Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Solar cooler

Two cans of beer with a damp towel wrapped around them. In theory, the sun heats up the water and the water evaporates. But to evaporate, the water needs to suck out energy from it's surroundings, however that works, and does this by robbing heat from the beer.
The towel is wrapped around the top container and wicks water from the container below. This way the towel doesn't dry up, and the beer is not surrounded by water that just gets heated by all that sun.
Might be hard to see on this picture, but why would I lie about something like this.
Astoundingly, this does work. and the principle here has been used all over the place for a long time.
I'm not saying that I ended up with near-freezing temperatures here. But it was sort of cool, in two ways at least.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Saving the planet one solar cooled beer at a time

Northmark said...

Ho ho! Precisely! It's all about priorities!

DianeLynn said...

MMMM...gotta check it out. Though I don't drink beer...guess it would work for soda eh?

coastkid said...

what water temperture is your nearby stream or lake or water source?
when we go camping the tins of beer or bottles of cider get put in the nearest burn(england,wales have streams,scotland there called burns!),its mostly rain water but is also snow melt early summer and does a good job of cooling,keeps milk cool too,esp if shaded

Northmark said...

Diane: Sure it will!

Coastkid: The nearest stream holds a lower temperature than what I could possible obtain through this system. But it's a funny thing, how incredibly lazy I get once I'm home. I want everything within arm's reach, at all times! I wonder sometimes if this is why we have all made such a mess of stuff. We all want stuff easily available, like right now!