the link to the other sizes and colors

http://www.sears.com:80/shc/s/s_10153_12605_Lawn+%26+Garden_Outdoor+Tools+%26+Supplies_Miscellaneous+Supplies?viewItems=72&sbv=Max-Slat&sbf=Brand

Thanks for the link!

Looks like they are made from polyethylene, so you would not want to have glazing over them -- they would melt.

Seems like a good possibility for an unglazed pool heating collector -- or maybe a water preheater for mild climates.

I guess the trick would be working out how the top and bottom manifolds to get the water in and out.   Maybe something like the trickle down collectors use would be the easiest:
http://www.builditsolar.com/Experimental/MTD/MTD.htm

Just over a $1 per sqft is cheap.  The rubber mat style pool collectors are about $5 per sqft.

Gary

[WindriderNM]

I am thinking of doing something like this. but using water from a river in the summer to cool and hot well water 105 deg to heat in the winter and discharging it into the river. The well is 23 ft deep with the water level about 12 ft (within a few feet of the river level) so little energy would be needed.